Getting Your Tracking Right

I recently posed a question in a forum asking what was the most important or useful SEO tip you've received. Of course, I got a lot of feedback - everything from do thorough keyword research to secure strong links. But the answer I thought was best was from an SEO who said, "Get your tracking right. " He glibly added that this was an area where "most SEOs were useless."

That's a pretty strong statement. But there is a hint of truth in it. Website tracking is both simple and complex. Simple in that it involves common sense. Complex in that it is not always easy to figure out how best to apply that common sense to real analytics situations.

Doing proper tracking isn't always what it seems. For instance, today I had to figure out how to determine the number of reservations we receive from a third-party website. Should be pretty simple, right? The only problem is: I cannot install tracking scripts on the third-party site, and the reservations booked through the site aren't populated in our in-house reservation database. Not to mention, the third -party site is in large part generated dynamically, thus compounding the problem.

After thinking long and hard on this, it came down to a rather simple, commonsense, solution: Call the Director of Operations and get a report of the number of reservations generated from the site in question!

This is the simplest, quickest and most effective way of tracking that particular variable. And it had nothing to do with scripts and goals and funnels and advanced segments.

In other cases the simplest way to track web activity is to create duplicate routes to a conversion goal. Of course, you have to be careful with this option so as to avoid any duplicate content issues that may arise, but this ca be mitigated with proper meta tagging.

At other times it is most effective to create a rewritten URL to track visitor activity. At other times it may be best to manually tag the landing page URL. Still other times it may be easiest to create a contact form with special notes in it. Then again, another situation may call for customizing a script to track an artificial pageview. There are any number of tracking situations and possibilities.

But the overarching question to ask in web tracking is: 1. What exactly do I need to track? And 2. What is the simplest, most direct way to track it?