Advanced Website Tracking Tools

The first half of this month's newsletter provides both a description of our advanced tracking tools and examples of how they are used. The second half functions as a manual for how to actually use the tools.

The NewfangledCMS advanced tracking tools provide reports of website activity that detail specific sessions which result when visitors trigger "trackers." We will begin by describing what these trackers are, and how they get triggered.

There are basically two kinds of trackers: trackers that get embedded in the NewfangledCMS email newsletters application and "alias" trackers. When someone clicks on a link in an email newsletter, since the NewfangledCMS can embed trackers in these links, they trigger our tracking system. Or, when someone gets to a website using an alias such as www.your_company.com/freeoffer where "freeoffer" represents a tracker alias, our tracking system goes to work. These aliases can be set up as a links for banner ads, or appended to a website's URL when it's going to be seen in print. These aliases trigger our tracking system. The following examples will help flesh out the difference between email newsletter trackers and trackable aliases.

Visitor A receives your email newsletter and clicks on one of the links to read a news announcement or respond to a special offer. As they click the link, the website is "called." When our advanced tracking system is running, the website consistently "listens" for visitors that access the site through one of these trackers. Because the email newsletter had trackers built into its links, when the user clicked the link, the website "heard" the tracker, and so began to record the visitor's session. Once a visitor hits the site through a tracker, the site will record every page visit, the time it was viewed, and any future visits from that person. If the same visitor comes back to the site the following day (even without triggering the tracker again) via a bookmark or simply by typing in your website address, the tracking system will still recognize the visitor and continue tracking their site usage.

Visitor B comes to the site through a GoogleAd. The GoogleAd would be pointed to a website address that contained an alias set up through the tracking system. The link would look like "www.your_company.com/google_ad_1" where "google_ad_1" is the alias. When the visitor clicks on the ad, the site "hears" the alias and begins recording the visitor's session. Another way to trigger an alias is by simply typing in the website address as printed on a piece of direct mail. By appending the website address with an alias such as www.yourcompany.com/info where "info" is the alias, when the recipient of the mailing types in the full URL, the tracking system is initiated.

The main difference between the two examples above is that a visitor who comes from an email newsletter can be personally identified by their email address. This is because our email newsletter system is designed to append the email address to each tracker as the emails are generated. The tracker records and reports all visitor sessions resulting from NewfangledCMS email newsletters with the visitor's email address included. In these cases, the reports are particularly helpful, because you know exactly who visited your site, when they visited, and what they've looked at. An alias tracker assigns the user's session a generic ID number since the system does not yet know anything about the visitor, other than that they happened to activate a tracker. However, if one of these "generic visitors" fills out an email form on your website, the tracking system can take the visitor's email address and associate it with their original ID number, so that all past and future session information is now identified with a real person's email address.

I know this all sounds a bit "big brotherish." In practice, however, while it's interesting to see what individuals are looking at on your site, what is most helpful about this tracking capability is viewing visitor trends by specific tracking groups. This gets to the heart of what our advanced tracking tools provide. They allow you to see definite patterns of site usage (visitor interest) based on specific marketing efforts. This kind of knowledge goes much deeper than general website statistics. Last month we did a newsletter on analyzing website traffic. While it's helpful to have a handle on your overall website traffic, the NewfangledCMS advanced tracking tools break visitor usage down session by session in tracking groups that relate to specific marketing efforts. The following case study describes how specific tracking group activity helps refine and maximize marketing efforts.

Company A offers white papers within their industry. They use the advanced tracking tools to create a tracking group that they name "September 04 whitepaper offer." This tracking group is simply a category for grouping together a series of specific trackers they will use in various marketing efforts with regard to this new white paper. Such marketing efforts will include an email announcement about the white paper, a Google Ad, and a postcard they will be mailed out. Additionally, they will be featuring this white paper on their site's homepage and so they will want to track downloads resulting from the homepage link as well.

First, Company A creates a "trackable email newsletter" and assigns it to the "September 04 white paper offer" tracking group. They also set up an alias called "GoogleAdwhitepaper" for the Google Ad they are going to run. Since clicking on a Google banner ad triggers this alias, it can be named descriptively for your purposes rather than naming it something that makes sense to the visitor. However, since the visitor will have to type in the alias to be printed on their postcard, the company will name it something easy for them to remember, like "whitepaper." The third alias, since it will also be used as a link off of their homepage, can be given a more descriptive name such as "9-4_homepage-whitepaper." The viewer does not see this text, only the link. All of these aliases will be assigned to the tracking group "September 04 white paper offer."

Unique trackers for each specific effort will allow the company to compare the performance of each marketing effort. They will ultimately know how many sessions and overall page views resulted from each tracker. Company A can also view the full list of all of the actual sessions associated with the tracker, and they can look at the specific pages viewed by each session. However, aside from curiosity, the overall tracking group information will be most helpful.

By assigning all four of the above trackers to the same tracker group (September 04 white paper offer) based on their common purpose (marking the white paper) they will be able to review overall session data for the entire white paper campaign. These statistics include a breakdown of overall sessions by month, the top ten sessions (those users who spent the most time and looked at the most pages on the site), and most important, the top ten most popular pages viewed by visitors from this tracking group.

