What Tracking Information

[stevelibby]

I wonder if i could have your opinion on tracking,
I have been busy lately working out a system that tracks clicks and pages.
My web site is a directory, therefore having many pages of categories and a few web sites that take the existing information on with, and of course external links, i have found it hard to track what works best and how i can try to increase click throughs to other web sites.
i have designed my pages to collect the following data for every external click as this is where money is earned and not how many visitors you can get through your door:
IP Address, Domain to which the click was generated, and also the page, the category to which the dealer is associated with.
I can now track and count what is happening,i.e i can count the most external clicks for each category, which domain and page works best and what external link is best perfoming, i can also pair the hits to clicktrough ratio up.
My point is can you tell me what else i could do with tracking?

[ronburk]

i have found it hard to track what works best and how i can try to increase click throughs to other web sites.

OK, so your goal is increased clicks.

My point is can you tell me what else i could do with tracking?

Sure. You could begin assigning (and varying) attributes to each directory entry, and then look for correlations between those attributes and click-through rate.

Possible attributes (from an infinite pool):

• Position on page
  
• Foreground/background color
  
• Font
  
• Type of "call to action" in text.
  
• Search term visitor arrived via (if any)
  
• Font size
  
• Use of temporal urgency in text (e.g. "White paper available now")
  
• Use of offers (e.g. a "free trial").
  
• Existence (or not) of AdWords on the page
  
• Category or cross-category of page (e.g., quite apart from your existing categorization, you might go back through and identify an internal attribute with values like "techie, consumer, automotive, housing, etc."
  
• etc.
  
• time of day click occurred
  
• day of week click occurred
  
• time of year click occurred
  

Ideally, you want to do data mining here, not just looking at one variable at a time. It's possible to build or buy software that takes a big multi-variable stream like this and spits out things like: "people most likely to click either (Came from Yahoo AND were given a large font AND got AdWords on the page) OR (came from Google AND was a "techie" entry AND used bold colors AND it was the weekend).

Data mining, not page rank, is what keeps Google's algorithm afloat, and it can help you optimize your results as well.

[stevelibby]

Good, so im going in the right direction by what i have already done, Thank You for that, time on site would be good but i would asume thats cookies that i would have to write, am i also right in saying that cookies would do sessions? or can this be done by db?