There is a lot of buzz and sizzle around the word "tracking" these days. It's all about interpreting numbers and sounds dull and dry. Is there real return on devoting time, energy and brain cells to this mysterious task? Yes! But it doesn't need to be often, complicated or lengthy. And these tips will explain where to look for the real value and how these findings will point to problem areas on your site.

Keep Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics your close friends.

Tracking will tell you things such as how fast visitors are leaving a page; how long visitors stay on a page; how often visitors are viewing your videos, sending your ecards, asking for your kit, etc. You will see that you can slice/dice a tracking report 50 different ways, so don't let this intimidate you. You only need to work with what is important to you.

Tracking will probably be based on your file names and page titles -- you may need to make some changes here so you can read your tracking reports better.

The report will show your most-visited (top) pages. The top 5-6 ranking pages of your site don't matter if they are not the pages used to gauge success (and, therefore, not "statistically significant"). I cannot impress this enough -- do not be seduced by your top ranking pages. I have met many a Marketing person who stopped here for their clients and, without understanding this simple point, these "experts" had their clients chasing the wrong site changes. More often, the question is "which pages are NOT ranking high?" and figuring out why. When you analyze pages, also be sure to analyze related pages together.

When reviewing, keep related pages together. For example, a request page should be viewed with with its results/confirmation page. This can show things like 357 people go to a page but there are 672 result pages. Only by comparing related pages can you discover, like here, that people like being here and more than 80% placed TWO requests. It doesn't really matter if the 357 number is high or low in your planning because the 672 number is GREAT!

Follow tracking closely for, say, the first 6 months of a launch/relaunch then, when you are happy with report numbers you can back off to a routine schedule; only picking up frequency again as important seasons rotate or major changes drive new behaviors.

Tracking usually reflects general changes across all Internet users -- i.e. fewer users want request FORMS (delayed gratification), they want to download the actual item now. If tracking substantiates this for your site, you have a potential change to consider.

If you are working on a search engine optimization effort, your tracking report will show % traffic coming from search engines, and help you see when actual improvements start to happen.