As the web site itself states, "Hoover's, Inc., delivers comprehensive company, industry, and market intelligence that drives business growth." When you first visit the Hoover's web site, you will see a search box and drop-down box. These boxes allow you to search the following: a company via its name or ticker symbol, an executive's name, industry keywords, news or press releases, or a report. If you search for a company, your result will look similar to the image below:



Although this information can be somewhat useful, it isn't extremely valuable. However, Hoover's does offer tools that companies of any size can benefit from. In addition to some of the free features which can be found on the homepage, the three main tools offered by Hoover's are listed below, along with a description of what they are capable of accomplishing.

Hoover's Online Subscriptions

Whether you are an individual, small to medium business or large enterprise, Hoover's has an online subscription that can work for you. An online subscription is the best feature Hoover's has to offer.

Before I go into anymore details, take a look at the Hoover's Tour. This tour is the best way to familiarize yourself with what Hoover's has to offer and how it can help you expand your business.


Now that you've taken at a look of some of the things that a Hoover's subscription has to offer, here are some of the key informational features of the different Hoover's subscriptions:




As mentioned above, there are four levels of Hoover's subscriptions. Here's a basic rundown of what is available with each subscription level:



If you are interested in trying out a Hoover's subscription and seeing what it can teach you about your competition, customers and prospects, you can fill out the contact form. Once Hoover's receives your contact form, a representative will contact you to help you determine which subscription will be the most beneficial for your company.

Hoover's Data Subscriptions

Similar to the online subscriptions discussed above, data subscriptions allow content re-distributors and enterprise level customers to directly integrate business information within their specific information infrastructure. With this service, you can customize and easily access everything from nearly 17 million detailed company records to information about 2 million high level business decision makers to taxonomies for close to 600 industries.

Once again, to take advantage of this wealth of competitive knowledge, you simply fill out a contact form and a Hoover's representative will discuss the matter further with you.

Hoover's Books



Each year, Hoover's publishes the Hoover's Handbook series. The complete series of books, which includes four Hoover's Handbooks, covers 2,550 of the world's largest, fastest-growing and most influential public and private companies. The complete set of four handbooks costs $495.00, while the individual handbooks range in price from $150 to $240.

Hoover's also offers the Rich Register, which profiles 4,700 individuals with a net worth greater than $25 million. The Rich Register can be used to find wealthy potential customers or donors. It can be purchased for $324, and is available on CD-ROM or as a hardcover book.

When you first visit the Compete.com, you are meet with the image above. If you enter the URL of your web site (or any web site you are interested in), you will see something similar to the following:



This image is known as a Snapshot and provides a rough estimate of a web site's monthly traffic volume. According to the Compete.com FAQ, the traffic estimates are based on the browsing habits of over two million US internet users. Compete's data comes from several sources, including the Compete Toolbar (which is also included in the Search Status Toolbar for Firefox), Opt-In Panels, ISPs and ASPs.

Although the single Snapshot does not provide a lot of value for web site owners, the real beauty of Compete is the ability to use Snapshots to compare your web site to your competitors, as demonstrated below:



As you can see, Compete allows unregistered users to compare up to three web sites, and if you create a free account, you can compare up to five web sites (another advantage of creating an account is that you can save Snapshots to view at a later time.).



When you are comparing your web site to others, you can use the buttons above to toggle between different information, including:

Visitors
People Counts - Monthly
Rank - Monthly
Visits - Monthly

Engagement
Attention - Daily
Attention - Monthly
Average Stay - Monthly
Pages/Visits - Monthly

Growth
Velocity - Daily

Although no click-sharing web site is completely accurate, Compete's data can be used to get a rough estimate of how your traffic volume compares to your competitors.

In addition to using Snapshots to evaluate your competition, Compete is also in the process of creating Search Analytics, which will allow you to look at the following data:

Crazy Egg is the ingenious invention of the talented team over at Pronet Advertising. In a nutshell, Crazy Egg allows you to actually see exactly where the visitors to your web site are clicking. For those of you that hate staring at numbers all day, Crazy Egg is literally a gift from above.



