Monitoring Your Website Performance

Whether you manage a single page brochure website or you have a dynamic site that combines the features of a blog, forum, video streaming site, and offers a umber of online applications, you should monitor the performance of your website. Knowing how many visitors arrive on the pages of your site, how many become paying customers, and other data about your pages and their visitors will help you offer a more complete online experience and it will also help ensure that you maximize your returns.Install an analytic package on every one of your pages. There are a number of great quality and highly effective, free analytic packages. These typically offer all the information you require but may be limited to a certain number of results. Once your website expands and grow beyond these limits you should consider paying the cost to upgrade your account and access more information.

You should also track sales results and ideally you should be able to attribute a sale to a particular website visitor. Your analytic package can offer information on visitor paths and, if you redirect customers to a thank you page then this can be used to monitor sales, calculate the most effective traffic sources, and improve results on a site wide basis. You can also use implement more complex sales tracking systems to further improve your results.

Track the performance of your marketing campaigns. If you use PPC then monitor your PPC account and use the reporting functions that are offered by most networks to tie this in with your visitor and customer data. Track your search engine rankings and, if you use social media marketing or social networking, find ways to track the performance of these marketing techniques too.

The more data you can track and combine, the more useful information you will have access to. This information can prove highly beneficial when you are attempting to optimize your website to get the best results. Through constant tracking and optimization you can continue to improve results, and you can further develop your website knowing that you are taking the best actions that will generate greater results for your business.