Little-Known Secret To Getting The Best Tracking Software For Free!

For the longest time one of my biggest frustrations as an online marketer is the fact that I couldn't afford the top-of-the-line tracking software that I'm sure most of the heavy-hitter marketing gurus use as a matter of course. I understood the benefits derived from using such software but what can I say, the mind was willing but the pocket was unable! Well until Google came to the rescue...

Google Analytics...Tracking Software For The Masses!

Most individuals who are serious about their profession employ some aid or other to enhance their capabilities of executing their job better and easier. For example:

Professional snipers (and well equipped soldiers for that matter) use night goggles or night scopes to sight their targets.

When driving at night people flick on their headlights (unless of course you're Paris Hilton) so that they can see where they are going.

Veteran online marketers use sophisticated tracking software and scripts to analyze and evaluate the results of their marketing campaigns and promotions.

The average everyday internet marketer effects their marketing strategy on hearsay, hope, trial and error! You don't have to be a genius to figure out what's wrong with that picture.
However, in defense of the average struggling marketer, until fairly recently, having access to top-of-the-line tracking software meant shelling out a hefty monthly or yearly fee. In other words it was only well established marketers with bottomless deep pockets who could afford to use such software.

But that has all changed! Now anybody and everybody who so wishes has access to such software; for free no less!

The THINGS THAT TRACKING SOFTWARE CAN DO FOR YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGN

VISITOR ORIGIN

Wouldn't it be great if you could tell how your visitors got to your website; in other words whether they got there via a search engine, another website referral or from a forum. How about if you knew their country of origin or even the city from which they hailed? You could then concentrate your promotional efforts in those areas that readily maximize your profit.

In the same vein, once you know which search engines are sending you traffic and which ones aren't, then you can better focus your SEO efforts on the ones that are generating revenue rather than waste time blindly attempting to optimize for all at the same time.

KEYWORD OPTIMIZATION

Ever heard of the term "Long-tail Keyword"?

Long-tail keywords are the various word combinations that people use naturally and unconsciously everyday to query search engines. These are word combinations that are rarely listed by keyword research software, and if such word combinations are ever listed they tend to be way down at the bottom of the list and jumbled up into unnatural incomprehensible arrangements that only a machine would ever consider.

Those long-tail keywords tend to have fantastic conversion rates however, but you'd never know it unless you had excellent tracking software to apprise you of the fact.

These days the search engine algorithms are really smart critters! They have matured to the point that they can identify and combine separate far-apart-spaced words on any webpage to comprise long-tail keywords that people actually type in as search engine queries. The search engine algorithms then qualify that webpage as optimized for that combination of words (long-tail keyword).

The real bonus here is that most times you'd never even think up such keywords let alone optimize for them, even when using keyword research software!

VISITOR DURATION ON YOUR SITE

The best tracking software avails you of stats illustrating how long people spend on your website (individual time frame stats for each page no less) so that you can easily know whether changes you've made to your site have improved conversion performance or conversely decreased it. In this manner you can readily determine which version of your sales copy or web page content has a higher conversion ratio.

To summarize, without statistics compiled from sophisticated tracking software, much of your promotional efforts would hinge upon trial and error which basically is tantamount to aiming blind.

How I Have Used Google Analytics To Improve My Marketing Strategy

Internet Marketers who started crafting their trade way back and have since been perfecting it, up until now, had a distinct advantage over the rest of us who were late to the party.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that they had access to funds that the rest of us could only dream of or hope to one day duplicate which fact meant that these guys could afford the best! "The Best" as you've probably discovered somewhere along the line, rarely if ever comes cheap!
But that has all changed!

The Best Things In Life Are Free

Many a crooner has...well...crooned that the best things in life are free and most times that is nothing more than wishful thinking! But for once that statement happens to be true!

For the longest time now tracking software and scripts with which to determine the effectiveness of your marketing promotions has been largely confined to deep-pocket internet marketers, because only they could afford the hefty price and benefits characteristic of such software.

But that was then and this is now. Now even a penniless newbie marketer can access such software and...drumroll please...it is free!

How come? Two words is how come...

Google Analytics

In the most modest of explanations (I'm not going to bother going into an indepth description here), Google analytics does what web stats do but a hell-u-va lot more!

Everything is amply and best explained on Google's own web page so I'm just going to give you a brief talk-about here illustrating how Google analytics has helped me thus far, so you can get a better understanding of how it can possibly help you. Google recently unveiled its new version of analytics which it is still classifying as the beta version. That said this is a brilliant invaluable too for any marketer, especially newbies.

How Google Analytics Can Help Your Marketing Promotions:

Traffic Sources

SEARCH ENGINES: Using google analytics (yeah I can't be bothered to capitalize the "G" in google anymore)I can easily tell where my traffic is from. With respect to search engine traffic for example I know that I am getting most of my traffic from Google and a lot less from Yahoo, as well as very-little-to-non-existent from MSN. This tells me a couple of important things which are: I basically shouldn't waste too much time concentrating on getting traffic from any other search engine other than google for the time being.

ARTICLE DIRECTORIES: A quick glance at my google analytic stats shows me that I am getting significantly more traffic from my articles than from MSN and Yahoo combined! I can also tell which article directories are responsible for sending me all that traffic.


OTHER SOURCES: I can also tell which websites are sending me traffic.

