When you divide number of visitors by number of page views, this can give an excellent indication of whether traffic is transient or is staying on your site. If average is one page or under, you can be pretty sure that there is something on your pages that is scaring people off. Perhaps load time is too slow or your opening statement is inappropriate. Remember that due to bandwidth considerations, those first few elements that display as your page is loading may be deciding factor as to whether a visitor waits around for entire page to load.

Studying your web site traffic can take up a fair amount of time, but it is definitely worth it. Of course in amongst all this you need to be able to make time to carry out promotion, maintain linkages, develop new content etc etc etc. Running a large, content rich site is definitely not a part-time job!

Michael Bloch  michael@tamingthebeast.net  http://www.tamingthebeast.net Tutorials, web content and tools, software and community. Web Marketing, eCommerce & Development solutions. _____________________________________________ 

Copyright information....If you wish to reproduce this article, please acknowledge "Taming Beast" by including a hyperlink or reference to website (www.tamingthebeast.net) & send me an email letting me know. The article must be reproduced in it's entirety & this copyright statement must be included. Thanks. Visit www.tamingthebeast.net to view other great articles FREE for reproduction!

Adminder http://www.adminder.com

An online tracking system that will enable you to track an entire advertising campaign. It will enable you to see how many visitors were generated by each of your ads, keep track of sales that were generated by each ad and calculates cost-per-click, cost-per-sale, and click-to-sale ratios for each ad. Cost - $19.95 mo. (for a limited time)

ROIbot http://www.roibot.com

ROIbot is a complete collection of tools for increasing your "Return on Investment." One of their many tools is ROIbot Ad Tracker. This powerful system will enable you to track your clickthroughs, where they come from, what browser your visitors are using, what operating system, and more. Cost - $17.00 mo.

Statcruncher http://www.Statcruncher.com

Statcruncher tracks and reports exactly which ads, banners and links are producing results. They provide you with access to their powerful web-tracking system that will enable you to track your ad campaigns 24 hours a day in real time. Cost - $49.00 yr.

If you'd rather not use any of products and services listed above, you can use some alternative methods. Below are some example tracking methods you can use to track your response rates:

URL

You can track your ads simply by adding some special coding to your URL. To code your URL, add a question mark followed by a special tracking code to end of your web address. Your coded link will still open your web page. Your code should look something like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?ad1

The text after question mark should identify a specific ad. You can code it however you'd like.

To view your results, you'll need to look at your log files. Your code will be displayed within your log files beside your URL.

Email

You can track your email responses to specific ads by using email subject. Select a specific word to be placed within email subject for each ad. Although you can request that a certain word be placed within email subject, many times it won't be supplied. To avoid this problem, you can create a special email link that will automatically fill in subject when clicked on. Your link should look something like this:

mailto:you@yourdomain.com?subject=ad1

Testing and tracking your strategies is an essential part of doing business. By concentrating your efforts on strategies that produce results, you can not only increase your sales, but you'll also save yourself a great deal of time and money.