Beyond Website Analytics: Tools For Helping Measure 'Other Things'

Online marketing now involves a lot more than websites and search results. Any successful company using the web as part of their sales process needs to start analyzing the “other things.” So to help, let’s examine some useful tools for measuring the benefits of other areas of the Internet.

E-mail Tools

All good companies should use an e-mail program that allows them to measure and develop success. Most advanced and paid e-mail services will allow you to develop e-mail cycles. I’m partial to Eloqua, but many others do the same thing.

You need to track open rates, but beyond that the subject line that helps increase them and its message should help you filter your lists into more granular groups that can have specific marketing sent to them. Many people just leave their lists in one big group and send out the same message to them all. Good e-mail marketers know this is a waste of their valuable commodity that they have paid a lot to build.

Eloqua and companies like them allow you to develop flowcharts that automate a lot of this process. Add this to your marketing efforts and you’ll soon see the benefits to your bottom line.

Copy-and-Paste Tracker

Tynt tracks content copied and pasted from your website. It has even impressed Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik — he uses it on his website.

Given the majority of copy and paste is used to add information in e-mails, this tool is invaluable. It can be used anywhere and has a few benefits.

As an analytics tool, it allows you to track what content from your website is being grabbed — good info if you want to make decisions on generating more. It also automatically includes a link back to your site, so it helps link building and generates traffic back to your site.

Social Media Tools

The popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and social media in general means good marketers should be active in this area. But measuring success can be difficult and what to look at needs to be worked out on an individual basis.

There are a bunch of tools out there for Twitter, and they’re even developing some of their own. The ones I use are Hootsuite, Tweetburner, and Twitalyzer.

You can get away with using one or two — I’ve used them all as they were the ones in place by clients. Basically, you get the ability to track who retweets your URLs and how many people open and share them beyond that — invaluable to help develop closer relationships with social influencers in your group, as well as strategic terms being used, when your brand is mentioned, and much more.

Understanding the impact of social media on your marketing efforts will only become more important as more people start using them as sources of information.

Facebook tools are out there but the app they developed themselves — Facebook Insights — will give you more than enough information to help improve your marketing efforts.

There are many other tools to help measure the areas beyond basic website analytics. If you want to suggest others, please add them in the comments.

But I strongly recommend you start using something to track these “other things” as their place in the online marketing world is only growing larger. Hopefully you find these tools helpful. Good luck!

Join us for SES San Francisco August 16-20, 2010 during ClickZ’s Connected Marketing Week. The festival is packed with sessions covering PPC management, keyword research, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, ad networks and exchanges, e-mail marketing, the real time web, local search, mobile, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization and usability, while offering high-level strategy, keynotes, an expo floor with 100+ companies, networking events, parties and more!