Dump That Free Hit Counter And Start Tracking

Tracking Visitors' Footsteps

While Yahoo and Infoseek don't have visible counters on their pages, rest assured that they know your every move. No other advertising medium allows you to do the things the Internet does, and it amazes us that more marketers do not take advantage of serious site tracking.

Part of the problem seems to be that many Internet marketers are only concerned with promoting their web site and getting more people to visit. More visitors equals more sales right? Well yes that is true, but only if your web site leads visitors through the sales process.

Before you even begin promoting a web site, you should have in your mind the path that you want visitors to take through your site. Sales is a process. One step leads to the next, until finally the end result is hopefully that what was once just a prospect is now a customer.

Tracking your visitor's footsteps throughout your web site is the best way to determine why they didn't take the action that you wanted them to take. Who knows, maybe 80% of your visitors aren't even making it past your introductory page? You'll never know unless you track them.

Consider this another Internet marketing rule that is written in stone. If you're not tracking your entire web site and tweaking it on a regular basis, you're throwing money down the proverbial drain. From a profit standpoint, it is critical that you know the answers to questions like:

1. How do visitors find your site in the first place?
   
2. How many of them make it past the main page?
   
3. Which page of your site is the most popular?
   
4. How long does the average visitor stick around?
   
5. What is the average number of pages viewed?
   
6. What path do visitors take through your site?
   
7. What links do they use to leave your site?
   

If you don't know the answers to these simple questions, here's an easy way to increase your profits starting immediately. And the good news is that it may not cost you anything other than some time. We're going to show you how to use free CGI scripts to ultimately increase sales!

While you don't really need to learn anything technical to use the scripts we're going to suggest, you do need to be able to run CGI scripts on your web server. If you have no idea what CGI scripts are, ask your ISP. If they say no, we strongly suggest that you find a new ISP.

If you haven't realized it by now, we are a big fan of CGI scripts because they are what allows you to add interactivity to your web site. But CGI scripts can also help you do many other things, like track your visitors' footsteps.