Before you read the rest of this review, I recommend that you try out the live Crazy Egg demo for yourself. After playing around with the demo, it will be easier for you to follow the rest of my review.

Now that you have had a little hands-on experience for yourself, let's look at the features of Crazy Egg.

The team behind this product definitely knows the importance of usability, because Crazy Egg is one of the simplest analytics products available. To set it up, simply choose a page from your web site that you would like to track and paste one line of Javascript into the page's source code. Once this is complete, you can head back to Crazy Egg and start checking out your results.



As you have probably already discovered from the screenshots and demo, Crazy Egg has several different options for viewing data. In fact, Crazy Egg has four different viewing options: Heatmap, Confetti, Overlay and List. From personal experience, I recommend using all four options when analyzing your data. Each option provides unique advantages (for example, Confetti allows you to find out information such as the source of traffic or the user's OS for clicks, while List places all of your data in an exportable CSV format). By viewing your data in the different formats, you can utilize Crazy Egg to its full potential.



In addition to multiple viewing options, Crazy Egg also packs some other great features. Whether you have a free or paid membership, you can block clicks from specific IP addresses (such as your own), archive reports for each "test" that you run and receive updates about your data via email and/or RSS. For those with a paid subscription (which starts as low as nine dollars a month), you also can share your reports with clients or colleagues via a Crazy Egg subdomain. Additionally, your stats are updated in real-time (free memberships have a three to six hour delay).

For those of you who are interested in trying Crazy Egg (which should be everyone reading this review), here's a breakdown of their pricing scale for memberships:



From personal experience and a search of other Crazy Egg reviews, the only criticism is the inability to drop the code into a template and track every page on a web site. However, this is a minor issue, and I highly recommend giving Crazy Egg a try. Chances are, you will start off with the free membership, but if you're like me, it won't take long for the program to convince you to upgrade to a higher level membership!

Google Analytics is one of my favorite programs for tracking data and statistics about my web sites. Not only is it free, but it displays all my data in an easy to digest format, and has a lot of advanced features and functions that really help me analyze my web sites' performance.

Once you log into to your Google account, you can easily create a profile for each web site that you want to track. Each time you create a new profile, Google provides you with a small chunk of Javascript. All you need to do is paste this Javascript onto each page (or template) that you want to track (the code should be pasted right above the closing BODY tag).

Once your pages have been updated, Google will tell you that it is Receiving Data. Within approximately twenty-four hours, Google will start display statistics about your web site.



The statistics above are known as the Dashboard. This is the view that Google shows each time you view an analytics report. I find this to be very convenient, because it allows you to quickly look over all your major statistics.

One of the Analytics high points is that it allows you to view all of your historical data. By default, Dashboard shows one month of data, but you can easily click the arrow and choose a custom date range, as demonstrated in the screen shot below:



Although the Dashboard may be all you look at the majority of the time, there are other times when you really need to analyze specific aspects of your web site, such as the traffic sources. The easiest way to do this is to click the View Report button underneath the set of data that you desire. This will take you to an advanced page that allows you to see more detailed statistics, ranging from sources of traffic to what browsers your visitors are using.

Another one of this program's strong points is the ability to define goals. In my opinion, this is essential for utilizing an analytics program to its fullest. A goal is simply a method for measuring conversions that take place on your web site. You can define a goal as anything from viewing a specific page to completing a lengthy survey. To learn more about goals, you can read this post by Analytics Talk (and also view the fourth video tutorial in the series listed below).

Although I can spend all day typing out the specific things that you can analyze with Google Analytics, Ian from Conversational Marketing has five great video tutorials that cover the following topics: Basics, Essential Stats, Digging Deeper, Goals and Search Analytics. He also has a video tutorial that explains some of the latest features in Google's newest version of Analytics.

The last major point I feel deserves attention is the ability to integrate AdWords with the Analytics program. If you are running an AdWords campaign, you can find out how to tie your accounts together here, and you can also view one of Google's videos about the kind of analytical data that they can provide for your PPC campaigns.

