Probably one of the most elusive yet most important things in web marketing is getting to know customers you have never met and will likely never see. We are all working in a virtual world, plagued more than a little by the anonymity of the sales  environment. Not to worry, although we might never be able to shake hands with our site visitors, as nice as that would be, we can at least mitigate the effects of the anonymity through effective visitor tracking. What’s surprising to most is just how easy this can be. More on the “how” after a little more of the “why”.

So, what kind of things do we want to know about our visitors?

How about:

  • which website referred them to us? - find out which of your marketing efforts or link exchanges/text links are working best for you
  • where do they live geographically speaking? - are you selling German flags and only seeing French visitors?
  • what keyword did they use to find our site in a search engine? - is your seo working at all?
  • who has been to your site before and is returning?
  • what monitor settings do your visitors use? - is your site too wide or narrow?
  • which other sites are competing for that same search term? - who is your keyword competition?
  • which page on your site is the most popular? - maybe the busy page should be the default page?
  • which page are the entering and exiting your site from? - are you losing visitors from a badly written page or through a link you maybe should consider removing? Keep them on your site.

Well, all of this stuff counts, and WILL have a direct impact in your income. Makes no sense to keep throwing advertising dollars at a web project when there are no metrics in place to measure the result of the advertising, does it?

Who do I use to collect all of this information for me and present it in elegant graphical formation for free? I use a service called StatCounter.com. They are free, with optional upgrades, easy to use, and 100% reliable and professional.

Here are just a couple of the over a dozen usefull bits of information provided for free for any number of sites:

Daily/Weekly/Monthly traffic counts

Visitor counts

Visitor locations

visitor locations

Visitor monitor settings

monitor resolution

Get this excellent system for your site, like I said, it’s free, and it may just give you a leg up on your competition. It sure did for us :>)

Cheers,

Ron

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