Testing And Tracking Your Website Traffic

Before you even begin to start driving huge amounts of traffic to your website, I highly recommend that you test and track all your traffic sources. You may have heard it before and blown it off, but it is vital that you set up your testing and tracking software or service as soon as possible because it is very important for a long term and profitable Internet marketing campaign. How important is testing and tracking? Consider this, you have a brand-new website that you just created. You decide that you want to sell baby clothes. So you spend lots of time and money to get your website completely stocked and ready for business. Now that you’re open, its time to market your business. You decide to paid for your traffic and you want try multiple advertising channels at the same time. Your advertising budget is approximately two thousand dollars for the month. You spend five hundred dollars for advertising A, seven hundred and fifty dollars for advertising B, and seven hundred and fifty dollars for advertising C. After a month, you received nine thousands visitors and you processed seventy sales. Without testing and tracking your traffic, you have no idea which advertising channel generated the most sales. Its possible that all your sales came from one channel. Without testing and tracking your traffic, you are marketing blind.

So what exactly should you test and track? I recommend that you track each and every individual traffic source. You should also track the amount of sales, or any desired action, that each traffic source produces. By doing that, you will be able to see which advertising sources are working and which aren’t. Once you’re able to identify which advertising channels don’t work, you can stop advertising on that channel or test other creatives (Ads). For the advertising channels that do work, you could increase the amount you spend for that particular channel and work on conversions. That’s what the big boys do and that’s what you should do.

There is one more thing about testing that I feel I need to discuss. Whenever you find an advertising channel that isn’t performing well, make sure you test different creatives before you stop advertising on that channel all together. You’ll be surprised what you can accomplish by tweaking an ad. If you’ve tweaked an ad many times and haven’t seen improvement, it may be wise to stop using that advertising channel. Just make sure that you have given it a fair shot. Don’t forget to test the creatives of your successful advertising channels as well. You may think that there is no need to test an already successful advertisement, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. If you were able to experience success on your first ads, there is a good chance that there is even greater success waiting around the corner. However you will never know unless you test your advertisements.

Tracking is also very important. I am aware that most websites have some sort of statistical data on their control panel, such as the number of visitors you have received and the referring urls data, but that may not be enough information. Remember, not only do you have to know where your visitors are coming from, but you also need to know who is buying, subscribing, or whatever action that you want your visitors to take. Having that kind of information is vital to successfully testing and tracking your website traffic.

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