Another often overlooked method of tracking is visitor communication. There are a variety of ways to achieve this goal. One effective method is by installation of visitor-feedback scripts at your site. You can find a variety of free resources of this kind. ( For starters, check The Javascript Source at: http://javascript.internet.com/ ) Also, don't forget that visitor feedback is not just important as people surf your page, but when they use it as well. For example, if you sell a product, a simple feedback form at end of checkout process can provide insight as to effectiveness of your checkout system. (i.e. Is it confusing? Is it a detriment to purchase?)

Finally, good old fashioned e-mail can be a great tracking tool as well. When someone corresponds with you through your site or business, take time to ask them a very quick question. For example, from time to time when we welcome a new subscriber to our e-zine, we often write a personal thank you back, and just ask them how they found out about us. Sometimes we'll even ask what feature about our e-zine was of interest to them. Of course, you can't abuse this practice as you could end up annoying visitors/clients.... not good. But if you are brief and genuine with people, my experience is that they are usually more than willing to help and often even like getting involved. People generally like to have their opinions heard, especially if they think it may make a difference... and in a properly run business, it will.

Tracking is more than numbers and geography. It is about knowing your current user-base and using those facts and figures to grow and expand that base . As webspace and e-commerce competition intensifies, in-depth tracking is another handy tool you may want to consider to keep yourself ahead of pack.

If your sales process requires multiple steps, you might want to track conversions from one page to next. The first page of your sales process might get 1000 visitors, while second page shows 500 visitors - you have a 50% conversion rate from first page to next. You can make improvements to first page and try to get ratio up to 60%, or 75%. In this manner, you can improve conversion ratio of a multi-step sales process one page at a time to finally increase your sales ratio overall.

You can track these multiple comparisons in a spreadsheet by pulling visitor information from your site traffic reporting tools and combining it with order information. Of course, visitor information is rarely exact, but it is intended to provide a relative data point - if data is off, at least it will be off consistently. A spreadsheet like this, developed over time, can provide you detailed type of analysis necessary to improve critical "cogs" of your online sales machine.