Ask This Before You Hire an Article Marketing Service > Article Marketing

Thinking of hiring an article marketing service? Before you commit to a payment, you should know that you might not get the results you’re hoping to achieve. There are services that will happily take your money and submit articles to various directories. But that doesn’t mean anything will grow because of those submissions. You have to ask what their policies and beliefs are regarding keyword density and search engine optimization.

If the articles aren’t written so that search engine optimization is used correctly, that article is time and money wasted because it’s not going to hit the bulls-eye. In fact, it won’t even come close to the dartboard.

Search engine optimization in article marketing is the practice of choosing specific keywords in each article for the purpose of boosting ranking. However, there’s a right balance to how many or how few keywords to use.

If you use too many – called keyword stuffing – then the article will be rejected by some article directories or shunned by Google (or so “they” say). When that happens, if you paid for a service, you’ve wasted both money and an opportunity for your business.

Keyword density is the area where many who are new to any kind of marketing mess up. Even those people working for an article marketing service don’t always understand how fine the balance is.

They either pepper the article with too many keywords, leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, or they flavor it with too few and the search engine spiders can’t recognize what the article is about.

And if the spiders can’t find your article – you won’t get the ranking you want, won’t get the traffic you’re looking for and your conversion rate will either plummet or become non-existent. So what is the balance? Within the article, keywords can only make up about 2%. That’s not a lot of words to play around with.

Not all sites are indexed. So find out where they plan on submitting your articles. Find out their strategy for article submissions. A sudden flood of articles for the sole purpose of driving up rankings won’t make some search engines very happy campers and you could be out of the ballgame before you even get up to bat if that happens.

Article marketing is basically you trying to promote your website. Without the use of this powerful tool, you might not get the right exposure, but by using directories, you reap in an area where they’ve been sowing. They want your articles, but they don’t want to get articles that are sloppily put together and don’t play nicely according to the rules of keyword density.

So before you hire an article marketing service and plunk down money for a submission campaign, make sure the company understands exactly how to work with keywords and if they don’t, save your money and do the writing and submitting yourself.

Article Marketing for Promoting Your Own Info Products > Article Marketing

Using article marketing for promoting your own info products is a widely underused tool but one that’s highly effective at directing traffic. When talking about marketing by the use of articles, there’s an assumption that it’s basically for affiliate marketers.

While it’s true that many successful affiliate marketers do tap into the power of using articles this way, you can use it to accelerate the growth of what you have to offer, too. Every day people access this gold mine to heighten the visibility of their businesses. It’s sort of the sign in the window that leads the way to the site you want the traffic to get to.

You can use this savvy idea whether you’re promoting a physical or an informational product. When you use article marketing for promoting your products, you build a solid web presence and even if you’re a startup online business, you can afford to use this tactic to promote yourself because it won’t cost you a dime.

What it will cost you is the time it takes to write the articles or the cost to pay someone else to do it if you’re not comfortable with your own writing. Since article directories allow links, make sure you take advantage of a powerful linking strategy.

When you do submit articles, keep them coming. You’ll want to keep the content fresh and meaningful for the visitors, eventually establishing yourself as the authority in your niche. Not only that, but relevant content will boost rankings of your site.

Make your article content easy to digest. Unbroken text leads to skim reading. Break up long paragraphs because it’s easier for people to read in shorter bursts. That’s why bullet lists are so popular.

You also want to prepare articles for your affiliates. The reason you want to do this lies in how you can then use the articles. These articles can be used on websites, on blogs, in email newsletters and as special opt-in information reports. Whatever you do, it has to bring added value to the table.

When you write the titles for your articles (or have someone else do them) avoid being vague or cute with your titles. You don’t want to waste time on words that won’t go to work for you as SEO rich verbiage.

Article marketing for promoting your products is not a selling tactic. You want to have content that promotes your stuff by way of hinting at a solution – you don’t want to solve the problem completely, because then why should the customer go to your other site or buy anything from you? The purpose of the articles isn’t to sell. It’s to point the traffic to the site that will bring a conversion.

Article Marketing Automation With a Free Directory and Blog > Article Marketing

Whenever you mention article marketing, most people instantly get an image of sitting down to write a bunch of content. But it’s more than the writing process. You can cash in promoting affiliate products or your own products and services by setting up a system that automates your article marketing for you year round.

