IMMania.com

One of my goals for 2007 was to get off the stick when it comes to tracking. Any kind of tracking really, since I wasn’t doing much if any prior to last year. The tracking that I did do consisted mainly of looking at my site stats in Webalizer. It was a start and I at least got a feel for my traffic numbers, referrers, search terms, and countries where my visitors originated from, but I was doing next to nothing when it came to tracking conversions.

And that’s a key piece of business data needed by anyone doing business online.

I hate to admit it, but I wasn’t even using the SID parameter provided by Commission Junction for affiliate links. I was happy that I was just earning commissions. The Holy Grail for me was to track conversions down to the keyword level. In order for that to occur I needed to use PHP scripts on my pages and encode my Adwords destination URLs with keyword information. This is just now starting to be implemented on my end.

I also own Jeremy Palmer’s “Optimize My Site” script that does a lot of this along with importing transaction reports from various affiliate networks for ROI report generation.

I still need to install the latest version and actually use it on a campaign. I’m just slow getting around to stuff sometimes, but it will get done eventually.

The one thing I’ve been doing on a much more regular basis is analyzing visitor behavior on my sites. I’ve been using the free version of SiteMeter on most of my sites and the information this is yielding is incredible. I love how it shows me out clicks on affiliate links as well as bounces. I can see in real time the relative CTR without waiting for CJ to update these stats in my account.

Seeing the exact search terms visitors enter into the various search engines is also very enlightening. I often roll some of these search terms back into my Adwords campaigns.

I probably should investigate the paid version of SiteMeter and see if it’s worth it. The other stats tool I really need to use more on my sites is Google Analytics. I’ve dabbled with it and just from that brief experience as well as all the raves I hear from others, it’s a fantastic tool and free to boot.

In the final analysis, I probably check my stats too frequently and should get in the habit of pulling in all the data in one shot and analyzing it for a longer period rather than say, every 15 minutes like I do now. But either way, I’m finding that making adjustments (tweaks) based on data can have a large impact on the success of both PPC campaigns as well as optimizing a site for organic search and conversions.