It is quite unbelievable that most companies and business owners still think that being online is just about creating a website and forgetting about it. As most people already know, creating a website is just the very first step of many, many more steps in creating a successful marketing strategy. In fact, nowadays, some marketing gurus do not even use a website to promote products or services.

OpenSource Analytics

All is good and great as far as creating a website and promoting it goes. But that is far from it. There are several tools to measure the marketing efforts. It is vitally important to measure every single thing done online, otherwise, there is a big possibility that our efforts may go in vane.

Some people focus too much in the size of the marketing strategy (I’ve got 300 pages in my site! Where are the sales?…), and while that is still important, not optimizing every little bit of it, means that you may be wasting too much precious money.

Be sure to check out google analytics

It is a complex skill, that includes some common sense and a lot of experience and knowledge to develop. Yes, I’m talking about analytics. There are several analytics programs available, open source and paid. Google Analytics is still the tool of choice for most webmasters, nonetheless, it sometimes necessary to have more than one method and cross reference everything is not an overstatement. Most tools are imprecise, therefore, they must be used with a bit of care and a lot of smarts. Google is one of the best in the market and it is absolutely free! It even has a huge instruction booklet that you may read to learn about proper usage. I do recommend you read it, as this tool can provide countless possibilities if used properly.

Lastly, a real marketing campaign should always consider research. This research is done through analytics. Perform minor changes, and verify the results. Works… keep it. Doesn’t work… go back ASAP.

In short, a couple of tools highly recommended are Piwik and of course, Google Analytics. Check them out, and if you get lost, give me a shout or leave your comments or questions below.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

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