There are three ways to add article marketing automation to your task list. The first involves outsourcing your writing and submission process to a qualified freelancer. You simply pay a bill and then let them conduct a full article marketing campaign for you, with hyperlinks pointing back to your domain.

The second one involves an email autoresponder system. Use a free viral report to get subscribers to an online newsletter and then drip feed a daily, weekly or monthly article to them that you grab from your own article directory account or from someone else’s, since you’re allowed to use articles as a publisher.

Use a system like Aweber and schedule your follow up emails to go out on a regular basis. You can add a bit to the email by writing an introduction about the topic that the article will cover, and ending the email with a conclusion (and possible hyperlink to a product, too).

Thirdly, you can use the same tactic on a blog that you create. Register a domain on a registrar like GoDaddy and use a hosting plan at a site like Hostgator, which has a cpanel where you can install a WordPress blog using the Fantastico button.

Then click Add New blog post and post your first article that you grab as a publisher form an article directory. Keep adding new blog posts, only for subsequent entries, schedule them to post each day for as long as you want them to appear.

Google and other search engine spiders will continually visit to index your content – the more frequently you post, the more often they’ll come back to index. Try to post some original articles mixed in with the article directory content or at the very least write an introduction to the article and a conclusion, as you would do with an email autoresponder.

Article marketing automation can help shave time off of your daily task list. By either allowing someone else to handle the workload or setting up a system that continues posting throughout the year, you’re able to focus your efforts on other areas where you need a more hands on approach.

7 Article Marketing Tips to Help Increase Views and Conversions > Article Marketing

Everyone can use a little help with his or her article conversions. Even the best marketers tweak their style to try to achieve the very best rates possible. Here are seven article marketing tips that can help you have even greater success with your campaigns:

Tip #1: Treat Your Title Like the Star Attraction

If they don’t like your title, they’re not going to read the body of your article, much less make it to the resource box where you’ve placed your hyperlinks. Take more time to create a traffic pulling title than you do with any other part of your article.

Tip #2: Maintain a Perfect Keyword Density

Most article directories don’t set limits, but the good ones do. That’s because they know what search engine spiders consider keyword stuffing. Keep it to a healthy 2%, which means for every 400 word article, you could use your keyword phrase 8 times total.

Tip #3: Break It Up With Bullet Points

Make your article easy to read by creating lists in bullet point form. People love to quickly skim an article first and then click on to the next chunk. Or, if they like what they see in the bullet points, they’ll go back to the beginning and read your article more thoroughly.

Tip #4: Check Your Spelling Before You Submit Your Article

Don’t simply use spellcheck to check the quality of your work. It doesn’t always catch the mistakes. Go through your article word by word and make sure it’s correct. Some readers will click out if they encounter a spelling error.

Tip #5: Watch for Trends You Can Use in Your Article Marketing

Magazines and news shows will touch on a wide variety of niche topics, and you can watch for trends or topics and then use them to rank high quickly with your articles.

Tip #6: Share Your Articles in a Viral Nature Once They’re Published

Your article marketing campaign doesn’t end the moment the directory accepts and publishes your article. Give it a boost by pinging your article link, bookmarking it on sites like StumbleUpon, and publishing it on your own blogs and websites!

Tip #7: Run a Few Different Versions of Your Resource Box

Don’t make the common mistake of writing a short bio or “about me” in your author’s resource area. With article marketing, this is the prime spot where you’re supposed to guide your reader from the body of the article to your call to action. Go out with a bang and invite them to download a freebie or follow up for some deeper information. And test a few variations to see what works best.

Employ all or some of these seven article marketing tips and you’ll be well on your way to designing a content campaign that produces great results every time and lasts for years to come.

Write Better and Increase Your Article Marketing Success > Free Article Marketing Report

Article Marketing report “How to Write Better and Increase Your Article Marketing Success” includes topics: Speed, Readability, Conversions, Solutions for Speed Issues, Solutions for Readability and Solutions for Conversions. Click “How to Write Better and Increase Your Article Marketing Success” to download (203 KB pdf) this free Article Marketing report.

Free-Report-Article-Marketing

Why Analytics Is Essential for Marketing Success > IM Management

Studying the metrics of what you do is a very important part of having a successful business. Without looking at the numbers you really cannot know exactly why you experienced either success or failure. You can make assumptions, but when you don’t have to do that it’s better to use facts to ensure that your efforts aren’t a waste.

