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Because Knowledge is Power!: Image from CainsBrain.com
It doesn’t matter if you’re fighting the Cobra Commando or making business decisions, the real American hero said it best: Knowledge is power.
If you write a blog for fun, seeing who’s coming and going is really just great for curiosity’s sake (it’s nice to know you’re not just yammering to yourself!). If your website is a core part of your business and you want to improve conversion, a great analytics program to capture traffic is an absolute must.
Understanding how people are reaching your site (particularly the keywords that draw your current audience from search engines), how many people are visiting and when, what they’re doing while they’re on your site and where you lose them – is vital to any business, be it an e-store or a simple website.
Early in the year, Mashable did a nice run-down of various website analytic programs that would be useful in content marketing.
Of those, some of the most popular sites that let your track online traffic are:
Google Analytics: Robust, popular, free and especially great if you’ve monetized your blog with AdSense.
Clicky: One of the best web traffic analytics available as far as customization and the variety of stats you can gather. A limited version is available for free, but the full meal deal of tools are available through plans that range from $30 to $300 per year.
Chartbeat: It’s very pretty (if you love a nice graph, Chartbeat delivers!), offers real-time stats, has a host of big-name clients (Huffington Post and The Onion to name a couple) and is $10 a month. Between it and Clicky, it represents some of the best web analytics you can get to monitor your content marketing.
StatCounter: Free with paid upgrades available, StatCounter let’s you dig deep into the activities of each visitor while they’re on your site. A favorite of bloggers looking for insight.
WordVision: This is a tool from ideaLaunch that’s great to use in conjunction with one of these web analytic programs as it’s focus is on measuring SEO content. Through it, you can build your keywords, input your content marketing pieces and see how you compare to your top competitors.
Tags: analytics
[...] A search field on a website is the next best thing to a mind-reading device. Analytic programs that track how visitors arrived at your website are really important – but so is understanding what they’re doing while they’re [...]