Marketing can prove to be expensive and it is often difficult to accurately calculate your ROI. This is especially true with pay-per-click marketing and inteet marketing/advertising in general.

There are services and software programs available to aid in this task. The problem with many of these types of solutions is that they tend to be expensive or require a subscription with a minimum commitment. If you really do your homework, you might even be able to find one free but I doubt that it will provide you with the detail required to get an accurate view of the relationship between your marketing/advertising and your web site traffic/e-commerce stats.

Well, now there is a very nice solution available. It is from Google.com. The name of the service is Google Analytics. This service is astoundingly detailed and in many cases, too detailed (if that is possible). What makes it even more attractive is that it is FREE! That�s right FREE! At first I was hesitant to try it out but I figured I had nothing to lose.

I signed up for this service a few months back. I had to add a simple script to my web site to enable the information gathering. The reporting provided by this service is absolutely amazing. Here are just some of the reports you can view (almost real time) from the service:

- Daily Visitors
- Visits & Pageview Tracking
- Goal Conversion Tracking
- Absolute Unique Visitors
- Visitor Loyalty
- Visitor Recency
- Top Content
- Content Drilldown
- Content by Titles
- Page Query Terms
- Depth of Visit
- Length of Visit
- Browser Versions
- Platform Versions
- Browser & Platform Combos
- Screen Resolutions
- Screen Colors
- Languages
- Java Enabled
- Flash Version
- Connection Speed
- Hostnames
- New vs Retuing
- Referring Source
- Geo Location
- Geo Map Overlay
- Network Location
- Language
- Domains
- Campaign Conversion
- Source Conversion
- Medium Conversion
- Referral Conversion
- Campaign ROI
- Source ROI
- Medium ROI

The list goes on from there. I continue to be amazed at the information I can gather from this fabulous service. What amazes me even more is that there is little talk of it. I have seen it pop up on blog sites here and there but no major marketing seems to be in place by Google.

It�s worth your time to visit the site and take a look. Remember it�s FREE! You don�t have anything to lose except the money you could be wasting in marketing and advertising!

http://www.google.com/analytics

Aaron Davis is the founder of PrayerChain Software, LLC. He has been a web/application developer for more than 12 years. His specialty is .NET development with C# and SQL Server. PrayerChain is about to launch their new site as well as Web Framework 2.0. PrayerChain Software develops custom application frameworks designed to aid in rapid web/application development. http://www.prayerchainsoftware.com