Whatever your business or service, if you want to succeed, you must understand your website.

When you have a clear picture of who comes there, when, why, and how, you can make smarter marketing decisions. Here are some of the things you can find out with a web tracking system.

1. Number of page views and unique visitors your web site gets on an hourly, daily or monthly basis.

2. A live count of who's on your site at any given moment.

3. The date and time a visitor came, their IP address, and what web page sent them to yours.

4. What search engine they used to get there.

5. What keywords they're entering to get to your website.

6. How many visitors have returned to view your site a second time, and how long they waited between visits.

7. What operating systems they have.

8. Which of your webpages is the most popular.

9. The most common browser type, whether their browser supports cookies and has them enabled and whether their browser supports Java and Javascript.

10. Top paths and how they navigate your site. What page they enter on and what page they leave from.

Here are the URLs for five web tracking systems:

WebTrends, http://www.netiq.com/products/wrs rial.asp SideTracker, http://sitetracker.com/
StatCounter, http://www.statcounter.com/
Extreme Tracking, http://extreme-dm.com racking/?reg Opentracker, http://www.opentracker.net/pages/features.jsp

Get to know all you can about the people who come to your website, and what gets them there. Only in that way can you focus your marketing program and maximize your return on investment (ROI).

About the Author

CopyrightSusan Dunn, Internet marketing coach, http://www.webstrategies.cc . I will develop an individualized marketing plan for you, design or tweak website, SEO, keywords, copy, sales letter. Also ebook writing and launch, promotional articles and ghost-writing. Mailto:sdunn@susandunn.cc for free ezine. Put 'checklist' for the subject line.