I heard a great saying the other day… “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. This is true in all aspects of business. When it comes to marketing, the golden rule is accountability. Knowing how much money you need to put in to get X return, and is this return worth it?
The beauty of online marketing is that everything is trackable, therefore accountable. Each click, search engine referral, download or visitor can be logged, tracked, analysed and improved upon. If you don’t have tools in place to manage and analyse your website, you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice.
Followed are some great free tools that will get you on your way to managing your website effectively.
Statistics
It should be a sin to not have stats on your website. Statistics are the road map to your website; they tell you how you can improve your site, get better conversion rates or more search engine traffic. The best free statistics package available on the net today (in my opinion at least) is Google Analytics, and it’s free!
www.google.com/analytics/indexu.html
Heat mapping
Heat mapping is a great way to find out where is the most valuable real estate on your website. If you’re not familiar with heat mapping, it’s a visual representation of where people are clicking on your website. It’s great to determine where you should put advertising, sponsored links or important information.
Crazy Egg has a free version of their heat mapping service. Check it out at www.crazyegg.com
Long tail search terms
If you’re chasing the long tail for your search terms and have a website that has over 100 pages on it, you will want to take a look at www.hittail.com
SEO information
If you want to get easy SEO info about a website quickly and painlessly, then I would recommend checking out the RankQuest toolbar for Firefox. It’s simple to install and makes looking at important SEO elements a breeze. Check it out at www.rankquest.com/download-toolbar.html.
Free photos
There are loads of free photo websites out there but one that I have found to be of excellent quality is www.sxc.hu. Another useful site is www.morguefile.com/
I know this isn’t really metrics but hey, who doesn’t love free stuff, right?
So here are a few free things you can use to improve your website. Enjoy!