Bed and breakfast marketing research provided by tracking tools will help you develop a plan to most effectively market your B&B Web site. Below are the recommended pieces of information you should track on a Monthly Basis. This information should be recorded and kept separately from your tracker. By doing it this way, you will be able to see trends from month to month and year to year that will help you make good marketing decisions about your business.

Visitor Counts, also known as Unique Visitors, tell you how many potential guests visited your Web site for a specified date range. Some Web site trackers included in these counts are the visits occurring from Web crawlers and spiders that read your site and index them in the various search engines, some do not. You need to know if your unique visitors include the spider traffic so you know if you are looking at combined numbers (spiders and human) or just human. Remember, you can't sell a product to a spider or crawler.

Included in your Visitor Count (Unique Visitors) you will see all visitors from all different types of referrers. It's also good idea to know how many came from any PPC (Pay Per Click) Programs. This will help you see how much search engine traffic you are paying for and how much search engine traffic is free.

It is important to track the various companies sending traffic (unique visitors) to your Web site. We recommend you track at least the top 10 referrers each month, but you may track as many referrers as you deem appropriate. This information should be recorded separately from your tracking system.

In most cases every Paid Listing site will have more traffic to your page on their site than will have "click-throughs" to your site.

It is best to use your Web site Referral tracking as a benchmark and go to the source for their numbers when the Cost Per Click appears too high in comparison to your other Paid Listings.

To be able to track the number of "click-throughs" provided from any Paid Listing site, you first must know who your Paid Listing Companies are so you may track them monthly.

Click to learn how to determine ROI on your Paid Listings

Organic Placement is the ranking your Web Site achieves in on the Search Engines at no cost. This is not placement determined by $$$, like PPC (Pay Per Click) but simply where the search engines place you at no cost.

To determine your Organic / Natural placement in search engines such as GOOGLE, YAHOO, MSN and AOL SEARCH you must first determine what Search Terms (Phrases) that are actually being typed by search engine users are most relevant to your business.

If you have made your Web site Search Engine Friendly, keep an eye on your list of Search Terms.

Each month you should look up your set list of search terms in each of the search engines and see where you are placing in the Organic / Natural listings. This information should be recorded separately from your tracking system.

Entrance Pages are simply pages from your Web site. If you have marketed each page of your Web site differently, each page has a chance to stand alone as a listing in the Search Engines.

By examining your Entrance Pages monthly, you can prove that the work done to market all of your pages is effective. Guests don't always see your home page first - especially if you designed and marketed all of the pages of your site to be different.

In other words, the more pages you have indexed on the Internet with different Search Terms (phrases), the more chance you have to be seen. By watching your entry pages you will know which pages are working the hardest for you.