Tracking the most popular pages is extremely helpful, as it reveals the interests of your target audience. Of course, the top page in this report will always be the page where the tracker directed the viewer—in this case, the white paper sign up form. However, seeing the next pages in this list tells you specifically what this group of visitors (who were interested in the white paper) were interested in. Did they go to the FAQ section; did they go to the pricing page; or did they read testimonials? Reviewing such specific trends can be quite revealing; it can help craft future efforts or refine website content.

The tracking report can also help salespeople know who to pursue first. The newsletter tracker report provides the email addresses for each session. Salespeople can examine the report and view the top respondents (the people who looked at the most pages and returned most frequently) to determine priority for follow-up calls.

In this particular case study, since the other trackers directed users to a white paper request form, many of the "generic IDs" will also contain the visitor's email address. In order to request the white paper, they must fill out a form and provide their email address. The tracking system associates their email address with their ID and includes this information in the report. As an added benefit, a salesperson is allowed to "look up" that user's session information before contacting them. They will be able to see exactly what the user viewed, and will be able to focus their conversation with the prospect accordingly.

The advanced tracking tools allow the capability to generate email alerts whenever a tracker is initiated. This capability may be turned on or off depending on the number of people to whom you are marketing. If your newsletter reaches thousands of people, you probably do not want to flood your inbox with hundreds of tracker alerts. However, if your marketing effort is more focused, you can assign an alert email address to any tracker, so that you will receive an email alert when a visitor clicks on an email link or uses an alias tracker. The email would include the email or ID of the visitor, information about the tracker they followed, the time they hit the site and a link to their particular session data so you can review what they've seen.

Now that you have an idea of what the tracking system does, we've provided you with a manual for how to use it. Of course, this is ultimately only useful for those clients who have the tracking system installed in their NewfangledCMS site. We've included this manual section both for their reference, but also to further quantify and specifically show how this system works and what the results look like.

The first step in using a tracker is to set up a tracking group. Think of these groups as buckets containing trackers that relate to a common set of tracker types or tracking efforts. Once you create tracking groups, you can then assign them specific trackers (whether they are trackable newsletters or aliases). In some cases, there may be a one-to-one relationship between a tracking group and a tracker. For example, you may be running a series of banner ads all for the same offer, but you might want to set up a separate tracking group for each tracker based on how you want to breakdown the overall tracking group session report as described above. If you want to see overall session trends (most active session and most view pages) separately based on each banner ad, you would set up a tracking group for each ad. If you wanted to combine the overall session information from all ads, you would assign separate trackers but assign them all to the same tracking group.

1. Go under "Do Stuff" open the "Tracking" area and click "Add Tracking Group." An editing screen will pop up, and you simply provide the name for your tracking group. You can also enter a description of the tracking group for future reference.

2. Once you have a tracking group in place you can start to add trackers to the groups. Go under "Find Stuff" and select the tracking group to which you want to add a tracker. After you have selected your tracking group, you will see both a list of trackers that already exist in that group (if there are any) as well as a link at the top of the list called "Add Tracker." Click on "Add Tracker," and a tracker popup screen will allow you to add a new tracker.

The Add Tracker screen contains four fields.

Tracker Title field is different from the actual alias name (see below). It is how the system lists the tracker internally so it should always be as descriptive as possible.

The Alias field is the actual word that will be used as the alias; it will be what follows the ".com/" part of the website address. You do not put in the full URL in this field, just the alias itself. So, if you wanted an alias for a Google Ad which would direct them to the white paper signup form you might provide an alias such as "ga_whpaper9-04." It's important not to put any spaces or special characters in an alias since it will become a part of a URL to your site.

The Alias Destination Link is the full URL (including the "http://www.your_company.com" part of the address) of the page that the alias will bring them to. In other words, if you want this alias to bring the visitor to the whitepaper request form the easiest way to enter the Alias Destination Link would be to go to that page on your site, copy the full URL out of the browser's address bar, and copy it into the Alias Destination Link field.

The Notify Email field is optional. It's used if you want to receive email alerts each time the tracker is initiated. You might want to enter your email address in this field if you are not expecting hundreds or thousands of hits.

When you purchase a Google Ad or some other online ad campaign, you provide them with a website address for the ad that contains the alias you set up (/ga_whpaper9-04). Whenever someone clicks on the ad, the tracking system begins to record the session.

The first report that you would see when reviewing your results is a list of the trackers themselves. For each tracker, the number of sessions and total page views per session are displayed. You can click on the # Sessions or the # Page Hits links to bring up a list of specific sessions and pages.



You can then click on a particular session and view the actual pages viewed by an individual...



Finally, you can view overall statistics of the entire tracking group. This report lists the top ten most active sessions and the top ten most viewed pages by that tracking group. As with the previous reports, clicking on a particular session's link will bring up that individual's sessions.

I'll conclude this month's newsletter with an appeal. By now, I'm sure if you've ever clicked on one of our newsletters, you may be feeling the heebie-jeebies, knowing that we've been tracking your every step. Well yes, it's true, if you call me up and ask me, I can probably look up your email address and tell you all the pages you've looked at ever since you triggered our tracking system by clicking on our email newsletter. Please know that we only use this information the way all of our clients should--to help us understand what you want/need/or are interested in--so we can make our services better. Also, if you can bear it, please don't stop reading our newsletters! ;-)