There are a few methods to monitor web and e-mail activity. They all serve a different purpose, and some provide overview while others give you the detail you may need. Take a look below at some of your options, and decide what is best for your promotion based on what you did.
- Web site statistics
Most ISP's have detailed logs of your web activity, everything from
Monthly Statistics, Daily Statistics, Day of Week Statistics,
Hourly Statistics, most page views and most visits. Then they can provide general statistics
such as; Top 10 Files by Number of Hits, Top 10 Files by Volume,
Complete File Statistics,
Top 10 Most Frequently Requested 404 Files (errors),
Complete 404 File Not Found Statistics, and
a break down of domain origins by country.
Then you get page by page statistics, hits, keywords, and more.
This is sometimes in a raw format, but if you have done an e-mail blast or just
put up a new banner someplace, this is a great place to come and see if the
web hits have increased.
- Use third party products such as
Superstats
This product helps to quantify and qualify your various marketing efforts so you can
have proof of success or find areas in need of work.
For general statistics you can look at The Referrers Report which details how people
are finding your site—links from other websites (possibly an advertising campaign),
various email or newsletter sponsorships or articles, search engines and more.
It even provides you with the URL of the referring site, so you can see exactly
where your hits are coming from. By paying close attention to this report, you can
determine if a specific banner ad campaign has been successful (compare the percentage
of hits coming from other websites and follow the referring links to see precisely who
is sending you hits) or whether you need to boost your marketing efforts.
The Reference Report also allows you to monitor the success of on-site promotions.
Try setting up another page within your site that details a monthly promotion. Make your visitors aware of the promotion by advertising it on your homepage or sending an email. Then watch your Referrers Report to see how well the promotion does. The report will detail which link (email, homepage, etc.) is sending the most hits to your special promotion page so you can determine which format is most preferred by your audience and most effective for your site.
The only thing with these services, you usually have to display a banner for them
- Set up separate web sites for ads and e-mail promotions
If the campaign is large, you may even want to set up an entirely new
web site to monitor the progress and flow through of the ad and each
page. Most ISP's allow you to set up 'sub domains'. These are domain
names that go to your original account, ie. www.bravosw.com, but when the
user invokes the sub domain name (ie. www.bravobucks.com) it is re-routed to a subdirectory on
your site (that you must set up), and it looks like a completely new site,
with new statistics for specialized monitoring. Sometimes these sub domains
can cost a few dollars a month, but they are a great way to know exactly
how that ad campaign did, and are no where near the expense and setup of setting
up an actual new original domain name site.
- Use HTML forms and separate e-mail addresses
When we are doing a banner ad or e-mail blast, to monitor the progress we set up either
a completely new page that receives the click throughs from that ad, or an
HTML form where they can make some sort of request
that is also unique to the campaign. Select to see a FORM example.
This form is then sent to a specific e-mail address, that once again is unique to the campaign.
With our ISP, we can have unlimited e-mail addresses, that we control the set up of ourselves,
and this is really convenient when it comes to seeing the actual results of a banner, or
direct e-mail campaign.
Join these successful companies..
Are you ready to become e.Commerce enabled??.. Then order now!
|
