The Internet is a successful marketplace because of its ability to measure everything from advertising to consumer behavior. Prior to the Internet, information about what your consumer thought and how they acted was largely unattainable outside of the bottom line. In the past, every new advertising campaign and product introduction was a roll of the dice. In contrast, the Internet is an accountable world where upgrades are easily implemented and tested using tracking tools. Best yet, most consumer tracking tools are free or inexpensive. Start using these tools and you can constantly measure your customer’s behavior and improve your online profitability.

Google Analytics is Your New Best Friend

Google In-page Analytics is perhaps the best free tool for measuring your customer’s behavior. Google Analytics tells you when your customers are coming to your site, how long they are staying and what they are buying. Then it collects and tracks all this data for you over time. Using Analytics allows you to directly track and correlate website changes with sales. On the Internet making a sale is known as a “conversion.” Google Analytics is easy to implement and use. Google Funnels and Google’s Website Optimizer are also excellent tools that will help you optimize your website and increase your sales.

Beat the Competition with the Heat

Heat Maps are the next level in consumer tracking. Heat Maps are excellent for telling you all the things you can’t see with Analytics. Heat Maps use visual tracking tools placed within the site that show you exactly what your customers are doing once they get to your website. Click Density, CrazyEgg and ClickTale are some of the best Heat Map providers on the Internet. For example, ClickTale actually provides videos of your customer’s behavior making it possible to experience your website through a viewer’s eyes. An awkwardly placed action point is easily seen using Heat Maps.

I’ll have another post shortly with some more great tools.