Tracking is absolutely essential to online business. Without it, how will you know where your website visitors are coming from? Are they arriving because of your amazingly provocative email campaign, your fantastically interesting article submitted to article directories or through one of your favourite traffic exchanges or from a website with which you have exchanged links? If so, which email, which article, which directory, which traffic exchange, which website?

So, we know that we need a tracking tool but which one do we choose and what are the criteria that are important to you personally when making that choice?

Here are some points to consider:

Cost - This needs to fit within your own business budget. The most fantastic tool, which meets all your needs, may cost $100 a month but if you only have $20 set aside for tracking and you can sign up for something which meets 90% of your criteria, wouldn't that be a better bet?

Campaign Quantity - There is usually a limit to the number of tracking campaigns that you can set up. Do you know how many you need? Don't forget to leave room for expansion.

Campaign Usability - Be sure to use a tracker which gives you the facility to create just one campaign per advertisement which you can use anywhere by putting a different parameter at the end. For example if you want to advertise a splash page in the traffic exchanges, you don't want to have to create a different campaign for each exchange. You need to end up with something like www.myurl.com/ILH (signifying I Love Hits) and www.myurl.com/TS25 (for TS25) and so on.

Your Domain - Some trackers provide a script which means that you can use your own domain name as part of your tracking url. Obviously, this increases the exposure of your domain and makes your tracking urls look more professional than those which just use the tracker company's url.

Rotators - Having a rotator available for split-testing web pages is a great bonus. If you're not sure which of your splash pages is the more attractive or successful for use in the traffic exchanges, you can just upload your rotator url to the exchanges, put your pages for testing into the rotator and check the results. You can change them round whenever you want and experiment with different graphics or text.

Statistics - Not only do you need to know the number of hits to your site or signup page, but you need to know where the hits are coming from, the referring url and preferably the ISP as well. You may also want the facility to trace how many sales conversions you received from each site where you uploaded your advertisement. If you post your advert to six classified ad sites and receive conversions consistently from only three of them, you may not want to bother using the other three.

Other Stats - As well as actual numbers, you may want to know what time of day is most popular for, say, clicking links in emails so that you can despatch your email campaign accordingly. You may want to know the browser type your visitors are using so that you can make sure your pages look great in that browser or you may want to know how many of your hits are unique and how many are from repeat visitors.