* If You Can’t Measure It Doesn’t Exist – When you set goals, they should be something that can be expressed in numbers: clicks, page views, sign-ups, buys and so forth. You can even assign values to conversions so that Google Analytics tells you what a particular conversion is worth to you without you having to leave the system.

* Help You Get to Know Your Visitors – You probably set up a certain idea of your audience before you even started your business. You created marketing materials based on your ideal audience and it’s worked. But, can it work better? If you dig deep into your audience’s demographics (especially the people who’ve converted), you most certainly can.

* You’ll know What Content Is Most Important – When you set up analytics you can see what blog posts, articles, and other content is getting more traction. You can see views, comments, and more, which can help you judge better what type of content you need to create more of.

* Lets You Understand Top Referrers – Using the data you collect, you can find out who/what is sending the most traffic (converted traffic) to your website. This is useful because if it’s one particular person (like an affiliate) or one website, you can give them some extra love to encourage more of the same.

* Helps You Study Your Competition – Nothing is more important outside of your visitors than your competition. You can learn a lot from your competition when you can get to know everything they are doing – including the keywords they use, the prices they charge for their products, and even their conversion rates.

* Teaches You What Works for Your Audience – When you study your numbers you can find out if the ideas you’ve had work or not. Some will, some won’t. You can find out what works, optimize it and do more of it by looking at the data.

* Enables You to Kill Projects That Fail – You don’t even have to allow projects to continue if the numbers show that they are failing all the way around. You can kill projects fast when you’re doing them online. It’s not like the old days when you had to let things run their course and watch your money go down the drain.

Running your business by the numbers is something that can really help advance it in ways that you may not have previously considered. It’s imperative to learn about metrics, goal setting, and how to determine correlation, because not everything is always as it seems when it comes to the numbers.

Using Analytics to Understand Your Visitors > IM Management

Your website visitors are much more than page views. They are people that take various actions (or not) when they get to your site. It’s important to understand as much as you can about them. Due to Google’s powerful network they have a lot of information on your users. You may as well use it to get to know your real audience.

* Who Are They? – Knowing exactly who your visitors are is useful because when you first choose your audience you are usually just making a guess on the best audience so that you can create marketing materials and products and services. But, once you have your site live and your products selling, checking up to ensure that you’re still marketing to the right people helps tremendously.

* Where Did They Come From? – How your audience finds you is an important thing to know. Because if your audience is finding you more from one location over another, you need to up your activities there so you can get more of that traffic. In Google Analytics you can find this information under All Referrals.

* Where Is Your Audience Located? – You can use the Geo Location area of analytics to find out where your audience lives. Even if you’re marketing worldwide it’s good information to have, because the location of your audience does help you make some assumptions about their personalities and values.

* What Do They Do on Your Site? – You can map what each visitor does on your site so that you can see which menu items are most popular. This can help you determine what type of content you should put more of on your website. Put more of what they’re reading and viewing on your site to attract even more visitors like them.

* What Do They Want? – By analyzing where they go, how they interact and so forth, you can make some assumptions about what they want from you. If they’re reading blog posts, do more; if they watch and share videos more often, do more of that.

* Where Are Their Conversion Paths? – Knowing the steps a user takes to reach a buying decision is important, because it can help you create paths that work for your visitors based on the conversions already made. This information can help you optimize your sales funnels.

* What Information Do They Comment On? – If you have a forum, or have opened comments on your blog, or get emails from people who purchased something from you, what information do they comment on most? Is it positive, negative or indifferent? With that information, you can create more content that gets bigger responses.

Any information you can get on your visitors will help you improve not only your website, but your entire business. You can learn so much by what the current visitors do and don’t do on your website. Use the information to make everything better and more targeted.

Using Analytics to Understand Your Competition > IM Management

The more you can understand your competition, the better business you’re going to have. You can learn so much from them – especially if they’ve been around longer than you have. If you know for a fact the competition is profitable and that they are good at what they do, it’s even more important to learn all you can from them. You can do that by using analytics.

* Google Alerts – This is an excellent, free service. Sign in and choose keywords, names, and more to search for. Then, set up how often you want to receive the alerts in your email inbox. You can scan each email to find information about your competition that you can use in your own business.

