The fact that 8 out of 10 people start a purchase decision online makes owning a website a powerful marketing tool, but the real power of the internet comes from what is known as analytics. Unless a company puts a coupon in a newspaper, or uses a special phone number, they really have no way to tell how many customers saw or heard their ads, let alone how many responded to those ads, or which ad form was the most effective. Not true with the Internet!

Practically every way that a customer interacts with your website is measurable by what is known as an analytics program. With an analytics program, you can see where they came from, how they got there, and which web pages they visited. You can identify your customers by which state and country they came from, which web browser they used, how long they stayed on your website, if they were a new or repeat visitor and which web pages they liked the best. This is only a fraction of the critical marketing data that can be obtained from an analytics program that will help you understand not only your customers, but the strengths and weaknesses of your website. Do that with a yellow pages ad!

There are several free and fee web analytics programs available, and like any other aspect of your web business, you should base your decision on your business needs.

Even though Search Marketing Corporation uses LunarPages as a web host, we do not use the free analytics program they provide. This isn't to say that it isn't a good solution, and we'll probably check it out sometime so we can help educate our readers, but we've elected to use Google Analytics because we were already familiar with it. Google analytics is free and easy to apply to your website. There is no software to download, so you can check your web traffic statistics from any computer with Internet access.

Search Marketing Corporation will go into more depth about the power of web analytics programs in future blog articles.