You'll never know how effective an advertising program is unless you ask how they heard about the park. Many resorts began their website service with a single page featuring contact information, a few details and a couple of pictures, and often designed by a relative or friend. Everybody has to start somewhere, but if they haven't moved up to a site with numerous pages providing more information and pictures of their park, they are missing a grand marketing opportunity.

After building a good website and releasing it, how do you know your audience is viewing your site, and if so, what pages are they interested in? The answer is web reporting.

There are a number of services that can provide reporting including the web host company you are using. You'll also find several do-it-yourself services available. For some the later is a bit daunting because it requires creating html code and copying it into your web pages. This code is not visible online, but it allows the reporting to gather the statistics you're after.

The report will show how many guests are visiting your site. You may find that the website has high numbers on certain days of the weeks and if so, you might decide to push your specials or discounts on those days to fill up your next weekend. How many pages they visit will reflect if your presentation is interesting and filling their need for knowledge about your park. It should report how long they visited your site: 30 seconds to ten minutes.

Obviously, if their visit is very short, they did not find your site fascinating or informative. This will help as you create new marketing plans for your website. Pay attention to the list of pages visited so you'll know what areas you might want to work on.

How did your guests find your website? This report will indicate if they found the site by search engines, but if the number is low, you might want help on improving your listing on the various search engines. This report reflects your 'keywords' used in describing your park via your pages. The referring site is another category reporting they found your website via another site, i.e. a Woodalls, Trailer Life, RV Park Reviews, Passport, etc.

A direct traffic report reflects that they found your site via your efforts: advertising, newsletters, marketing campaign, rack cards, brochures, business cards, flyers, etc. If this number is low, you'll probably change your marketing campaign to improve your scores and make your website name more visible in your advertising.

All reports display a visual view of your numbers in a bar graph by day, week, or month, or pie chart. You can visit the report often and some services will email the report to you.

Copyright 2009 by GTI