Website Marketing Analysis Part 1: Building Your Toolbox

One clear sign that you are not executing your online marketing plans effectively is if you forget to tidy up those plans with the important (should be first) step of marketing analysis. Website marketing analyses don’t need to be expensive, although letting the pros handle the, otherwise raw data, will save you time and error, but business owners who shy away from the reality of analysis altogether will senselessly fail to evaluate what the highest return on marketing investment is—and what it could be.

Business analysis doesn’t always need to be complicated. Despite pitfalls that may be placed in the way success along the way, if all innovators and thinkers were to neglect performance testing, we would have never had the great inventions come along like light bulbs and motor vehicles. While Edison and Ford worked tirelessly at never giving up, they never reached their goals without also figuring out exactly what was and wasn’t working—and changing. If you want to improve the way your website is performing, capturing leads, making money, and getting the right idea across to you audience, you must face the facts (and figures). The analysis behind web marketing can seem especially confusing within business, but the tips and tools within this series will help you to do so more successfully, without as much time, and definitely without so much of that complicated thing called guesswork.

Turning Guesswork into Yes-work. What’s the first step to managing and analyzing your website marketing? You have got to say YES, first, to enabling the process. If you don’t have any web traffic analytics tool installed onto your website, you are essentially saying no—let’s not care about how all this work pans out in the long run. A great list of tools to get you going and help you say YES, loud and clear:

Free Website Marketing Analysis Tools:

• Google Analytics (highly recommended) This tool is not only free, but it’s very useful if you are not only running a website, but also have implemented a Google Adwords campaign. Track keywords. Do split testing. Track conversions.
• Yahoo Analytics Also free, once you get the hang of Google Analytics software, you may find Yahoo Analytics to be just as powerful—if not more in-depth.
• Statcounter Another great free tool, Statcounter allows you to analyze a lot about where your traffic is coming from and very easily. Premium features are paid. We highly recommend and use this to track our own traffic.

Paid Website Marketing Analysis Tools:

• Crazy Egg This neat tool ranges from $9-$99 a month, but is worth it, as it allows you to track your visitors activity through impressive heat maps.
• Majestic SEO is one of the standard tools for SEO, definitely great for market analysis research.
• SEMRUSH probably the new standard in market analysis. Very good 3rd party information.

By setting up any one (or a combination) of the above tools, you will be putting yourself at the capacity to reach far beyond the competition—but more importantly—make a further reach towards the more important party: your visitors, the goal of any marketing analysis effort.

Coming up! Part 2: Experimentation and Testing Tools!