If your website sits on a server in an ISP then you can either request server log files from them and run them through your own software, or you can ask them if they provide an interface for you to review your site statistics online. Most do provide this service. It’s often web based and all you have to do is log onto their site to view them.

Now you’re armed with a lot of good data. But if all your e-marketing initiatives drive traffic to your homepage, how will you know which ones are working and which ones aren’t? If you send out emails to rented lists and call to action are all links that point to your homepage, then you’ll never know which emails are doing better than others. You may get an idea by seeing if your overall traffic increased day you sent out email or posted banner (even to determine this you’ll need your website stats), but to do it right, you need exact data, and web will provide it for you.

Some sites that you place banners on will offer you click-thru counting services to you. Most email brokers also offer similar services, at a price. But what if they don’t offer tracking information for you? Or worse, what if you don’t trust their reporting?

The solution: Create, implement, utilize and manage your own unique tracking pages.

It’s relatively simple. In every e-marketing campaign you conduct you create and assign a unique html page to it. Then initiative’s call to action (hyperlink) points to its unique page. After campaign is done, you can then go to your website statistics obtained through your website’s server log files, and see how many visits were logged for each unique tracking page.

For example, let’s say you send out an email to a list of 1000 email addresses. In body of email there is a call to action link that says, “Click Here to Buy Now”. This link points to a page on your website. But not just any page. It points to a unique tracking page you created earlier to track how many of 1000 people clicked-thru from email. It’s important that no users can get to this new page in any other way than through email. Let’s say you named page email-campaign1.htm. After email campaign is done (I like to wait about 2-4 days), you go to your website statistics (the result of parsing server log files through WebTrends or its equivalent) and search for page called email-campaign1.htm. Finally, you view page visits number. Let’s say visits to this unique page totaled 200. That number is your click-thru number.

Now you can really start to fill in all relevant data discussed in Part 1. This will enable you to determine how well each campaign is doing and whether you need to make adjustments.

To help manage all these unique pages, keep them all in one sub directory of your site. If you don’t do technical work for your site, you ought to consider giving Part 1 and Part 2 of this series to your technical web person so they can get a better handle on your website vitals.

Until you know how well your website and e-marketing campaigns are doing, measured in visits, leads and sales, you can’t possibly maximize your operation and increase your bottom line. Now you have information to make this happen.

Jason OConnor is President of Oak Web Works - The synthesis of Web marketing, design, and technology. Jason is a Web development expert, e-strategist, and e-marketer who is trying to affect the future of the Internet in a highly positive way

http://www.oakwebworks.com