Traffic Analysis, the New Marketing Strategy

Throughout time, internet advertising has taken many forms both good and some even, not so great. Advertising in general I could say is part of our human nature; the same which has forced our species to make strategies for a victory over our competition. With that said, good advertising in the true sense of being “good” advertising, should really be beneficial to the audience rather than just the advertiser, furthermore it is that which will win any company, organization… brand following. Brand loyalty should be a top priority for any organization, thus once again, as it is natural, advertising should be beneficial to the audience.

Internet advertising has gone through many stages, yet unfortunately, not all stages are what I am referring to as good advertising; I never met any person that finds spam or constant popups beneficial. Fortunately, however, it seems the days of popup attacks are done as every free modern browser seems very good at blocking popups, yet spam seems like a never ending trend. Spam works for some, but completely turns off many candidate customers from following a company. It is because of all of this, that the most modern and successful trends for advertising involve non-intrusive methods, that don’t negatively get in the way of the possible future users/customers.

Now, finished with my long introduction for this article, I feel its time to talk about the latest trend of “good” advertising. This trend is of course, studying what people like and dislike about your site. This is completely unobtrusive, and allows the advertiser to adapt to his/her customers/users which is the way good business is supposed to be.

How does one study one’s clients when all is done usually programmatically by the website code? The answer to that is through traffic analysis. Google, Microsoft, and all the big companies in the search and web marketing business provide many tools free of cost, for anyone who wishes to track the traffic of their websites. The best of these tools tell you much information as to what words the client searched for which lead them to your site, their loyalty in terms of revisiting, and the bounce rate which could be a good indicator of when you need to add fresh content. Other things included which are a huge aid for marketing include tracking of the user’s geographic location, their monitor resolution and more. These tools will allow your customers to become a loyal following, rather than forcing them to visit your site as was the case in the days of spam. A lot of people have a sour taste from AOL’s old methods of marketing for example, which I doubt they still do.

All, in all, this are all great tools to help expand any websites exposure. It is a good idea, however to use two of these tools. One client side, and one server side, to keep up the tracking even in the cases in which client scripting is turned off.