One of the biggest advantages to having an online-based business is the ability to track your efforts. Every visit to your website and the activity by each visitor can be recorded and analyzed. Having this information can give you help in making good, informed decisions about your online marketing and SEO efforts.

Website Visitor Tracking

Nearly every website hosting company offers visitor tracking tools along with their hosting package. These tools can generally be lacking in usability. The most commonly used (and free!) website visitor tracking software is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a powerful and user-friendly tool. The software is easy installation, but the use and manipulation of the data requires a little more time to learn. Once installed, tracking begins immediately. These key statistics available are the number of unique visitors, the source they found your website through, the keywords (if any) they searched to find your website, the number of times each of your webpages is viewed, and the number of times someone signs up for your newsletter or one of your courses.

Tracking your website visitors is almost considered mandatory. If you don’t measure your efforts accurately, you risk wasting valuable time and money on marketing and SEO.

Phone Call Tracking

If you have a high volume of incoming phone calls about your courses, you should consider using a phone call tracking service to shed light about how customers originally found your website. Tracking services give you a pool of numbers that rotate on your website and when called, ring to your regular phone line. With this, the service is tracking from where a visitor came to your website and any key search phrases associated with it.

Tracking your marketing results can have a substantial affect on your online course success. But before you can track, you must learn How to Market Your Course, and how Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help your online course.