As with any program (especially those that are free), there are some downsides to Google Analytics. However, I believe they are minimal to the benefits that it provides. Obviously, the biggest concern among the internet marketing community is the level of data privacy that Google Analytics provides. Although Matt Cutts has stated that his team does not use the data, and he is relatively confident that the rest of Google does not use it, there will probably always be a certain degree of trust issues about this data.

In addition to this potential downside, there are really only two other issues. The first is that although it offers a lot of data, Analytics does not have some of the extremely detailed custom reports that paid solutions offer. Also, direct support for this product is minimal, but once again, that is to be expected from a free product.

Overall, I think Google Analytics is a great program. It provides lot of data, stores your data overtime and is free for anyone to use. I personally use it on all of my web sites, except for the experimental ones that may potentially push the envelope a little too much. If your team has not tried out Google Analytics, I recommend looking through the resources I have provided and giving it a shot yourself.

Feel free to add your personal experiences or additional/advanced questions you may have about GA.

You could have all the analytic tools, PPC bid maximization services and website monitoring services in the world, yet sometimes things are just not going to add up.

Inspite of all the automation you might have in place, you just can't manage a successful search engine marketing campaign without logging in daily to your accounts and studying the numbers.

Consider this scenario experienced by one of our pharma clients:




Two ad creatives, both created at the same time (4 days ago), campaign is setup to automatically rotate between the ads.

Thanks to data from another campaign, we know ad #2 converts a lot better than ad #1, yet regardless of how high we're pushing the daily budget, Google refuses to show ad #2 (End Impotence Fast)

Although both ads show as 'Active', when we tried pausing ad #1, nothing was showing up for the selected keywords.

The reason?

Google AdWords, similar to Yahoo Panama keeps a third status per each ad creative and keyword. That third status is "Active - Approved".

Unlike Yahoo and MSN, Google keeps its editor approval process behind the scenes. Where Yahoo and MSN will specifically show you a certain keyword/ad has not been approved, Google's interface hides the fact that certain keywords or ad are under review.

In the example above, ad #2 has not been approved by Google yet, more than likely due to the word "impotence" flagging a 'manual-approval-required' trigger.

The conclusion: Login to your accounts daily, download the data to an Excel spreadsheet, sort and study the numbers daily. Understand the rational behind the numbers and tweak ads/keywords until you get the desired results. Don't have time to do this? Hire an Internet Marketing agency.

Here are some tips on cutting through Google's manual approval process -

1. Every time you touch a keyword CPC or edit an ad, it will go through a script that checks your landing page and keywords against a master database. If you're not happy with the price you have to pay per click or if one of your ads is still not showing after a week, try editing it and understand this takes your ad/keyword through the cycle again.

2. Make sure the keyword you're going after appears on the target landing page. Hint: You could auto-generate it based on the user search query

3. Avoid any HTTP redirects on your landing page. Make the landing page appear like a credible source and not another made-for-adsense site.

Although many web masters view them as worthless or time consuming, analytics are one of the best tools for increasing the conversion rate of your web site.

Analytics are basically a way for your visitors to communicate directly with you. Google offers a free Analytics tool which can provide a wealth of information about your visitors.

Once you have signed up for a Google Analytics account, you can setup a profile for each of your web sites. Google will provide you with a special tracking code for each web site. This code can be added to the bottom of every page that you want to be tracked. Once this code has been added and validated, the Analytics program will begin displaying information about your visitors within one day.

Google Analytics can be used with or without Adwords. Regardless of whether you use Adwords, Analytics can provide you with the number of page views and visits everyday, where they are from, whether they are a new or returning visitors and what source brought them to your web site. Additionally, Analytics shows you the top five keywords that brought traffic to your site, along with the top five pages that they entered and exited on. The more knowledge that you have about your audience, the better you can provide them with the design and content that they want.

Whether you plan on starting a PPC campaign or just need a reliable way to track your web site statistics and improve your users’ experience, Google Analytics has the tools that you desire.

Analytics can be as basic and simple as you want, or as technical and cutting edge as you can handle. The important thing is that you give it a shot and see what a quality Analytics program can do for your web site.