There are so many ways to measure the effects of your marketing efforts online it can begin to feel like a losing battle, encompassed by sheer chaos and reams of charts that seem to shout opposing viewpoints. There's good news though, just as an M.C. Escher print would suggest. The saving grace of this never-ending scroll? Patterns. Learn to spot patterns and you'll be able to put the data in perspective, quiet the noise around you, and pay attention to what really matters. [Read Full Article]

Tips from July 13, 2009 The Small Business tips today discuss how small businesses can use Google Analytics to track web traffic and marketing effectiveness. Install: create a Google Analytics account, configure your profile, edit the tracking code, & add to your webpage. Visitors: see anything & everything you’ve ever wanted to know about visitors to your site: location, clicks, bounce, & origin. Traffic: see where your visitors are coming from: search engines, links, social networking sites, or a direct link. Content: check what brings people to your site & brings in revenue: information, tips, guidance, or keywords. Daily Overview: [Read Full Article]

Finding ways to track your website and the performance of the URLs that you give out is an important tool in monitoring your internet marketing efforts. This allows you to learn what is and isn’t working which will then show you if you need to adjust your approach or even your content. I’ve been using the bit.ly service the past few days to do some comparisons on their stats reporting versus Google Analytics stats reporting. I also used Google Analytics (GA) campaign tracking to simplify things on that end. bit.ly is a service that shortens long URLs and, as a bonus to number buffs like myself, gives you instant and live tracking statistics. It tells you where the URL is posted, what conversations the URL is being involved in, where everything is coming from, time of the clicks and more. GA statistics are delayed which is why I wanted... [Read Full Article]