Link – https://www.google.com/alerts

* Social Mention – Use this cloud-based search engine to search websites, blogs and more for mentions about your competition. Then you can go take a look at what they’re doing. Identify the gaps in their offerings and you can outshine your competition in no time.

Link – http://socialmention.com/

* Website Grader – While it does ask for your website and not your competition’s (and your email address), you can still use it to check the health of someone else’s website. The information you will receive is page size, page speed, redirects and more, including how many requests for the site have been made. It also tells you how they’re doing on SEO and more.

Link – https://website.grader.com/

* Link-Assistant.com – Using this downloadable software you can study keywords of your competitor’s site so that you will know what keywords they’re using. You can then use them on your own website to nab their traffic.

Link – http://www.link-assistant.com/

* SocialAdNinja – You can use this software to copy and make your competitor’s ads your own. Of course, you don’t copy them exactly, as you are selling your own products, but this will help you duplicate the most successful ads online.

Link – http://www.socialadninja.com/

* KeywordSpy – This software is an amazing way to profit from your competition’s hard work and research. You can find out what keywords they’re using, what they’re spending for AdWords, their ROI estimate, and much more.

Link – http://www.keywordspy.com/

* Open Site Explorer by MOZ – You can get a lot of information about your competition from this cloud-based option. You can get information about the links that come into the site and the anchor text used, and you can even compare five sites. What’s more, it’s free when you sign up.

Link – https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/

Using these tools to discover important data to analyze about your competition is a great way to grow your business and please your audience. By keeping an eye on your competition you can learn about what your audience really wants and what they really respond to.

Using Analytics to Plan Where Your Business Is Going > IM Management

Analytics can tell you what happened, why it happened, what will happen and how you can make it happen. “It” consists of any goal that you’ve set for your business. Using analytics to inform you about these issues will help you make your business even more prosperous. The insights you get from the data are immeasurably useful for business owners today. They will help you guide all your actions.

* Operate a Better Business – When you use data to help you learn about your business, your competition, where you stand and where you want to go, you’ll truly end up with a better business than you ever thought possible. Today, data can actually be predictive and almost give you directions on what to do next to boost your business and make it better.

* Be More Innovative – As you look at the data you have, and you can see what happened and how it happened, you can take that information to repeat whatever worked so that you can get more good results out of it. But, you can also use that same data to add complementary products and services to your offerings or even change direction altogether.

* Stay Ahead of Trends – Think of Netflix’s decision making. Had they minded their data when they thought they were going to stream only, they would have known in advance that this idea wasn’t ready to work – although it probably will in the future as people who use electronics instead of digital devices will become fewer and fewer.

* Face Challenges – Every business faces challenges and you can even predict some by looking at data. For example, some businesses are seasonal in nature, even though in some cases there is no reason for them to be seasonal. But, if you check the data you might find that your business has times where you make more sales. You can use that information to pump up advertising during the off season.

* Information to Help You Grow – Analytics can help you get to know your audience even better. When you first start a business you choose almost out of thin air who you want to be your target audience. You set up all your advertising and marketing with that in mind. But, you might find through analytics that you have a far different audience than you thought. This can help you narrow down and optimize your marketing materials so that you can grow your business.

If you want to grow your business and plan exactly where it’s going, use analytics to discover insights into your business that will help you accomplish that goal. Predictive analytics can help you make the right decision for your business.

Using Analytics to Improve Your Website > Website Design

Website analytics are there to help you track and measure various parameters of your website. But, they can also help you ensure that your website is completely optimized in every aspect – including layout, speed, SEO, and more. For example, with Google Analytics you can create many different reports to help you understand the health of your website.

Set Goals First

The first thing to do is set goals for your analytics. For example, if you are having a webinar you might want to study how many people sign up for your webinar and signed up for your newsletter. If you’ve created a white paper you may want to keep track of how many people downloaded the white paper, and if you put links inside the white paper you want to know how many people click through.

* Did SEO Work or Not? – Using the analytics that you have available, you can find out if traffic or conversions increased after you updated your SEO on your site and added more content.

* What Type of Content Works Best? – You can also find out which posts are more popular and which converted. When you take stock of which blog posts are popular, what do they have in common?

* Which Segments of Your Audience Convert at a Higher Rate? – If you use audience segmentation you can find out the segments that covert at a higher rate, which means you can then use that information to target that segment harder.

