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If I had to pick one and only one thing that could almost by itself be the separator of successful and unsuccessful Internet Marketers it would be tracking everything you can possibly track.  If you are tracking your results you can't help but learn to do it better.  What’s funny is this is the one thing that most people fail to do properly!  I guess that isn’t funny, in fact it is a little sad for those folks.   

Let me tell you they are the people driving up bid costs on competitive PPC terms on Google and Yahoo for 2-3 weeks who then disappear never to be seen again.  They are the ones sure that you can’t make money with PPC or that they must be victims of click fraud (when PPC can be and often is an almost fool proof method to make money).  

Side Note:  I recently read a report that said of the major Fortune 1000 companies buying traffic online over 40% we not tracking conversion or effectively tracking ROI.  IN THE FORTUNE 1000!  I'm sorry but to me that is an example of having more money then brains and if I were a stock holder in one of those companies I would damn sure want an explanation from someone!  

Many of them justified this by stating it was their intention to gain branding recognition rather then traditional e-Commerce but even more of them (65%) stated they were not tracking the "impact on branding".  Again to me this is just people with more money then brains!

Let me give you three key reasons you need to track EVERYTHING you can possibly track.  

One – Done right as you begin to get traffic, over time your visitors 
will SHOW YOU easy to rank key words that you can then 
develop specific content for.   

Let me explain that one because it can be gold all by itself.  Many tracking programs will show you your last 100 or even more visitors including the referring url.  And that will tell you exactly what that one individual clicked on, how long he was at your site and what page he left from.   

It is that referring URL you are most interested in because many time it will be a Google, MSN or Yahoo result.  Now let’s go back to our marketer doing a books site. Say he chooses James Kavanaugh and makes a section about Kavanaugh.  He chooses some terms like “James Kavanaugh”, “Book by James Kavanaugh”, etc.  He however does not come up with the term “the collected works of James Kavanaugh”.  

Now he views his tracking and sees that someone searched for that term (“the collected works of James Kavanaugh”) and visited his site.  He check the referring Google url and discovers he is ranked #9 for that phrase even though he never tried.   

WOW think about that!  A top ten rank for a term he never optimized for!  So now he simply makes a new page titled, you guessed it, “the collected works of James Kavanaugh”.  And he actually tries to rank for that term this time, gets a few link, etc.  Odds are he will easily pull off #1 or #2 across all three search engines.   

Why?  He tracked his results, that’s why.  

So Just how effective is this simple technique over time?  Judge for yourself here is a screen shot of the traffic to just one of my many sites.  I won't tell you the name of this site BUT it is in one of the most highly competitive markets on the planet right now.  Markets dominated by multi million dollar corporations and chased by more then a million affiliate marketers.

The important thing to note is 100% of the traffic you can see in the graph below is from organic results.  I have never paid for a single click to this site.  While I fully optimized this site the growth you see below is almost 100% from the technique of tracking my traffic and making pages for terms that I found by tracking my results.

Note that in the above graphic February was only half over!  I also know 2500 unique visitors may not seem impressive compared to sites with 1000 a day right?  Well, again it is about the market this site is in.  PPC traffic in this sites niche is going for well over a 4 dollars a click cost right now!  So some of my competitors are buying those 2500 visitors for more then $10,000.00 while I get them for the cost of my web space and domain name!  So yes I would say this technique works!

Two – With out tracking you will never know your value per visitor (VPV)  

Let me be very clear about this because if you don’t get it odds are your will always pay more for traffic then it is worth and you just can’t get ahead that way.  Let's again use two hypothetical marketers to illustrate this more clearly.

• Marketer One – Does not track his results fully, sees it as a bother and taking to much of his time.  He goes and sets up a PPC campaign, picks high traffic words, bids at least to be in the top 5 and waits for the money to roll in.  Five days later he is out 500 dollars and made two sales for 200 in profit.  Clearly he is loosing money problem is he really does not know how much, probably made some sales from other methods, he is bleeding money and sooner or later will simply quit the PPC game.  

• Marketer Two – Tracks everything, puts tracking into place on every web page, on his email list conversion, on his contextual ads, etc.  One month into his project he has had exactly 1134 visitors, based on things like sales, advertising revenue, leads he got into his mailing list, etc.  Marketer Two determines his Value Per Visitor (VPV) is $1.00.  He then decides he wants at least a 40% return so he never bids higher then 60 cents.  He does not care who is at the top for some term with 7 million searches he focus his efforts on finding good traffic terms for 60 cents or less.  Result for Marketer Two – He can not loose money!  

Three – If you don’t track everything then you simply can’t maximize contextual advertising.  

You have probably heard of Google Adsense, if not you should check it out.  Simply put it is a program where you add some simple HTML code to your web pages and Google Ads are displayed on your site.   If a visitor clicks on them you make some money.  It could be 10 cents or it could be a dollar or more per click.

The price is based on the key words displayed on your page and how much people are bidding on them.  Well guess what you can track almost everything with Adsense!  Of course most people do not.  I create “channels” for every major page or at least group of pages I ad this code to.  I can then see how much I make per click and how many clicks I get for every thousand visitors.  With this alone I know that a page is worth say 10 dollars per thousand visitors JUST IN ADSENSE REVENUE.  Nice thing to KNOW huh?  

This allows me to change the lay out of the ads or their appearance and KNOW which way works best.  Or to take down Google Adsense and put up Yahoo Publisher ads instead and MEASURE which one makes more money.  I saw people in forums like crazy saying “Yahoo pays better, switch to Yahoo”.  Being cautious I did not switch wholesale, instead I tested different pages and found out.  

One some pages for some niches Yahoo paid over two time MORE!  

However,  

On other pages for other niches Yahoo paid almost two times LESS!  

You can guess what I did right?  Went through and TESTED my highest money earners for a few days and then went with the winner.  End result my contextual ad revenue went up 76% from December 1, 2005 to January 31, 2006.  

All I can say is USE every tracking metric you can possibly find!  I have always done tracking and in spite of the fact that I made almost all the mistakes I outline in this course it was probably tracking that kept me in the game long enough to figure it out.  

Going back to the first reason of having your visitors tell you what terms they are searching for.  A lot of hosting comes with some pretty fancy tracking, makes nice reports, etc. but it often DOES NOT SHOW YOU INDIVIDUAL VISITORS and EXACTLY what terms they searched for.  That alone is what will give you a growing list of terms to build pages for.  I know of three great free tracking tools that do this for you.  

They are  

Google Analytics - One of the most advanced tracking tools available

Site Meter  - The free version shows your last 100 visitors

Active Meter  - The free version shows your last 150 visitors

In the game of Internet marketing what you or I think means nothing and can get your killed by the competition.  It is KNOWING that guides good decisions and the only way to KNOW is to track and measure.    

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: analytics, google, tracking software, sitemeter, activemeter, google analytics, internet marketing, web marketing, web analysis, metrics, site metrics, ppc, organic search, seo, sem

More on Tracking and Google Analytics

• The Need for Web Analytics Part 1
• The Need for Web Analytics Part 2
• The Need for Web Analytics Part 3
• Reporting is now up-to-date
• Tracking Google Check Out Sales Part 1
• Tracking Google Check Out Sales Part 2
• Absolute vs Unique Visitors

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