Business Marketing – Web Analytics For Tracking Your Competition

Tighter economic times have made companies more careful than ever with their marketing budgets. However, amazingly a huge number of businesses are still not utilizing cheap and easy tools–right at their fingertips–to help them hone their marketing strategy and marketing effectiveness. Instead, many companies are using out of date practices and reducing the amount of marketing they are doing from fear of lost money. Instead, they should be analyzing what is and isn't working so they can improve and maximize marketing ROI. Surprisingly, even business coaches and marketing consulting agencies are making these costly mistakes. Ignoring data and marketing metrics right in front of you is like complaining you are broke while burning a hundred dollar bill.

Domain hosts often offer a wide variety of website tracking tools and web marketing analytics for your website. In addition, a number of third party sites, like Google, offer web marketing analytics. These tools and programs can help you analyze your business marketing in seconds. They usually provide a range of easy to read graphs and charts of your marketing metrics with the click of a button. This includes not only tracking the number of visitors to your Internet domain but where that traffic came from, how long visitors stayed on your site's pages, and how they progress through your site. This information is priceless for measuring advertising effectiveness, no matter what medium you are using to generate business.

Perhaps even more valuable is the ability to use web marketing analytics and marketing metrics for tracking your competition. For start up businesses, these online web marketing analytics make for low cost and simple research to develop your marketing strategy. These tools offer insight into what your competition is doing with its online advertising by showing which keywords or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaigns the competition is using and how much it is paying for them. Some software for marketing metrics like Competitor Analysis even tells you who is referring business to your competitors and how often your competition changes its content. Regular analysis of your competitors' online advertising can help you stay current with market trends and discover what is working for others. Ultimately, this information will help you better to target your business marketing strategy, thereby cutting costs and rocketing your marketing ROI.