Advertising on other websites can be an excellent way to bring targetedtraffic to your website. However, much advertising is over-priced, and you should evaluate each opportunity to ensure you are getting value for money.

Make sure you know how many visitors the website receives to the section on which you wish to advertise. Ask how many visitors other advertisers in the same section receive each month. Attempt to calculate how much you will essentially be paying for each visitor, and compare this with your other advertising.

If you proceed with the advertising, ensure you track its success using your website statistics package. Ideally, use statistics features such as Google Analytics’ Goal Funneling, which can help you track the origin of actual sales back to websites on which you advertise.

And if in doubt, ask the advertiser for a free trial — most websites will have sufficient confidence in their website traffic to allow this.

If you operate more than one website, or if you utilise phone numbers in your advertising, consider the option of leasing multiple freecall (tollfree) numbers to enable better tracking through this medium.

Your phone company (or some clever PBX systems) can provide reports on call activity, which you can then apply proportionally against leads and sales made via those channels, and merge this data with similar data collected through your website or statistics package.

If you use Google Analytics to track visitor statistics on your website, you can instruct it to ignore traffic coming from your own computer (or network of computers.) This is important to ensure the accuracy of your statistical data; otherwise, your visitor numbers will be inflated by the times you or your staff access your own website.

To do this in Google Analytics, login to your account, then, under Analytics Settings, go to Filter Manager, and click Add Filter. Give it a name, such as “Exclude me”; from Filter Type, choose “Exclude all traffic from an IP address”; then enter your IP address in the next box. (If you don’t know your IP address, use this What Is My IP Address? tool.) Next, choose the profile(s) on the left hand side and click Add. Finally, click Finish to apply the filter.