It used to be that just getting traffic to your website was success. Today that just isn't case. To survive on internet, marketers have to increase traffic and improve conversion ratios, requiring more accountability from marketing efforts and investments.

What does this mean?

It means analyzing traffic from your marketing campaign to user's action. Whether it's an affiliate sign-up, sale, newsletter opt in. Such data is vital in learning how to better target your customers and improving profitability.

What to analyze?

The great thing about internet marketing is that you can can monitor your campaigns traffic, conversions, and evaluate overall performance.

It's important that you analyze, measure and continuously improve overall performance of your marketing campaign.

As simple as it sounds, many people find it difficult to analyze data captured.

How do I analyze my traffic...

The first step to analyzing your campaign is pinpointing exactly where users are coming from. Whether it's email, search engines, or affiliates. So let us talk a second about how to gather this information.

All data resides on your server in logs. While logs can be confusing and frustrating to read. There are some great traffic analysis tools such as...

- extreme-dm.com - hitbox.com - web-stat.com - webtrends.com

Many are free and very useful. Although you can pay a few dollars a month and get some extra features.

You can track keywords, web site referrals and much more. By taking this information and familiarizing yourself with how users are getting to your site. It will help you better optimize, improve, and target traffic.

Converting your traffic

What do you want to measure to determine what site changes might improve your conversion ratio? This depends on nature of your site. What is focus for visitor at your site?

- Buy a product? - Subscribe to a service? - Opt-in to your newsletter? - Recruit an affiliate?

Each site will have specific goals. The best way to determine how well your site attracts and converts visitors is to analyze, test and tweak different elements of site such as:

- Sales Offers. - Sales letter copy. - Photos and other images. - Product/Service Price. - Headlines. - Guarantees. - Different products and services. - Site design, color schemes, fonts, navigation, etc.

For instance, county government of Burlingame, California, wirelessly regulates its parking meters to stop meter theft and monitor coin deposits. The parking industry itself is estimated at over $500 billion; US accounts for over 105 million parking spaces.

Half-way across world, Singaporeans today can use their mobile phones to pay for parking, taxi fares and photo prints. In Suntec City shopping area, drivers can pay parking tickets via cellphones after having procured a designated PIN (Personal Information Number) with a local services agent. M-solutions providers like Netgalactic (www.netgalactic.com) expect major takeoff in Web and wireless enabled parking solutions for markets ranging from US to Asia-Pacific.

In Australia, companies like Telstra are also targeting services which will collapse multiple credit card features into one single cellphone. In Melbourne and Sydney, mobile phone-equipped parking meters are widespread (thanks to features like meter expiry alerts via SMS), and sales at phone-equipped soft-drink machines are reportedly 10 per cent higher than at conventional machines.