I am fed up with how limited I am with some of the tools I am using to improve my business. As an example for web statistics I am using AWStats. AWStats is great. it gives me a lot of useful information, but that is actually not enough. It tracks all the keywords people use to find my websites, but it does not associate the keyword with the actual landing page. This is a manual process for me where I have to grab the keyword, find out which search engine is ranking me for the keyword and what the URL/Page is it is sending the visitor to. Why is that information important? Well, it allows you to better target the arriving visitor and to provide for a better experience. Experience? Yes, a) you can optimize the page the visitor will arrive on to provide even more related information (=better experience) and b) it allows you to offer extremely targeted advertising of products and services (=better experience).

So, the last few days I have been pulling my hair out brushing up on my PHP/MySQL skills and were able to create a small snippet of code that does exactly what I described above. The PHP code is now embedded into one of my websites for testing and it writes the data I am collecting into a MySQL database. From there I am pulling the data, clean it up, and then use it to my advantage. The PHP code tracks where the visitor comes from, which keyword/phrase she was using, and what page the user landed on. Here is a (cleaned up) example of the final result (I pulled out the source from this image as it is secondary for now). The image shows the search term the visitor was using and the URL/page of mine where the visitor arrived on.

I can now go and review those pages and optimize them. I can update outdated information and target the update towards the search the page is ranking for. I can add extremely targeted advertising as well as I can add highly visible links to other pages with related information and therefore keep the visitor longer on my website. The good thing with the script I wrote - it also tracks the IP address and time stamp of the visitor and so I can track where she went next and when they finally leave my website. I can also track how long the visitor stays on my website up to a certain degree. There are a couple more benefits and things I can do now.

I still need to improve the script to get all the information I want into a useful format, but for now I am mainly concentrating on keywords and landing pages. Eventually I am considering to make the code public so that others can jump in and improve the code since I am not a good developer. My coding knowledge is very limited and this is already way beyond of what I usually do.

The script also works well in PPC landing pages. A) I can now verify which keyword the visitor arrived on and b) dynamically include content and keywords on the PPC landing page to provide a better experience for the visitor and that way increase my sales or referrals. That is still another big piece I have to work on. So much ideas, so much work, not enough time when you are still having a full-time job + family. So, patience is still a skill I have to have, but I am getting there …..

PS: If you have some PHP knowledge and would like to get involved and help me to optimize the code, I am interested to hear from you. You would get a good head start on the keyword tracking script and so we both can benefit from it. Please leave a comment.