Fairly recently I started posting to forums and I'm getting a fair bit of traffic from several of them. Every now and then a good bit of traffic comes inexplicably from a very unusual source. What I'll do then is check out the website and find out how come I am getting that amount of traffic from that particular source.

In this manner it is possible to stumble upon a little-known secret new technique for attracting highly qualified traffic; a method which you might have never otherwise thought up!

Country of Origin

This parameter has been surprisingly useful for me; you can find it under the heading of Map Overlay (Geolocation visualization). So how precisely has it been of use to me? Geolocation visualization can tell you right down to the city where your traffic is coming from. I was particularly interested in the country of origin and not so much with the city. In conjuction with another important google analytic parameter(s) which will be discussed a bit further down (the parameters are "average time spent on site" and "bounce rate".

I found those two parameters of particular interest with respect to country of origin because I noticed the folks who spent the most time on my site originated from N. America, most specifically the United States.

The content of my home page practically screams how most newbie marketers are being duped by promises of overnight riches and very long tales of how they'll be making thousands of dollars in next to no time. As mentioned previously I know that the people who spend the most time on my website (average time is 8.67 minutes) come from the U.S. Now the other visitors who hail from all parts of the world such as: Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia etc tend to spend far less time.

Here's how I interpret such data: The folks from North America are more aware of scams and have probably been scammed or burned by useless internet marketing products. What that means is that in essence they have already experienced the frenzied period of o-mi-gosh-I-gonna-be-rolling-in-cash-soon!

Now the people hailing from other parts of the world who breeze straight-on-thru they are the best candidates to fall prey to internet scams or are the most likely to buy a marketing eBook that promises them that they'll be pulling in $5,000 in a weeks time (these are the suckers who make online marketing very profitable for the few who know how to game the game of internet marketing).

So how can I profit from this knowledge? Well as my website trudges further up the search engines I'm going to change the content of my home page (and nooooo I'm not going to promise prospects landing on my home page that they are going to be overnight millionaires) such that I retain more of those gonna-be-rich-soon misled folks; after all I'd be doing them a favor by saving them from spending their hard earned cash on worthless promises.

Bounce Rate & Average Time Spent On Site

In the paragraphs above I have illustrated the usefulness of these two parameters; but their usefulness extends much deeper. Google analytics tells you the average time spent on each webpage as well as the bounce rate (bounce rate refers to the number of visitors who land on your home page and exit right away). Obviously once you know such information it makes it that much easier to optimize your content to keep your visitors on your site.

Google also kindly furnishes increase/decrease percentages for all its parameters so you can easily tell whether the tweaks you have made improve your visitor retention rate or not.

By the way the longer people spend on your site the "stickier" it is said to be. In fact site stickiness is going to be one of the most important seo parameters in determining how far up the search engines a website will get! In other words stickiness is good (which is why I'm going to make the navigation of my site better and more accessible).


READ ABOUT NEW SEO PARAMETERS HERE

Keywords

I've actually been a bit more wordy than I intended but I think it would be downright irresponsible of me not to mention anything at all on how Google analytics can really help you concentrate on the right keywords.

Okay, so there is plenty of free software sprinkled liberally across the internet that helps you to research your market before making a financial investment; the point being that it is far better to determine the viability of an idea by determining whether there's really a large enough interested audience to warrant it as being a profitable market. (I mentioned various sites that supply these free tools in my free ebook Best Kept Marketing Secret).Click the title if you don't have it yet.

Problem with such keyword research software is that it may tell you how many times that keyword is looked up per month but it gives you no idea of the conversion rate of that keyword. When I say conversion rate I mean how many people that get to your site via that particular keyword actually perform your most desired goal or stick around to check out your site.

Okay here's an example that I determined from my Google analytics stats. The number of times that the two keyword terms "internet marketing online" and "internet marketing strategy" are queried each month fluctuates; sometimes the one is more popular than the other.

But as far as my website is concerned what I discovered was that "internet marketing online" is a far more effective term. In what way do I mean more effective? Well people who get to my site through that keyword on average visit 8 pages (compared to 2 for the keyword "internet marketing strategy") and also spend a whopping nine minutes more!

From such data I can tell that the keyword "internet marketing online" is far more profitable to me with respect to the current content of my homepage. Oh! Did I mention that the bounce rate for internet marketing online is 35% less than that of internet marketing strategy for this website?

But perhaps one of the best aspects about Google analytics with respect to keywords is that you get to be aware of longtail keywords that you'd probably never even think up let alone optimize for. For example I never specifically targeted the keyword "free internet eBooks" (the new search engine algorithms are smart enough to pick out keyphrases from text nowadays) but people who come to my site via that word spend a whopping 23.38 minutes on my site and the bounce rate is zero!

Now before you rush off to optimize your website around that longtail keyword you should understand not many people search for it per month and the only reason why I'm even getting traffic from it is because for most of the Google datacenters Internet Business Mart is on page 1!
Okay 'nuff said. If you cannot see how Google analytics can help your marketing strategy well I'll be decorus enough to keep my comments to myself. But if you can...then what are you waiting for? Go to google right now and introduce yourself and get acquainted!

Oh one last thing you need to sign up for a google account which will then incorporate your-everything-google such as Adwords, Adsense, Blogger (if you use it) and Gmail to mention but a few!

GET GOOGLE ANALYTICS HERE

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