When it comes to your online business the old adage still applies "If you don't know what you're aiming for - you're sure to hit it." I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to track your online visitors. Tracking your visitors is even more important when you're just staring out than when you're a seasoned business. You absolutely need to know as much about your site visitors as possible.

Without proper tracking you will not be in a good position to do search engine optimization, manage an online ad budget, or even make changes to your website. You need to how your vistiors are finding you online and how they navigate your website to constantly tweak your online strategies.

There are web applications for tracking your website vistiors. The most popular of which is Google Analytics. Although I have to say I'm not impressed with Google Analytics for a few reasons. The most prominent reason is that Google Analytics doesn't display the tracking data in realtime. You have to way an unspecified period of time to see tracking data. Heaven forbid you're in a situation where you just turned on some very expensive and frequently search for keywords on Google Adwords without realtime tracking. It's possible to spend hundreds of dollars in a few minutes. That's just not something I'm willing to stomach without having the ability to see in realtime what I'm getting for that money.

My favorite web application for tracking is Hitslink.com. Hitslink does provide realtime tracking. The only downfall to Hitslink is there are so many features which it tracks, sometimes it becomes rather confusing which ones are most important for my business. In general however Hitslink is the best one I've found.

Once you have actual tracking added to your pages it's important to know how to use the information to improve your website. You should closely monitor any change in site visitor behavior when you make a change to your site. For example_ You may notice more people click through to a second or third page if you use a certain compelling headline on your homepage. Or maybe you notice an increase product sales by displaying a certain image. Whatever the case, your decisions should be data driven rather than just going on a hunch. I can tell you many times I though what I considered to be a cleaner, better looking page ended up converting worse than expected according to my tracking.

No matter how well you design or layout your web pages it's important to remember to test, measure, and track your results. Otherwise you're cheating yourself the best opportunity to improve your online business.

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