There are a significant number of web analytics packages on the market today. But, when Google entered the market about a year ago through their purchase of Urchin, they changed the face of the game by offering a relatively robust stats package at zero cost (it’s in some ways similar to how Google used Gmail’s extremely large storage capacity to make Hotmail and Yahoo!’s premium e-mail offerings obsolete).

Besides the fact that it is free and tracks an extensive number of metrics, Google Analytics makes a lot of sense if you are using AdWords because it integrates nicely with it.

I do want to note that here at Viget Labs we are big fans of WebSideStory’s HBX Analytics package (which costs money) and have a significant number of clients that we help leverage it. HBX allows you to dig a little deeper and, from our perspective, offers the ability to segment audience a bit more finely (and more easily). Still, if you just want to get up and running with a stats package - almost as a taste test for learning what web analytics is all about - Google Analytics is a great place to start.

Below follow a couple of resources:

Conversion University

http://www.google.com/analytics/conversionuniversity.html

Google Analytics Blog

http://analytics.blogspot.com/

Help

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/

That is the question for many of today’s businesses and organizations. And, it is a difficult one regardless of the shape and size of your company.

There is no “quick fix” for determining if blogging is right for you. I’ve worked with organizations with less than twenty people and thinking through their blog strategy was still very tough work.

A simple place to start is to answer the following questions.

What is my goal with blogging? What benefit(s) - if any - will blogging yield to my web efforts?

It would be easy to rattle off things like help with Search Engine Optimization, develop potential sales leads, or increase transparency with customers.  But, that’s not the whole story.

Charlene Li provides a nice framework for thinking through blog strategy, or more specifically on how to calculate the ROI of blogging.  She notes that, along with goals (benefits), come costs and risks.  After identifying these three elements, she writes:

“… simply divide the benefits by the costs + risks to arrive at the ROI. The key is what to use it for – it’s not enough, I believe, to use the ROI calculation only to justify a blog. It should also be used to manage and optimize the performance of the blog on an ongoing basis.”

Her research in this area is not yet complete; but, her post provides more than considerable first steps in quantifying blogging ROI.

Today’s Washington Post has an article (”For Ted Leonsis, a Quest to Find Himself Faster Online”) on Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL and owner of the Washington Capitals. It describes how he launched his personal blog, Ted’s Take, initially in an effort to control the results in Google on a search of his name (previously, results were “a hodgepodge of news stories"). It’s an interesting summary of using a blog and an intuitive SEO strategy to establish a specific reputation online. Here are the steps Ted followed:

1. Define the blog - he decided the blog would be both personal and professional, presumably to reach the widest audience.


2. Write often - Ted notes that frequency of updates is an important ranking factor, and often posts several times per day.


3. Link out - The article implies that outbound links help ranking, but that’s primarily because they help ...


4. … Encourage Links In - By linking to other popular bloggers like fellow sports team owner Mark Cuban, Ted’s earned links back to his blog, which both drives direct traffic and represents “votes of approval” in Google’s indexing algorithm.


5. Name drop - Ted hints that his keyword strategy is to use the names of the famous people he deals with regularly in his posts and tags, presumably so that searches on those names will return his blog. That’s a challenging approach, though we’ve managed to make some good headway with a similar SEO strategy for ExecutiveBiz with their weekly “Executive Spotlight” feature.

With a Technorati rank of 12,390 as of today (compared to Cuban’s 107), Ted clearly has some room to make his blog more popular. That said, since Ted’s Take ranks #2 in Google search results for his name (behind AOL’s corporate bio), Ted’s primary objective has been achieved.

Ted told the story of launching his blog at an ExecutiveBiz event last May, where he described his motivation as more based on his curiosity and general interest in how Google works than any elaborate personal marketing strategy. During that talk he also gave a great overview of Web 2.0 and how it fits in at AOL. You can watch the entire Ted Leonsis / ExecutiveBiz Web 2.0 event video here.