Tracking Traffic and Sales
 

I think this could be an interesting topic, since it's really important.

Our site currently lacks advanced traffic tracking. For instance, we get around 1K "direct" visitors daily to our site (according to Analytics) but it's impossible for 1K people to type that into their browser directly every day, trust me, I know our site.

Is there any way to track this BETTER?

Also, just like many others, we use email marketing to convert free accounts into paid account (upgrades), how can we track those? All we track now are sales and sales from an affiliate.. but not exactly where they come from. Do they buy immediately? Do they upgrade from their free account? Did they use an email to upgrade, our upgrade page?

I'm pretty sure Google Analytics Goals can do a few of these things, but we don't have the experience to set that up, so if anyone's looking for a job to set that up - get in touch with me please!

If you can recommend any other tracking solutions, that'd be great aswell.

Thanks guys

I don't use GA much nowbut is it definitely not counting pages from within the site as direct referrer? I know awstats has that issue depending on how you set it up.

Sure it's possible for 1,000 people to directly type in the site. That's one of the dirty little secrets of the business. If your promo materials have your url or even a logo on them a certain percentage of viewers are going to type it in directly and the affiliate won't get anything for it. It will be tough to track these people unless you are serving all the ads and promo material. Then you could in theory track the IP address served (or use a cookie based solution) and then later see the original source if they directly type in the url. Not many companies really bother to take things this far.

For your email marketing you could place tracking links (or images) on the mailers and gather information in that way and compare it or integrate it with your other statistics. I'm not sure about GA being able to do much with that. I don't know. Only that it's possible to track it in general.

any action can be tagged and tracked in GA. i do it all the time for trailer videos and fhgs.

http://code.google.com/apis/analytic...ckerGuide.html

those type-ins could be browsers that block referring url or bots. a large % of daily traffic on the web is non-human.