There are several analytics services on the market to help you gauge your web site’s traffic and overall popularity. But if all you really want to know is how you are faring against your biggest competitors, there’s a new, but very big kid on the block.

Google Trends for websites is essentially a tool for showing how popular your website is. It generates a snapshot of site traffic and compares results with (up to 4) other sites. Instantly see:

• daily unique visitors (with graph)

• where they are located

• what other sites they have visited

• what they are searching for (by terms)

Google Trends is free and available to Google accounts holders (which is also free). See if your big competitor offline is really your biggest competitor online by comparing the number of unique visitors. Find out what search terms your visitors are typing beside your brand name, then reevaluate your SEM strategy. You can even identify stealth competitors by seeing what other sites your visitors flock to.

So whether you’re looking for competitive intelligence or just plain curious, check out Google Trends for websites and see where your site stands.

Every website generates a mountain of data. Every visit, every click can be recorded, then sifted, analyzed, and parsed. Oh, you can find out what your visitors are doing.

Just not why they’re doing it. To do that, you have to ask them. That’s the need served by 4Q. It’s a free, 4 question survey tool. When visitors arrive at your site, they are presented with an invitation to participate in a survey after their session. If they accept, a second, minimized window, which contains the survey itself, is launched and waits in the background for the visitor to complete the site visit (see the overview video).

Sign up, create your survey, generate the survey code, place it on your site, and then you’re ready to go. Go on. Don’t you want to know more about why your site visitors do what they do?

Sometimes a speedy answer that’s at least directionally accurate is better than a slow one that’s definite.

One way to reach everyone in a poll is to use text messaging, as you’ll see in StrawPoll, built using Twitter. It’s a simple system that sends out a poll question per day and then lets you respond and have your vote counted by replying with a text message. Here’s how you can see it in action. Sign up for a Twitter account. Choose to “follow” the StrawPoll by simply clicking on the follow button. Then, all you have to do is wait to be notified of the next question. Once you receive it, reply by twittering “@strawpoll” .” This system will capture the results. What’s interesting here isn’t seeing which is the more important superhero power, flight or invisibility.

It’s getting a glimpse into how you might use a tool like this one to gather information from your customers, your employees, or your channel partners. Don’t you think that you would benefit from more input to help make the right decisions?

Sometimes it’s hard to really define how much your customers need your product or service without doing a little bit of analysis up front.

Here’s some inspiration for everyone who maybe needed a bit more time in high school typing class - Keybr.com.

Use this simple but engaging example of a typing test to inspire you to think about what sort of test you might administer online. When you gather customer data, you instantly have something to talk about, an opportunity to invite your customer to contact you, or even a chance to sell something right there. For this site, it would probably make sense to sell typing software, typing lessons, or even access to a typing service.

If you’re skeptical about how using testing can help you understand a customer need, maybe you need … a free marketing checkup?

None of us like it, but we know it’s true. When we take a test and get a grade, what tends to stick with us is what we got wrong. Could your sales force use some help retaining what’s important about your brand or product?

Maybe it’s time to create selling information pop quizzes using Zoho Challenge. This free service lets you create and manage online tests - mostly multiple choice and descriptive questions. Test takers see a standard form (much like an online survey), but with this service you can also apply a time limit. Results are displayed immediately. While your sales force might need a refresher course, you could of course use this tool wherever you would like to ensure that product knowledge is up to snuff. Maybe even the call center.

If you’re managing a brand and want to guarantee that its essence is communicated consistently at every customer touchpoint, here’s an easy way.

For many people, it’s a real mystery as to what you can and can’t track on a website. Most of the modern analytics tools rely on a script found on each page to provide information about who clicked where (and when!). This approach works well and is easy to implement. However, with outlinks (links that go beyond your site), they tend to drop the ball.

Now you can answer the “where did they go” question, thanks to Google analytics. We’ve covered this free analytics package before (see Follow the Yellow Brick Road), but there’s a lot underneath the covers. If you’re wondering where your site visitors are going, first, set up Google Analytics. Then, make sure that all of your outlinks are coded according to these instructions - you may need your webmaster to make it happen. Then, when you pull up your account, drill down into top content and you will be able to track activity to these links (even to some of our favorite mad scientists).

