Tracking Your Own Website is the last step of making and managing a website that everybody may not overlook. In order to find out what has worked and what has not, you need to track your website from all current aspects. That way, you would be able to test various methods and strategies, analyze your tracking results and improve your website performance.

If you don’t track your website, you would put all your efforts to waste and lose money. Even if you don’t lose, you would miss a lot of money on the table. You see, tracking is not about realizing how stuff works, rather it is about what stuff works.

If you track your own web pages precisely and properly, you will lower your hard work and increase your profits. This process is such an extensive process that cannot be simply covered in a single article. In fact, there are tons of features, factors and elements related to your website that could be tracked and tested on the Internet. By figuring out every single aspect of the entire process, you can move your online business to the next level, creating and running a website that works.

Website Tracking is generally referred as an act of recording and monitoring changes made to the website and tracing the flow of visitors to and from the web pages. With that being said, we can basically divide the process into 2 sections; Tracking the Traffic Sources and Tracking the User Experience.

1. Tracking the Traffic Sources:

This action is finding out the source of your visitors. You need to know what web pages have sent you the most traffic. Whether it is an authority website, a search engine or a simple blog, you must figure it out and realize if the traffic is targeted and qualified. That way, you should improve the source of traffic and increase the conversions which in turn can result in higher profit margins.

The most popular aspects of checking Traffic Sources that should be tracked and monitored are:

• Direct Traffic: People who visit your website directly from their Internet browsers.
• Referring Sites: Other web pages linking directly to your website and referring visitors to yours.
• Search Engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN that are mostly the main source of web traffic.
• Keywords that are connected to the Search Engines & reveal the topics people want to search.

Testing each and every source of traffic to your own web pages enables you to find out what the best, targeted and high quality traffic is. Then, your job should be focusing on those sources and improving them. That way, your conversion rates will reach the roof and you will get the most out of your efforts.

2. Tracking the User Experience:

Sometimes, it is not only enough to know your Website Traffic Sources. You would need to know what your visitors do on your web pages, which part they see and interact, what pages they visit, which links they click and so forth. It is called the User Experience and plays a very large role for determining your site conversion rate.

Conversion Rate is a ratio of visitors who make the needed commitment and convert to a desired action based on your request. So, if, for example, you want your audience just to click on an ad or a link, your web page must lead the visitor to that action. Then, you need to be informed if it is done properly or not. That´s when Tracking the User Experience comes to play.

The most popular aspects of checking User Experience that should be tracked and monitored are:

• Click Through Rate: The ratio of users clicking on an ad by the number of times it is shown.
• Average Time On site: The time a visitor spends on a site for browsing and navigating.
• Bounce Rate: The average percentage of visitors to a site who bounce away to a different site.
• Conversion Rate: The ratio of people who took the desired action or fulfill the certain goals.

Now, you have learned how important it is to track your website traffic and user experience. No matter how you look at it, you have to get a tracking system to do all the work for you. You can either pay someone to create it for you which is a very costly process, use the FREE tools out there which is quite useful but not that comprehensive or use  an online paid tracking management system.

AdMinder is an Ad Tracking Tool that enables you to track response to your ads such as text links, banner ads, ezine ads,  etc. Now, you can efficiently manage your ad campaigns and easily calculate return on investment with the AdMinder website advertising manager.

HyperTracker is another Tracking solution for webmasters and advertisers who want to track, measure and view unlimited campaigns, automatically and instantly isolate which ads, visitors and products are productive and much much more.

And finally, if you are looking for a FREE solution, then I cannot find anything better than Google Analytics, a reliable tracking system that helps you track, test and improve your websites. If you don’t go for the paid solutions, then I highly recommend this tool from Google.

Bear in mind that Tracking Your Own Website should be always monitored and analyzed appropriately. In the next posts, we will talk about it more and show you how to Analyze your Own Website.

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To Your Success!

Hooshmand Moslemi