American Marketing Association Professional Certified Marketer (PCM) Content Marketing Practice Exam

Analytics can track information about all except which of the following?

1. Websites visitors used to reach yours

2. Websites visitors went to after leaving yours

3. Other types of websites your visitors spend time on

4. Pages visitors start at when arriving on your website

The correct answer is: Websites visitors went to after leaving yours

The ability of analytics tools to track visitor behavior encompasses multiple aspects of user interaction with a website. While analytics can effectively gather data regarding the pathways visitors take to arrive at a website, the specific routes they take after leaving it are typically not within the scope of what analytics can measure. Tracking the websites visitors used to reach yours provides insights into referral sources and successful channels driving traffic to your site. Similarly, identifying the initial pages visitors access upon arriving helps understand entry points and initial engagement. Furthermore, analytics can highlight other types of websites where your visitors spend time, often using cookies and user behavior tracking to reveal trends in their interests and habits. However, once a user leaves a specific website, the analytics tools lose the ability to monitor their subsequent actions on external sites. This limitation happens mainly because analytics relies on tracking scripts embedded on your own site, which cannot extend their reach to observe activities on other domains. Thus, while insights can be inferred or aggregated using larger data sets or third-party tools, individual post-visit website behavior is not directly tracked by your own analytics setup. This is why understanding user exit paths and subsequent online interactions is generally outside the limitations of standard analytics capabilities.