How can you market successfully when you do not know who is visiting your site, how long they are staying, where they are going, or where they came from?

As we spoke in the previous articles it is important to build a good site, optimize it and submit it to search engines, get traffic, advertise etc etc. But is also very important to monitor your visitors movements within a website. By knowing which parts of the website are the most visited and where users stay longer you'll know what content is more popular. It is like you are getting feedback from your visitors. This can help you to improve your website more according to your visitors preferences.

So how can you obtain this information about your visitors?

Some basic statistics are provided by your hosting company, but usually this reports are not very informative and definitely not enough to build your marketing strategy on them. You need to incorporate your own website statistic management. It is not that difficult as it sounds. There are many web based applications and scripts that can help you with this. See for example ClickTracks - offers a great way of understanding how visitors interact with your website, whether ecommerce, content or intranet. It's unique because it's visual and interactive, displaying information in context with your site. It's powerful because it permits you to separate your visitors into different groups and compare their behavior - so you can see the effectiveness of a search engine or ad campaign, for example.