* What New Products or Services You Should Offer – When you determine through analytics what your visitors like most, you can offer complementary products or services, and even new things that they might like based on the data you collect.

* Help You Determine New Goals – As you research the data and information that you find in your analytics software, you can actually come up with new ideas for new goals – goals that you might not have come to if you hadn’t looked at the other data. For example, your first goal might be to get people to subscribe to your newsletter, and then you may set up a goal that people on your newsletter list convert to joining your membership site.

* Help You Choose the Right Keywords – One thing that Google Analytics and AdWords are really good at is helping you choose the right keywords. Plus, once you download a couple hundred keyword ideas it will also help you decide what type of content to add based on the keyword research.

* Help You Identify a Slow Loading Site – Sometimes website designers add too many interesting features that cause a website to slow down. If your website is too slow, visitors will leave and Google will downgrade your website. By keeping tabs on this metric, you can take steps to improve.

Using analytics to help you improve your website is a great use of the software. You can ensure that your site is up to date, works fast, and has proper navigation and SEO so that you can convert visitors to buyers in no time.

Using Analytics to Detect Fraud > IM Management

One of the most dreaded forms of fraud on the net is click fraud. It costs marketers and advertisers an enormous amount of money each year. Thankfully, you can discover click fraud and protect yourself if you know how. It’s important to do so since click fraud is more than a five billion dollar business.

How Many Clicks from the Same IP Address?

Check to find out how long the clicks have been coming from the same IP address, and compare that to all your other clicks to find out if it’s possible that it’s click fraud. If you check enough, you’ll know the pattern for your own website and know when something is wrong so you can block that particular IP address when needed (if it’s a static IP address). You can find this information in your server’s log.

Use a Service Like ClickReport.com

With this service you can find out a lot of information about your PPC activity that you need, such as date, time, IP address, location, keywords and much more. This is a great way to protect your investment in pay-per-click marketing. So much is lost in click fraud so it’s great that you can protect yourself a little better with this service.

Test against Established Parameters

A good example for this to help a lot is to make sure your data entry is accurate. Don’t allow people to input false answers in your forms. For example, if your form requires an address, don’t allow them to put in all 9’s for the zip code. Conversely, you can pull all data with invalid zip codes, check them out further and delete them and block static IPs if you believe they’re fraudulent accounts.

Find Weaknesses in Your System

When you regularly study analytics, patterns emerge and when that happens you can figure out what is causing the issues if there is one. You always need some sort of proof when fraud is happening and the proof is in the data that you have access to and can study.

Analytics Helps Detect and Prevent Fraud

Analytics offer a means by which to detect fraud and even alert you to a problem. If you set up any type of analytics system correctly – even Google AdWords – you can often detect fraud and put a stop to it as soon as possible.

It’s important to do all that you can to stop and prevent fraud. It can affect your profits in enormous ways. It can even cause the ruin of an entire business. But, if you use analytics to detect fraud you can be one of the smart business owners who lowers the damage that it can cause by catching them.

Social Media Analytics > Social Media

One thing that is hard to do sometimes is to interpret what actions mean on social media. The fact is, not all actions even matter. It’s important to know what matters and what doesn’t. It’s also important to know what everything means or potentially means based on other factors and the goals you set. Below are some important questions to consider.

* Leads – How many new leads did you get from the action you performed? If you set up a freebie guide and marketed that, how many people signed up and downloaded it? If people downloaded a freebie, how many who did that took further action?

* Engagement – When you make a post, how many people respond in some way to the engagement? What was the point of the engagement? Did the audience do what you thought they’d do?

* Reach – How many people shared your post? How far did the post reach, meaning how many people laid eyes on it and shared it? If a lot of people shared it, you might consider adding more content like that.

* Impressions – When you boost a post on Facebook, how many impressions did it make versus how many people saw it, shared it, and engaged with it? What did they do afterwards?

* Funnels – With your analytics software you can set up a means to testing out your funnels to find out which type of funnel works best. This can help you identify holes in your plans to reach your goals.

* Unique Visits – It’s important to know how many unique visits you get each day, where they came from, and what they did after they got there. Did they convert? Did they sign up for anything? Did they download something? Did they search your site?

