Site owners: Where do members come from?

[nyllover]

It wasn't easy, honestly. Maybe because of my lack of experience... anyway this is what i do:

- After a successful join, member is sent to a special page, not linked anywhere else, that has an immediate automatic reload. The page just says "all went fine, finalizing the membership" but anyway he doesn't even see that as in the header i put <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.MYDOMAIN.com/">
- That page has, as every other page of my site, Google Analytics installed
- In google analytics i create a Goal, named "subscription", set it as "regular expression" and write the full name of the special page in there

That's it. After that in many Google Analytics reports i can use "goals" to see everything (almost) about each and every subscription to the site.

I posted the same on GFY and, basically, they answered something like "it's a waste of time to do that thing, it's just because you are a newbie"...very true...but well... i still think when you have a small budget, it helps to know where money comes from....

Another thing to keep in mind: we don't get thousands of members each month, so i don't know if this method would still work (Google Analytics is well known to don't give exact numbers but just a part of the real ones)