Tracking visitor habits and knowing much more about what is attracting and retaining visitors has led to many new types of systems for recording more personal information. It’s only for marketing use as companies need to know their visitors - are they potential customers or visiting by mistake? It began with tracking via cookies many years ago which record visitor settings and personal preferences.

Back in July, the U.S. government looked at changing the law on cookies by allowing them to be placed on user machines going against the law forbidding that action back in 2000. The law which is still being discussed is open to general discussion at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open.

Visitor trackers are powerful social media tools as they gather statistics that is presented in an analytical report. Tracking tools have become a core marketing tool for all businesses today.

One example of a tool that is very popular right now is Google Analytics which shows full analytical reports on visitors - pages read and stats on traffic, etc.

Google Analytics provides full reporting on your visitor stats

These tools are needed to be able to:

1. Observe ways to improve traffic

2. Gain real-time knowledge of customer behavior

3. View reports on visitor browsing dates and times

4. Optimize content to be search engine friendly

By focusing on your chosen niche, businesses can establish expert status within their niche by finding relevant customers. The big ‘but’ here is that there is a real-time element missing from most web marketing campaigns.

What are your visitors actually doing?  That is where an effective visitor tracking system makes the difference.

It is important to understand why visitors want to browse your site and what retains them. If some leave, why did they leave?  The success of your business is dependent on your knowledge of your surfing customers looking for products and services like yours.

The advantage is that bad site trends such as - why was that skipped, the form was not filled in, or gone in 60 seconds and never to return - can be prevented every day. One current popular tool for allowing you to accomplish this task is Clicktale which does exactly that. You can record visitor sessions for playback in your browser at any time.

So, to summarize:

1. Visitor tracking systems allow you to record browsing sessions and gain a real-time view of what is interesting or perplexing to visitors.

2. The importance of tracking lies within knowing what interests your visitors. What do they want? What do they really want from your site?

3. You may have asked yourself - Why did no conversions occur last month?  Traffic does not mean conversions.  Is the traffic relevant? Are your visitors finding your site as a result of a relevant search on Google?

4. Did you try to dupe your visitors into your web site using unrelated content? You will be sure to see a recording lasting a few seconds.

5. What is wrong with your site? You have done all the SEO optimization tasks - blogs, high traffic articles, great bios, slick copywriting on landing pages. So why are your conversions so low? Did a page fail to load?

By observing your target audience you become fully aware of your visitor browsing habits. This will allow you to gain an accurate insight on how to improve your site usability.

Tools that allow you to record visitor browsing sessions will prevent loss of customers by allowing access to a real-time view of your visitors so issues can be corrected before they damage your business conversions.

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