By Alan Berg, author, speaker, consultant, Kendall Park, N.J.Too often I hear people talking about the number of clicks to their ad, how high they come up in search results, or how many friends they have on Facebook, but rarely do I hear people talking about how much money they’re making. Of course, there are good reasons for that. You don’t want to share your personal finances. You don’t want to brag. Or, maybe, it’s because you don’t really know. There’s a big difference between getting people to click through to your website and making money from those clicks. Is the answer a click away?Google Analytics can’t tell you if your ads are working. It can tell you if you’re getting clicks from your ads, search engines, and other websites, but it’s not connected to your balance sheet. Google Analytics doesn’t know when you make a sale, it knows if someone saw your site, but not who. It’s up to you to connect the dots from click to sale. This is not exclusive to the Internet. It’s never up to the customer to tell you if they saw your ad. It’s your responsibility to find out. If you’re waiting until clients come in to give them a form to fill out so you know if your ads are working, you’re getting incomplete or incorrect answers. Don’t take my word for it; test it. List all of the places they could possibly find a business like yours—including places your business is not listed (other sites, magazines, ads). What you’ll likely find is that they check off boxes for some of the places you don’t advertise. By the time customers come in, they don’t remember or care, since it doesn’t matter to them. They just want to talk about their wedding or event.Learn to connect the dotsWhat you want to do is connect the dots between the people viewing your ads and website and the sales you make. That’s a lot harder than it sounds since there are many steps along the way. For example—someone sees your ad on a website or a search engine result, so they click through to your site. Once there, you want them to contact you. They email you for information and pricing. Hopefully, you get them in for an appointment. Once s/he is in your office, you hope to make the sale. So, how are you going to connect the dots from that sale to your website and the original source? Can you track it? Sure. But when you track is just as important as how. If you’re waiting until you’re sitting across the desk from customers to ask how they heard about you, it’s too late. They have one mission and that’s to get a DJ for their wedding or event. They don’t care, nor should they, about your marketing.What should you track and when?• How people get to your site.• How long they stick around.• Your bounce rate from each source of traffic. A bounce is when someone leaves from the same page they entered your site. Don’t be fooled by the volume of traffic. Get to the root of the quality. A high bounce rate usually means lower quality traffic. It doesn’t mean you’re not making money from the traffic, but if they only view the one page on your site, how likely is it that you’re doing business with them?Ask better questionsHow can you make it easier to track? First, track as close to the contact as possible. If someone gets to your website and fills out your email form, make sure you add a question to the form: “How did you find our website today?” Notice I didn’t say, “How did you hear about us?” That’s not what you want to know, so ask a better question. What you want to know is how they found your site. It’s the same when someone calls you. Don’t ask “How did you hear about us?” or “Who referred you to us?” Ask, “Where did you get our phone number today?” Was it your business card, website, print ad, email marketing, direct mail piece, online ad, an online directory?Put your tracking on auto-pilotTo automate tracking, use separate URLs (website addresses) in your ads, different phone numbers (easy to do with toll-free numbers and Google Voice), and different email addresses. This way, you’ll know, without asking customers, how they got to you. Of course, many people have had more than one exposure to your business before they contact you, so it’s almost impossible to track it perfectly every time.To find out if your campaigns are making you any money, all you need to do is learn to track better to find that success. Of course, you can always just accept that you’re not really tracking, and you’re okay with it. Take heart in knowing that if you want to be able to track better, you can, but it’s always going to be up to you to do it.What should you ask and when?•    On your website email form, ask, “How did you get to our website today?” They’ll never be closer to this than at your site, so ask it there.•    When they call, ask, "Where did you get our phone     number today?” They just dialed it, so ask what they looked at to get your number.•    When they come in, it’s usually too late to ask any good tracking questions. They just want to talk about their wedding, not get grilled or tested on marketing.