Lesson #22 Tracking Your Adult Traffic
Written By Cyndalie

Knowing what your traffic is worth can be the difference between success and failure for any website. Properties such as the origin of your traffic, demographic information, identifying the most commonly taken paths through your site, how long they stay and how often they come back are essential for decision making when choosing sponsors, modifying design, writing copy, and selecting keywords for every webmaster.

Finding the tools to get this information is very affordable, if not free. When considering web hosts, find out what kind of statistical traffic and bandwidth information they provide on demand, such as through an administrative account interface. Some web hosts will include geo-tracking and stats information for virtual or co-location accounts by providing access to raw logs that can be analyzed by desktop software. However some web hosts only provide usage logs that do not include the essentials for marketers such as referring URL's (accounted for daily, weekly, and monthly), search engines, and keyword search information used to find your site. The best solution is to go straight to the source and find out if what your web host has available.

If you cannot get stats information directly from your server, or do not wish to purchase software to get this information directly from your server log files, an easy solution is to find a free web based hit counter such as FoxCounter, Extreme Tracking, or other adult-friendly counters. This information can usually only track the stats of one page at a time so its only benefit is to get a general idea of what passes through your home page. But, if you use doorway pages that feed directly into pages of your site, forgoing the index page, you will lose this incoming "walk-in" tracking information from every page except your home page. Web based counters cannot transcend multi-level stats information unless the counter is on every page, and typically you can only use one counter per page at a time. This leaves you with the problem of using a different tracking account for every page unless the tracking service has some advanced features, usually a paid service (like HitBox) due to the number of impressions it will be counting on average.

New web based tracking utilities such as Google Analytics offers a free service by which information is tracked by adding a bit of code to each page you want included in the report. The advantage is a simple web interface to check your stats at any time and conversion tracking, however the disadvantage is that every page of your site must have the code on it to get accurate stats. A tip to make this easier is to call the code in an include or remote file if your site is setup to utilize them.

Where does it come from? Where does it go? Wouldn't you like to know more information about how much traffic link partners really send in comparison with how much you send them? Without some kind of CGI tracking script or programming solution to provide and track using link codes, most webmasters really don't know if a trade is equitable. A web stats program that tells you referring URL's and exit URL's can give you this information, and please be smart; open links that leave your site in a new window ( target="_blank ) and have limitations on the number of pop-ups that occur on sites you link to. You don't want to lose or annoy your visitors.

In the same respect, if you purchase advertising (banner, pay per click search engines) you want to be sure what they say they send you, is in actuality to what you receive. If you are actively marketing in the search engines, what keyword phrases are driving you the most traffic? I think the answer may be surprising and you may just find that you are ranking for many keywords you didn't even realize. It is interesting and can help give you an idea about the way the "general public" actually searches in the engines. Good information to know when choosing sponsors and keywords in your marketing campaigns.

Overall the big picture is important for a webmaster of any kind of site. If your TGP marketing efforts are costing you more in bandwidth then they are making you in sales, stop for a month and take that money you would have spent in bandwidth to see if a pay per click marketing campaign will work better. Knowing how much traffic you get, what it does and where it goes, is the basis for measuring any internet marketing effort. Since time is money, why not spend your time and effort knowing the trends of your own site traffic, your visitors wants and needs, and make those efforts result in more visitors coming back? You've worked so hard to earn their click, don't let the value of your time be diluted by uneducated decisions. What works for you will be totally unique to what works for your fellow webmasters.

Have questions or trouble finding tools? Talk about this article at CozyCampus. Until next time – Happy Promoting!