Email Newsletter Tracking | Website Alias Tracking

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.   next >