Tracking Sites Effectively

A lot of people fail to maximise their earnings simply by not tracking their websites effectively. It doesn't matter if your sole source of income is affiliate marketing and monetisation or if you have a tangible product or service to sell. If you can't see what's going on it's going to be very hard to make improvements. Basic Tracking No matter how big or small your site is you really should invest the time in setting up some form of log analyser or web statistics solution. Most hosting plans will offer you webalizer or Awstats for free (isn't that a great word? :) ) While neither solution will give you the pretty graphs and reports of Google Analytics, they will give you the key information:

• Number of visitors
• Number of page views
• Referrals

Don't confuse "hits" with "page views". A hit is a unique request for a file. A single web page could have a large number of files including the text file, images, css and multimedia, so you will always see a lot more hits than page views. This is normal. Referrals are where it gets interesting. You can see not only which websites are linking to you, but also which search engines are driving traffic to your site AND for what search terms / phrases. In some cases you may find that a large percentage of your traffic is being generated by relatively obscure terms that your site has gained a naturally high rank for. For example, in my day job we sell hosting. While we rank well for hosting related terms we also have a very high rank for "tshirts", "t-shirts" and a few related phrases. In the example above we are actually monetising, however, if we weren't the savvy thing would be to find an affiliate program or other online advertising niche to tap into. Why not? We're getting the traffic anyway... The flip side to this is the actual monetisation itself.... Adsense has been offering "channels" for quite some time, so you can easily assign a channel to an advert. The more specific the channel the better the information you will be able to glean. So you could add a tracking ID to each ad type on each site, thus allowing you to easily see which adverts were performing best. Up until recently this level of control was not possible with the Amazon associates program. Fortunately this has all changed. You can now easily add as many tracking IDs as you want to your account. Simply login to your Amazon affiliate account and click on the "Your Account" link in the top right of the screen (click to enlarge): Once you're there you can see which tracking IDs you have already and create more if needed. This means that you can now generate reports on a per ID basis - very handy if you're running Amazon ads on multiple sites. Other affiliate programs may offer tracking solutions internally, but hopefully the example I've provided will give you a starting point.