What Your Click Tracking Script Should Tell You

Click tracking scripts are tools used by online marketers for one main purpose, to collect and help analyse data about the visitors to a website. They are usually small cgi programs that are designed to very quickly capture information and store it, allowing you to analyse it whenever you need to check performance. Here is a little summary of how a click tracking script typically works. Online marketers purchase a product such as link cloaking software and install this on their website. They then configure the link cloaking software to capture data on specific hyperlinks within the website. These might be links to an affiliate product, or maybe a product of their own. Whenever a visitor clicks one of those links, the click tracking scripts jumps into action. Usually the visitor is first transported to a hidden temporary web-page, designed to very quick and un-noticeable to the user, not to cause any delays in the users surfing experience. The click tracking scripts then proceeds to record every single piece of obtainable information, and store this information somewhere, in a database probably. Very often the amount of information that is recorded is far too much for most of us to make proper use of it all, but the following types of information should always be looked for. These are the types of items that your click tracking script should allow you to run reports on and analyse whenever necessary. The date and time. You might wonder how you can make use of information about date and time of visitors clicking your links, well here is one example. You may run adverts in the future to promote your products. If you analyse the dates and times of your visitors, you might be able to see a trend. Perhaps you get less visitors on weekends, or perhaps you notice that you get the most visitors at certain hours of the day. You can then make use of this information in future, maybe by configuring your advert to begin at the most appropriate time. The geographic location: Your click tracking script should always include this information for you. You may be trying to target one country in particular, perhaps the United States because it has the largest audience. However when you analyse the results, you may find unexpected visitors from other countries, in reasonably large quantities. This sort of information can help you because now you can try to concentrate a bit more on that country, and increase your chances and your overall revenue. The number of clicks received: Obviously your click tracking script would be fairly useless if it did not provide full data on the number of times your ad has been clicked. This is the type of information that marketers need to spend the most time analysing. If a particular advert not performing well, this information should be obvious when you run your analysis, and easy to spot. You can then proceed to take some corrective action to help improve performance, such as by moving adverts around on the page, or even by re-wording them. Ryan King is a click tracking script expert and has created several tools for internet marketers and web designers. He has written several articles about different software including click tracking script.