Web analytics is an integral part of any business intelligence portfolio and cannot be avoided in any decision-making phase. But it is perhaps most discussed among online marketers, who require it in order to make the best sales and marketing decisions.

These are often the same users who face a decision between paying for Web analytics tools and using free ones.

Since the time long ago when the release of the free Google Analytics tool created immense noise, significant differences between paid and free tools have emerged.

The biggest advantage of paid Web analytics solutions is the extensive support offered in terms of training, consultancy, and expert advice in measuring every aspect of your Website. Also, free tools normally just show trends and a summary-based view of the data. With paid analytics, it is possible to have much more graphical information, including a summary of data by date presented in dashboards.

The choice of free or paid depends on the intensity of your business. A personal blog or a nonprofit Website might be easily integrated with free Web analytics tools, such as Google’s or those available from BBClone, FireStats, 4Q, Grape Web Statistics, JAWStats, MochiBot, Piwik,Snoop, Woopra, Yahoo! Web Analytics, to name a few.

Free tools like these may well be sufficient for small and medium-sized businesses. And even for a large enterprise, free tools can act as prototypes to showcase the power and importance of eventually opting for paid Web analytics.

A corporate or enterprise Website, in contrast, may require data that can only be furnished by a paid Web analytics solution, such as those available from Clickstream, Clicky, Coremetrics,Lyris (formerly ClickTracks), Mint, Omniture, Unica, or WebTrends, to name a few.

Paid-for Website analytics from suppliers like these will help firms answer queries like the following:

• Which keyword(s) or referral source is giving me the best sales activity?
• Which geography is giving the best clicks and sales?
• Is organic search working well for me? Or is it the inorganic search giving more leads? (Note: Organic search refers results that appear automatically for free; inorganic search results are linked directly to ads or sponsored links.)
• Which is my best online marketing campaign?
• Who are my visitors in terms of geography, age, browsers, etc.?
• What areas of my Website are visitors most interested in?

These reports aren’t the end of what can be done with Website analytics. All the Web intelligence and insights drawn from these tools fall into the area of business intelligence. To be specific, I would call it Website business intelligence.

Users can create spreadsheets and presentations to showcase Website business intelligence. But suppliers offer help here, too. IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), for example, has partnered with WebTrends to deliver Web analytics through IBM’s WebSphere Portal Software, a corporate BI management and reporting system.

Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) and SAS Institute Inc. are in the Web business intelligence area, too: Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems has added the Sun Web Analytics Solution to Oracle’s kitty. And SAS has its own Web analystics tool.

The growing popularity of Web analytics tools is a clear indication of how important it is for any businesses to extract Web intelligence to optimize the user experience on corporate sites. Only Web analytics can help optimize online marketing campaigns while contributing valuable detail to business intelligence.

–Meer Irfan Ali

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I count my lucky stars that my fortunes don’t rely on SEO and PPC alone. I’m happy to be part of a couple of agencies with a full range of interactive and traditional marketing solutions. That means I don’t have to pretend like SEO and PPC always are the best choice for clients. They’re not.

I thought it might be refreshing to talk about when SEO and PPC are NOT a great choice for local businesses- but not just to discourage you- The reasons they don’t work can tell us something about the businesses, what they should do next, what makes a good business in a certain niche, and so on.

First, let’s think about what makes for success in search:

1. Relevant keywords
2. Prospects that convert
3. A competitive advantage or a not too competitive niche
4. Proportion of cost and revenue that creates positive ROI
5. Trackability that can prove that ROI

We’ll look at each of those in the ideal situation, and how problems in each can lead to marketing failures for local businesses.

1. How a Lack of Relevant Keywords Can Doom Search Efforts

I typically divide keywords into two groups:

• Brand names
• Category (general) keywords

The brand searches are the low hanging fruit. If a local business has a strong brand and repeat customers, there’s good ROI here. And you can make it even better by testing ads.

Category keywords could be vertical-related, offering-related, or geomodifiers. For a mexican restaurant, it could be “mexican food”,  “myrtle beach restaurant”, or “myrtle beach mexican restaurant”.

Where this breaks down:

–> If you get too long tail; for example, “myrtle beach mexican restaurant with California burritos” isn’t going to show evidence of volume in Google’s Keyword Tool.

–> If your vertical is too competitive, and you’re not near any geomodifiers that get search volume; e.g. a golf course in the boonies on the edge of Florida and Georgia might run into trouble- not committed enough to get good results from either state, not near a big golf tourism city, and “golf” itself is way too competitive in SEO and too expensive in PPC. Add in lack of brand recognition, and you’ve got an uphill battle that looks a lot like a sheer cliff.

–Brian Carter

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