By Julie Bombacino

Unlike neighboring gas stations or the two local grocery stores, knowing just who your competition is online isn’t as easy as looking out the window. So before you assume you know who your competitors are, go to Google and type in your main keyword/phrases. Who’s paying to be there? Who’s got the top natural search listings? Like it or not, these are your competitors. Take note. (more…)

By Bill Wynne

The Google Trends Web site was made public in 1996 but many marketers on the Internet don’t know about it. Some know but don’t understand it and so don’t get the benefits out of it that are possible.

The Google Trends Web site is a service offered by Google to users that want to get some fantastic data about keyword searches in the Google search engine. For example if you wanted to know how popular Levi jeans were over the past six years you could type in “Levi Jeans” and get data that would show you the search trend for Levi Jeans. It will not only give you the search trend but you can begin to focus the searches on country, city or even by language. (more…)

By Monique Martin

You’re reading your latest Web analytics report, but it might as well be Greek. What does it all mean? Here’s a quick primer on hits and pageviews that will help you make sense out of it all. (more…)

By Tammy Elizabeth Southin

You have a small business, and you have the Web site; now what? If you are not selling items directly through your site, you might be wondering if those uncluttered pages with the right amount of graphics are being read or being ignored. Do Web analytics matter to your business if you don't have an ecommerce site? (more…)

By Julie Bombacino

Creating Effective Customer Surveys

Seems simple enough, right? You’ve got a question or two or 10 to ask your customer base, so you’ll send out a survey. Then everything will be crystal clear.

Not so fast. If you don’t follow a few basic tenets when creating your survey, you might end up with more questions than answers or, worse, use the data to make bad business decisions. (more…)

By Melissa J Luther

The term conversion is confusing to many small business owners, because most people think only of a sale as a conversion. However, a conversion can be almost any action a visitor takes on your Web site. It all depends on your goals. (more…)

By Philippa Gamse

Imagine that you own a beautifully designed yacht. It looks great on the surface of the water, with superb lines, gleaming decks, a well-appointed galley... but you're having real trouble getting out of the harbor, and you can't figure out why!

You investigate, and you find that beneath the surface your beautiful boat has a number of slow, silent, leaks. None of them are big enough to sink you on their own, so there's no obvious immediate crisis — just a constant drain on your efficiency and your speed.

I've been reviewing Web traffic reports for over 10 years, and I believe that this analogy applies very well to almost all business Web sites. Very few sites are so terrible or have something so wrong with them that they're clearly a disaster. Yet just about every site has some area where it's quietly losing traffic, losing potential business or the chance to create relationships — or failing to attract visitors in the first place. (more…)

By Jerry Bader

With today’s Web site tracking software and services you can find out a lot about the people who visit your Web site. You can learn where they’re from, what kind of browser they’re using, how long they stayed on your site and a whole lot more. But what all this high tech intelligence won’t tell you is what kind of people they are, and how likely they are to be transformed by your Web presentation from viewers to customers. (more…)

By Hostway

Want to know how people are finding your Web site? Sure, Google might send some traffic your way, but you might be surprised to learn which other Web sites link to yours. (more…)

By Pete Moore

Internet marketers and Webmasters have always had a love/ hate relationship with Google. Whatever you think of them, they do provide Web site owners with some great market research tools. (more…)