Data Analysing Help Online Marketers

If you are involved in the world of Internet marketing then it is crucial to continually track and analyse the statistics related to your web page and its visitors.  During a marketing campaign it may be necessary to use multiple techniques that are applied to multiple markets, and without a reliable data analysis tool you can't ever know which methods are working better than others.  There are many data analysing applications out there that are designed to help someone with their online marketing campaigns. 

One of the most popular is a free service offered by Google called Google analytics.  This tool generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a specific website.  Google are obviously in the perfect situation to provide a tool like this as they are already running the most popular search engine on the planet.  There are other alternatives out there however that can offer similar and in some cases even more detailed statistical data available to you.

Google analytics (GA) can track what site a visitor has come from before they reach your page, and from a marketing perspective this is valuable information indeed.  Whether a visitor enters your page through a search engine link, an email link, a pay-per-click advertisement or even an online PDF document, GA can track the origin of your visitor.  This gives you the ability to allocate your resources in the most valuable places, for example through either search engine marketing campaigns or linking campaigns to specific web pages where people are likely to come from.  When you know where most of your visitors are coming from you know where best to spend your money and your time in trying to get more people onto your site. 

The technology behind this tool is referred to as the Google analytics tracking code (GATC).  This is actually a hidden piece of Javascript code that can be added to your web page in order to track anonymous visitor data and send it back to the Google processing centre.  The GATC also sets up a cookie on the visitor's computer to track other anonymous data such as time of visit and whether the person was a return visitor or not.  All in all it is a great tool and probably the most popular analytics program that is used by Internet marketers.

Most of the other data analysis tools that compete with Google analytics are much less known, but that doesn't mean that they aren't any good.  The other big player in the search engine world, Yahoo, also have an analytics tool called Index tools and Lyris HQ ClickTracks is another big player in the business world.  Microsoft even plan on entering the market later on in 2008 with a product that is currently code-named Gatineau.  Other industry leaders also include WebTrends, Omniture and Netstat. 

With so many alternatives out there, there are a couple of obvious ways that a company can distinguish their product.  Price is the first one, however many of these tools are free.  The other important feature is the flexibility of the analysis tools that a package offers, and some marketers are ready to pay money for a feature rich and flexible solution.