by Krystal Folino and Bill Mee

Internet marketing & advertising brings in targeted leads and knowing the source of these leads is very valuable marketing information.

Should you be spending more money on Pay per Click advertising or search engine optimization? Should you be doing more banner advertising or email and affiliate marketing?

These are questions that I am sure you would like to have answers to. Fortunately, the Internet provides your business with the ability to identify and track the source of your leads and website visitors.

Most businesses use a combination of methods to drive traffic to their site.

• NewsletterEmail Promotion
• Search Engines
• Pay per Click Services
• Banner Advertising
• Affiliate Sites
• Ezines
• Offline Marketing

In all of these cases (excepting offline marketing where the visitor must physically type in your website's domain name) a prospect clicks on a text or graphic hyperlink that in turn brings them from another website to your website.

Many internet hosting services can provide limited analysis of site traffic in terms of page "hits", page views, time spent viewing pages, bandwidth used, IP addresses etc. Limited reports from pay per click services provide activity analysis on specific search terms and the total monthly cost of each of these terms. Hit counter scripts and outside services can provide basic page hit information as well as some other statistics.

None of these services; however, can tell you:

• how many unique visitors have come to your site (They can tell unique IP addresses but not individuals)
• what domain the visitor came from (the IP address but not the domain)
• why the visitor is coming to your site in the first place.

With a little extra foresight and effort you can dramatically improve this situation. The solutions are remarkably simple and easy to implement. They all involve taking a little extra time to add some extra information onto the domain name you want the visitor to click through to.

When you do a search on the Internet you have probably noticed a long string of strange characters (letters, numbers and punctuation) added on to the end of a domain name in your browser. Most of us generally do not pay any attention to this as for the most part this information appears unintelligible.

That stuff that looks like "gobbledygook", is actually useful information and can be turned into real marketing gold. Be patient and take a closer look.

Let's look at the following fictional example: http://www.mywebsite.com?source=overture

Here we have created an identifier named "source" that tells us that the visitor came from an Overture click thru.

It lets also lets you track the leads you are getting from other sources against those generated by Overture, thus allowing you to assess the value of the money you are spending with Overture versus that which you are spending on other forms of Internet advertising.

If instead of a pay per click service you were sending out your bi-weekly newsletter and you were running a special promotion for that month you would probably use a clickable link with a URL that looks like the following: http://www.mywebsite.com?source=newsletter012003&promocode=special01

When the visitor who had clicked on the above link arrives at your home page you can identify them as responding to your January newsletter and to a promotion known as "special01".

If you are sending out an email newsletter you can add additional information to the URL string that identifies the person who is receiving the newsletter. With that level of information you might use the opportunity to welcome them back to your site.

Similarly, if you have an affiliate program you could use this information to identify which affiliate should get credit for the click thru to your site and track which affiliates generate the most leads for you

Now that you have identified the source of a visitor who enters your site, how can you pass this information on to your payment gateway if they purchase your product or service at the end of their session? Clearly, there needs to be a way of persisting this informaition as a visitor browses through the pages of your site. The problem can easily be solved using a variety of techniques. The most common methods involve the use of "cookies" or session variables. "Cookies" are packets of data that are stored on the visitor's computer, whereas "session" variables are generally stored in the memory of the server. We will discuss these methods in further detail in a later article.

Everyone in business wants to know the effectiveness of their advertising and promotions. This is completely legitimate and is consistent with allowable internet protocols and courtesies. If you are not already taking advantage of this you'll want to consider it. The Internet provides us with a means of identifying and tracking online leads that was only wishful thinking, but a few years ago.

Once you have the ability to track and identify the source of your leads you can evaluate the effectiveness of your "magnets" and promotions. With this valuable information you can create better "magnets" that enhance your increase marketing ROI.

To learn more about how you can enable your website to automatically track the source and nature of leads visit us at http://www.magneticwebsites.com.