Search engine marketing is often quite a difficult commercial activity to measure. Changes can be very slight, but you need to be able to react instantaneously in order to optimise opportunities and prevent major slippage. This is where analytics comes in very handily indeed.

There are analytics packages aplenty to choose from, one of the more popular being Google's own free software - conveniently called Analytics. Each one embeds itself within your website, hidden within the Meta and out of the vision of all visitors. From this position it is able to map the movements of all your visitors, including where they originated from, the keywords used, how long they stayed on your site, the pages they visited and where they left from. In short, it tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

When it comes to optimising your website and marketing it to the wider world, you need to have as much information at your disposal as possible. In order to understand how to get yourself targeted visitors, you first have to understand what it is that these people are actually looking for. Similarly, if you are attracting good levels of traffic to your site, but just aren't able to convert that traffic into sales then you need to find out why. Analytics may help you to shine some light on this.

Of course Analytics is only as good as the person using it. If you have very little understanding of the software you're using and how to read the results, it is going to be of little value other than to track the number of hits you're receiving. To gain the real benefits, you need to go much deeper and really examine the feedback. There are nuggets of information in there, you just need to get in there and dig around.

It is also extremely useful for monitoring specific campaigns. If you have a marketing promotion or specific Pay per Click campaign in operation for a page, you will be able to see what the effects of this are on your traffic levels. If you have invested a significant amount in an email campaign, make sure you give it a trackable URL and then set aside a special goal to ascertain whether or not it was a success.

In truth, analytics is one of the most all-encompassing tools a Search Engine Marketer or a Search Engine Optimisation expert could ever hope for. Whilst it won't tell you what exactly you should be doing to a site to improve it for visitors, it will at least provide you with a helpful nudge in the right direction.

In the most part the software is free, discreet and can be easily tailored to meet your requirements. Of course there are pay versions that will offer some more bespoke, advanced features, but for the majority of Internet marketers, that just isn't necessary. The software is versatile and can be used to find out exactly where your site is being most effective and where developments can be made. This too can roll over to your external marketing efforts and highlight the pages that ought to be promoted with greater gusto.

If you aren't marketing orientated, don't have the time or the resources, then you might want to get some professional assistance for your analytics as well as other areas of your website's marketing. It requires a great deal of understanding and certainly shouldn't be taken lightly, but there are plenty of people out there who can help you get the very most out of analytics.

So if you're struggling with SEO, SEM or PPC, get analytics installed on your site and start getting some real-time feedback on how everything is going. To achieve the level of targeting you need to really succeed, it is impossible to consider not using some kind of analytics package.