* Repeat Visits – Having a lot of repeat visitors is a sign of a healthy site with a lot of content for the audience to read and look at. What is the percentage of repeat visitors versus new traffic? If it’s low, what can you change? Are you targeting your audience correctly?

* Bounces – Are people coming to your website and then leaving before doing anything? If this rate is high, then that means something is wrong. Find out where the links are coming from and try to determine if the content is badly targeted or not.

* Exits – How and what page are people using to exit your website, and if they came from social media where did they come from? Can you pinpoint what is making them leave? What you can do to encourage them to stay or to convert them in some way, for example by using an exit pop-under?

* Time on Site – How long are your visitors staying on your page and what exactly are they doing while they are there? What do they read the most? What do they watch the most? What exactly are they doing that keeps them on the social media site? If they’re only there a short time, what did they do?

* Growth – How fast are the visitors to your social media page/platform improving each month? Is it going up or down? What actions affect growth? How can you do more of those things to keep growing your website and your influence?

* Response – When you create a post, how long does it take your audience to respond and what type of responses do you get? Are they commenting, liking, sharing, retweeting and so forth?

* Inbound Links – How many others are sharing your social networks and causing people to link to your social media networks? Who is sharing your platform more and why?

Finally, the only thing that really matters in the scheme of things is conversions. If you’re not meeting your conversion goals, then you need to readjust. Remember that conversions are what you determine that they are. You may be tracking email sign-ups, clicks or sales. It’s up to you what a conversion means.

Nine Common Analytics Mistakes > SEO

If you truly want to improve your business, get more customers and make more sales, then you need to mind your numbers. The metrics behind what is working or not working is very important. They say that only 20 percent of your actions make up 80 percent of the results. What if you’re working on the wrong 20 percent? If you study analytics, you’re going to be so much more likely to work on the right 20 percent.

Below are nine common analytics mistakes. Hopefully by reading them you’ll avoid making the same mistakes yourself.

1. Not looking at the Numbers at All – Many people have perfectly successful online and offline businesses where they never look at a single number. One might wonder what the point is if you’re already successful. But, the fact is, how much more successful can a business owner be if they know what’s working and what’s not working?

2. Looking at the Wrong Information – Many new people study information that really doesn’t matter. For example, are “bounces” really bounces? Or, did they get taken to a redirect affiliate link that cannot be tracked via your analytics software?

3. Not Setting Up the Software Correctly – If you’re new and you have no idea about the capabilities of the software or how to use it, you need to get training or have someone who is a professional set it up and give you reports. The software only works as well as the user.

4. Not Monitoring Regularly – Often, people spend a lot of time and money to set up analytics but they never look at them again. This is terrible use of the software and a huge mistake for the business. Once you set it up, ensure that you monitor everything on a set schedule so that you will not miss anything.

5. Not Segmenting for Retargeting/Remarketing – One of the most powerful forms of marketing today is retargeting or remarketing to people who have visited your websites or had some sort of interaction before. Some people need to see your offerings multiple times in order to finally trust you. Don’t miss out on this amazing ability.

6. Not Setting Conversion Goals – If you don’t set goals within your software, you won’t know if what you’re trying to achieve is happening or not. You can make assumptions based on income but you won’t really know what’s helping or hurting you.

7. Not Filtering Out Invalid Traffic – A lot of traffic can just mess up your numbers, so you need the ability and knowledge of how to filter out that particular traffic. The invalid traffic are people who visit your website to work, like yourself and your virtual assistant or web designer.

8. Not Setting Up Multiple Views – When you get reports, instead of trying to look at everything at once, set up multiple views so you can see what each parameter means to your business.

9. Not Differentiating the Types of Traffic – There are several types of traffic such as referral, direct and so forth. You should differentiate each type of traffic so that you know what is causing a spike in bounces or conversions.

If you’re not using your analytics software properly due to lack of knowledge or time, consider hiring a professional. Google Analytics offers certification and a Google Badge for those who have passed the tests. If you do have time, consider going through the course yourself.

Link – https://support.google.com/partners/answer/6089738?hl=en

Nine Analytics Tools You Can Use > SEO

One of the most important things you can do as a business owner who uses internet marketing is to study the numbers. Some people think analytics is boring, but in truth it can be very exciting to find the key to unlock higher conversions and higher return on investment.

Here are nine different analytics tools you can use.

