If you want to determine the effectiveness of your advertising campaign, you can use Google analytics to track your sales and conversions. You can also benchmark your actual results against the thresholds you have previously established. You can trace actual transactions to your campaigns and keywords. Find out which of your keywords are the most efficient.

With the cross channeling and multimedia tracking tools, you can watch the internal site search of your visitors. You can begin to understand their intent, and what they are really looking for. You can also compare your site usage to those of your industry. Benchmark your key metrics against the aggregate performance metrics.

Being able to track your most lucrative geographic markets is invaluable if you are doing advertising in more than one location. You can track how effective your campaigns are within your different areas.

If one area is outshining another, you can research what is different, and make the necessary corrections. Another advantage of Google analytics is the ability to customize the style of the reports, and how they come to you. For instance, you can choose to dashboard your reports, so you do not need to filter though the data to find what you are looking for. The metrics you consider the most important can be placed in an easy to use report for you. You can also set up the reports to be e-mailed to you when there is a significant change that occurs.

One concern that some website developers have had with Google analytics is the possible privacy issues.

They feel that Google may be sharing private information to others in their sales effort. They feel that if they use Google analytics to track their information, the proverbial “big brother” may be watching them. Still, the ease of use, the ease of implementation, and the amount of information available makes Google analytics a viable tool that you should consider using.