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Using a website analytics tool is an important part of a successful Internet marketing campaign. Analytics tools can help determine the success of your website, pay per click ads, or marketing campaigns by monitoring and analyzing Website traffic. When looking for an analytics solution for your company's Website, there is a lot to consider. One of the decisions you'll have to make is whether or not to use a free service, like Google Analytics, or a paid service, such as HitsLink. While free is always the best price, it's also true that you often get what you pay for.

In order to know what is best for you and your company's needs, you need to think about why you want to use analytics. Do you just want to track the number of visitors to your site, or do you want to maximize your site's effectiveness, understand visitor behavior, and track marketing campaign results?

If you just want to know the basics, and can't fit HitsLink into your budget, Google Analytics may be right for you. However, as you will see by the list below, there are many advantages of using HitsLink over Google Analytics.

The Benefits of Using HitsLink

• Unbiased results: Because Google makes most of their revenue from advertising, they have incentive to overstate their results. Google also profits from click fraud, meaning that they often won't report it or understate how much click fraud there is. Google is also biased when it comes to charging for AdWords. When using Google Analytics, Google knows how much you make with every click, and can charge you more if they know you are likely willing to pay it.

• Privacy: Google Trends will share (with your competition) your Website traffic, visitor locations, and the search terms used to find your Website. Their online Privacy Overview states that they collect personal information when you register for Google services, and can use that information for a variety of purposes, including auditing, research, and analysis. The Overview also states they may share that information with third parties.

• Google can use your data against you: When a customer visits your Website, Google stores the Website visit, and the keywords they searched for. The next time that customer gets online, there will be ads based on the data from their visit to your Website, meaning there will be ads from your competitors.

• Can prevent click fraud: Click fraud is a real danger when using pay per click (PPC) ads. Click fraud is where someone (or a computer program) clicks on a PPC ad for the sole purpose of generating a charge per click, without having any interest in actually visiting the site. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous companies are even paying people to sit and click PPC ads for this purpose. With the information about user details that HitsLink generates, they can track click fraud.

• Results in real-time: Google Analytics refreshes their results every 24 hours, while HitLinks refreshes results in real-time. So if you post a blog this afternoon and want to see how its doing by this evening, you can do that.

• Daily backups: HitsLink does daily backups of your data. Google offers no such guarantee on how often, or if at all, they backup your data.

• Customer support: The HitsLink support staff is available via email and phone, while Google does not offer any free customer support. Google Analytics support is only available to Google Partners for a fee.

• More detailed information: HitsLink provides more detailed information than Google Analytics does, which also helps monitor click fraud. HitsLink can provide you information on who visits your site, how they found you, how they navigate your site, whether or not they made a transaction on your site, and how effective your advertising is.

• Different versions to fit your needs: Depending on how much you want to spend, and what type of information your company needs regarding your website, there are three different versions of HitsLink available. There is HitsLink Professional - the basic package, HitsLink Enterprise, and the most comprehensive - HitsLink Platinum.

• Report customization: You can customize your report to suit your needs and make accessing your data easy. All charts have customization capabilities, and you can hide charts you don't need. There are different filters you can use and you can sort data in a way that makes it most usable for you.

While Google Analytics might be a good option for a small company with a small budget, for most businesses HitsLink is clearly the preferred option. While Google Analytics does provide you with some good information, the privacy issues and inaccurate results due to bias make this analytics tool not worth the risk. A tool like HitsLink can help you with the success of your Internet marketing campaign much more effectively than Google Analytics.

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