1. Chartbeat – This cloud-based software is a little different than some of the other products out there. This company realizes that clicks are only part of the story. With this software you’ll know right away what content is working best on your website or blog.

Link – https://chartbeat.com/

2. Adobe Analytics – With this service you can gather deep insights in all your online activities, including mobile. Get to know each customer’s journey inside and out from A to Z with just a few clicks. You can conduct a 360 customer analysis, use predictive intelligence and more.

Link – http://www.adobe.com/marketing-cloud/web-analytics.html

3. Google Analytics – This is the original free analytics software which is definitely worth trying out. It offers so many features and benefits that it would be impossible to go over them all in this space. But, it would do your business good to learn it or hire a professional to help you with using the software.

Link – https://analytics.google.com/

4. Snowplow Analytics – This works on the idea of pipelines and with it you can view all customer interactions, monitor the performance of your business, and even respond to users in real time. You can track anything you want to track.

Link – http://snowplowanalytics.com/

5. Piwik – This is an open-source analytics tool that anyone can use. You and only you can see the information. You can self-host it or you can use it in the cloud. You’re in full control of your tests and analytics.

Link – https://piwik.org/

6. Clicky – Almost a million websites use Clicky to monitor their web analytics in real time. If you want to know how your website is performing in a simple way, this software works wonders to help you make the right choices.

Link – https://clicky.com/

7. KissMetrics – The analytics you can get from KissMetrics will help you become more customer centric as you learn what makes your customers tick. You’ll be able to optimize pages through testing and more. If you want to keep happy clients, this is great software to try.

Link – https://www.kissmetrics.com/home/

8. Woopra – You can use this software to track anonymous website and mobile app users even before they identify themselves and then after too. If you really want to get a good understanding of your customers and their buying cycle, try this software.

Link – https://www.woopra.com/

9. HubSpot Analytics – HubSpot offers an enormous amount for website owners and business owners in terms of analytics. The reports offer sales and marketing data in one spot for easier understanding.

Link – http://www.hubspot.com/products/analytics

Which software you choose to use depends on what your goals are. Plus, it depends on your own understanding and expertise when it comes to using the software. You might consider hiring a professional who is an expert in any of these software options so that you can get the most out of analytics.

A/B Testing with Google Analytics > SEO

A/B testing consists of having two versions of whatever you’re testing that are very slightly different. You then divide the traffic between the two versions and see which one converts at a higher rate. It seems simple enough but most marketers don’t even do it, even though it has shown time and again that website owners who conduct proper A/B testing experience higher conversions and a higher return on investment than those who don’t.

Create the Marketing Collateral

Whether it’s a sales page, newsletter landing page or something else entirely, create the designs in twos. You want to create two landing pages (A and B) that are slightly different. For example, perhaps each page has a different image on it, or a different headline, or perhaps a different buy/call to action button.

Upload the Pages to Your Site

You’ll need the URLs of the pages that you want to test. Make sure when you collect the URLs that you name each test page so that you know which one each URL is assigned to. Keep track of it all to ensure that you don’t get mixed up, so that your results will turn out accurately.

Set Your Goals

Obviously, your goal is to make more money and increase your return on investment. But, you will have many different conversion goals, such as newsletter sign-ups, freebie downloads, sales and more. Choose an “experimental objective” within Google Analytics to create your goals. You can find this under Behavior and Experiments. Just click “Create Experience” to get started.

Name Your Experiment

Choose names for your experiments so that you can identify which page is working best during the testing. Once you’ve done this you can set your goals under “objectives for this experiment”. You have several choices such as AdSense, ecommerce, and many other goal metrics. Choose the best one for your test.

Run the Test

Once you have it all set up and uploaded, you can let it run. Keep checking up on your statistics as often as you can; at first you may want to do it daily, then maybe weekly. Let it run long enough that you’re positive on which test, A or B, worked better.

Pick the Best Conversion Page

Remember that conversions and clicks are nice but money is the point. There are always possibilities that the most clicked and trafficked page is not the one that makes the most money. Therefore, it’s imperative to run the experiment long enough with enough variables to notice. For example, don’t sign people up for the same list even if the series is the same; that way you know which list is filled with either A or B respondents.

When you know what your goals are, and test to find out how accurate you have been designing sales pages and landing pages for your audience, you’ll soon get better at converting and making more money. Testing with Google Analytics is free and well worth it.