Image by George Morris via Flickr

You have built the perfect website and it clearly offers all the services you provide. It is user friendly, has a great look and feel to it, beautiful colors, great pictures, everything anybody could want from it. All that is left to do now is have it advertised. There are an estimated 312 million websites on the web today and this number is forever growing. So how can you make sure yours is different? How do you make sure yours is the one people want to visit?

Online Advertising
There are many ways to go about online advertising. There are industry calculations such as click through rate, cost per action and CPM online advertising (cost per thousand impressions). Then there is classified advertising (in conventional papers etc.…), web advertising (such as ad filters, click fraud, affiliate marketing, pay per play and web banners), email advertising (the most common one is spamming), search engines (optimization and marketing) and mobile advertising (such as WAP).

Basically, online marketing uses the web to deliver marketing messages that grab the attention of potential customers. They usually state something that is not necessarily true, but is guaranteed to get people at the very least interested.

How Do You Know Your Online Advertisements Are Working?
To make sure that your advertisements are working, it is important to have some systems in place that measure how many individual visitors and returning visitors come to your website. You will be familiar with the visitor counters you sometimes see on web pages, but they are quite unreliable as they show you all traffic, including your own, and also that of people who may have only stayed on your website for a few seconds or even less.

What you need is a system that will show you exactly who came to your website, what they looked at, how long they stayed, that sort of thing. The easiest way to achieve this is by using web analytics tools. Web analytics measure, collect, analyze and report on internet data, helping you improve the service your website provides. If you use it specifically for a website you own, it is called on-site web analytics and it looks at what each visitor has done once they came to your website. If you want to see what has been happening on other people's websites (although you will not be able to receive as much information) you can use off-site web analytics.

There is some free web analytic software available on the market, including some from Google, as well as organizations that offer services to monitor web analytics to your site and comparable sites. Some free web analytic software is available through Piwik, AwStats and Deep Software, for example.

So, once you have created your website, it is important to make sure it is advertised in the right way to maximize traffic to your website and to then be able to analyze what people did once they arrived there, enabling you to improve your site even further, in turn increasing the flow of traffic!

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