When driving at night people flick on their headlights (unless of course you're Paris Hilton) so that they can see where they are going.

Veteran online marketers use sophisticated tracking software and scripts to analyze and evaluate the results of their marketing campaigns and promotions.

The average everyday internet marketer effects their marketing strategy on hearsay, hope, trial and error! You don't have to be a genius to figure out what's wrong with that picture.

However, in defense of the average struggling marketer, until fairly recently, having access to top-of-the-line tracking software meant shelling out a hefty monthly or yearly fee. In other words it was only well established marketers with bottomless deep pockets who could afford to use such software.

But that has all changed! Now anybody and everybody who so wishes has access to such software; for free no less!

WHAT TRACKING SOFTWARE CAN DO FOR YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGN

VISITOR ORIGIN

Wouldn't it be great if you could tell how your visitors got to your website; in other words whether they got there via a search engine, another website referral or from a forum. How about if you knew their country of origin or even the city from which they hailed? You could then concentrate your promotional efforts in those areas that readily maximize your profit.

In the same vein, once you know which search engines are sending you traffic and which ones aren't, then you can better focus your SEO efforts on the ones that are generating revenue rather than waste time blindly attempting to optimize for all at the same time.

KEYWORD OPTIMIZATION

Ever heard of the term "Long-tail Keyword"?

Long-tail keywords are the various word combinations that people use naturally and unconsciously everyday to query search engines. These are word combinations that are rarely listed by keyword research software, and if such word combinations are ever listed they tend to be way down at the bottom of the list and jumbled up into unnatural incomprehensible arrangements that only a machine would ever consider.

Those long-tail keywords tend to have fantastic conversion rates however, but you'd never know it unless you had excellent tracking software to apprise you of the fact.

These days the search engine algorithms are really smart critters! They have matured to the point that they can identify and combine separate far-apart-spaced words on any webpage to comprise long-tail keywords that people actually type in as search engine queries. The search engine algorithms then qualify that webpage as optimized for that combination of words (long-tail keyword).

The real bonus here is that most times you'd never even think up such keywords let alone optimize for them, even when using keyword research software!

VISITOR DURATION ON YOUR SITE

The best tracking software avails you of stats illustrating how long people spend on your website (individual time frame stats for each page no less) so that you can easily know whether changes you've made to your site have improved conversion performance or conversely decreased it. In this manner you can readily determine which version of your sales copy or web page content has a higher conversion ratio.

To summarize, without statistics compiled from sophisticated tracking software, much of your promotional efforts would hinge upon trial and error which basically is tantamount to aiming blind.