Tracking Traffic: Home Based Affiliate Businesses

One of the essential rules for home business Internet
marketing, and for marketing of any business, is to know if
the product or means you are using to market is working or
not. It’s amazing the number of entrepreneurs that spend
time and money on home business internet marketing and don’t
track it. By tracking we mean that they don’t keep track of
how and why people inquire about or buy their products and
services. They don’t know if the ad that they ran in the
paper is the reason someone called for their technical help,
or if the speech that they delivered at last week’s Chamber
of Commerce luncheon might have lured that new customer.

Home business Internet marketing is successful only if the
money and time spent on the effort to bring in new customers
and new revenues does not exceed the profit made from that
expense. A crucial part of determining Return on Investment
(ROI) is knowing what Internet marketing tool works for your
home business – and what does not.

Buying a home business Internet marketing analytic tool that
can help track results makes good business sense for
several
other reasons, one of which is to determine what users and
potential customers like about your Web site and what they
don’t. Home business Internet marketing analysis software
can tell you which pages were visited most frequently and
the common exit and entry pages.

Examples of Areas that Need Tracking:

A news paper add needs tracking to find out how many people
actually visit your site as a result of running the ad. If
you ran two articles in the same newspaper you could track
to see which one is better recieved by the public. Adminder
is a free online service that will track links back to your
website, where the link came from, and how many times it was
clicked.

You need to track so you can spend your time and effort
doing what has
been proven, through tracking, to work.

Exit pages are important, because if the page that a large
number of consumers are exiting from is not the order
confirmation page than that tells you that something about
that page is driving users away from your site. Knowing
where you go wrong so you can correct it is a crucial piece
of Internet marketing information for your home business.
Knowing the entry page gives you an idea of which of your
home business Internet marketing tactics and resources
worked.

Most Internet monitoring tools let you know which browsers
and operating systems your site’s users have. You can find
out, for instance, how many have Macs, how many have Windows
based systems, how many use Internet Explorer and how many
use Netscape. You’ll be able to see if consumers are also
trying to navigate to “404” pages – those that no longer
exist. These broken links must be fixed quickly or the
message to these users is that your home business is not
efficient and you’ll have lost that marketing opportunity.

With these monitoring tools installed for your site you can
also keep track of your conversions (consumer visit that
results in a sale) and determine the source of the visit as
well as the path on your site that that buyer took to
complete the sale.

Nor are home business Internet marketing and tracking tools
costly. Some of the best software and services are priced at
a low $20 a month.