Tracking and Monitoring Results
to Improve Web Promotions

The secret of good marketing is to spend your efforts where they will count most. There is a thing we call the 80-20 rule, which states that 80 percent of your results come from just 20 percent of your efforts, while the other 80 percent of your efforts only actually produces the final 20 percent of results.

In marketing and promotion, there are always more methods and techniques to try, than you can ever have the time and budget to try. It is therefore essential that you swiftly learn to evaluate ROI (return on investment) for yourself.

The oldest method for finding out how customers came to you is to ask them how they heard of you. Unfortunately response rates for such are traditionally very low, and may certainly not be considered representative.

Suppose only 2 percent of your customers were to fill out a questionaire, and that they are only the two percent who responded to a particular kind of advertising? In other words, would those people who chose to fill out a questionare be representative of those who chose not to?

What is needed then is a method of tracking referrals that is reliable, and that does not depend on customers having to volunteer extra information. For this, webmasters turn to various tracking solutions.

The problems of accurately tracking the full effects of any promotional activities are tough indeed. The largest single factor is that no single tracking solution is flawless.

In the following pages I shall give information and advice about each of the common tracking solutions webmasters may use. As you will learn, there is no truly faultless solution to tracking.

What you should gain, however, is a good overview of the means and tactics for gaining data, and an understanding of the main strengths and weaknesses of each source of data.

Importantly, you may learn to easily combine several different sources of data, so that even if your information is never 100 percent representative, it will at least be far more detailed in informing you of possible trends.

Introduction to Tracking Web Promotion Results

Using Web Server Logs for Tracking Usage

Using Dedicated Landing Pages to Track Referrals

Using Referal IDs in URLs to Track Referrals

Using Cookies to Track Referrals and Repeat Visits