Advertising Effectiveness - How to measure

We have been advertising our new shop quite aggressively. I religiously watch our traffic but I am not 100% sure how to interpret it. For instance, we have tiktok crawlers that do not show as spiders (we have spiders excluded from the IP listings...do the totals show up in this graph). The same thing happens for one of my host's site monitoring systems. They seem to connect every 5 min or so. If this chart has those 288 instances listed, then my traffic could be all spiders/crawlers. Any thoughts as how to monitor the advertising effectiveness as it relates to website traffic?

So, the spiders.txt file may need some updating to capture those additional not yet identified spiders. That is if they are to be "ignored". Associating the site to one or more other search engine like utilities could help with evaluating traffic info.

There's a lot of info out there about such data. I mean ultimately the best outcome is that one or more purchases are made... So seems like would want to follow the flow in that direction...

I keep "hearing" Google Analytics. The last plugin made for ZC is listed at version 1.5.4. Would this help my problem? Is this plugin compatible with 1.5.7c?

Definitely get Google Analytics setup with Conversion Tracking. That will tell you where every order comes from, and which channels are just producing expensive traffic but not selling. Without GA, you are flying blind.

ChuckPhillips:

Definitely get Google Analytics setup with Conversion Tracking. That will tell you where every order comes from, and which channels are just producing expensive traffic but not selling. Without GA, you are flying blind.

It has taken me some time and pain to get to this point. Today I setup GA and Google Ads. In fact, I think I just committed all of our profit for the month on this test. This is a side thing for us so I consider that a good bet. We will see how this goes.

Thanks!

The team and I are just creating a plugin that will show analytical data, if it’s still relevant, I can throw it off when it’s ready