Remember, this tool is free, so there’s no reason not to know. Why not get it loaded up and start analyzing where your customers are going … today?

There’s always been a fork in the road when it comes to developing a site that sells. While the Flash animation path is engaging and sometimes slick, it has always been very difficult to measure. For this reason, many sites that are serious about tracking usage have gone the other way.

Thanks to tools like MochiBot, you can now track the performance of flash-based website content. As you’ll see in this demo, by embedding a code in your flash content, this free tracking tool will keep you apprised of precisely how many people are viewing your animation, no matter where it goes. While embedding the special code will require the assistance of a friendly flash guru, you’ll at last be able to get a sense of how often a site visitor might view your animation. This tool doesn’t answer everything you would want to know, but it’s a great start.

We have a flash animation that we just love and hope you do too. Up until now, we’ve had no idea how many times our visitors have seen it. We won’t be wondering anymore.

giants that exist today and why the banks we remember from our youth . . . have disappeared. The concept is cross-selling. While there are some great examples of the concept being more than an illusion, nearly everyone has a lot of work to do to really make it happen.

If you’re ready to figure out exactly how to do that, Offermatica offers the tools that can help you answer two simple, but important questions. First, what products should I cross-sell, when? Second, where (on the site) and how (what creative) should I execute a cross-sell? Much like our conversation about site optimization in The Dating Game, this system lets you identify the variables in the equation. Then, as traffic visits and you gather data about all of the potential scenarios, the system will narrow the potential choices down to the best one. It uses the power of the web and your flow of traffic to optimize how you sell.

As they describe in this e-tailing related article, the benefit is real - more sales, profit, and share. And, since you’re really just optimizing the revenue that you get from existing customers, it’s often the most efficient way to improve your results. Don’t let the numbers or process scare you. There’s no reason to be guessing.

Every website creates new data with every click. With everything else you have to manage, how can you not get overwhelmed, while staying on top of what’s happening?

While there are many options for web analysis (see Follow the yellow brick road), try Mint if you’re looking for an option that’s very user friendly and up to the minute. Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program, with a flexible dashboard that lets you view site visits, referrers, popular pages and searches all at once (see the live demo). The best analytics tool isn’t doing you any good if no one is looking at it.

Mint is something of a DIY option, requiring the addition of script on each of your web pages and the download of software to your server. A license is available for a flat fee of $30 for each installation. While there are free analysis tools (and one that’s much anticipated but not yet here from Microsoft ) and more expensive versions, consider Mint if a simple interface will get more people to pay attention.

While we don’t like to admit it, sometimes the best ideas can come from studying competitors or similar industries. That said, how much have you learned from your competitors by analyzing the technology of their website?

One tool that will give you some insight is builtwith.com. All you do is plug in competitor sites and see what turns up. For example, let’s say you’re in the news publishing business and want to analyze the CNN site to see what makes it tick. You learn that CNN is using Omniture’s SiteCatalyst for analysis, Doubleclick for advertising placements, and Scriptaculous for javascript libraries.

Hmm, if these are good enough for CNN, might they be something to consider for your site?

Do you know what your customer is thinking while using your website?  Well, that’s nearly impossible. But, given the rage of ethnography in marketing research, what if you had the ability to get instantaneous feedback by watching not only their actions on the screen, but also their expressions as they point and click?

Techsmith’s Morae software gives you the ability to do just that.  Via the internet and this software, you can now identify precisely where your web site fails your customers - causing everything from abandoned shopping carts to expensive conversations with the call center.  With Morae for usability testing, you can gather all of the data you need, including wrinkled brows and expletives. To see some of the Morae software in action, check out their online demo or view a few screen shots of some of the new features available.

For $1495 you can get the Morae bundle (1 manager, 1 recorder and 1 observer) to create one usability station, through which you can rotate an unlimited number of users. It’s not super cheap, but smart players like E-trade, eBay, and Expedia use it.  What’s your plan for delivering the optimal user experience?

We know better than anyone that you can only handle so many emails a day (have you seen the signup for the weekly feed growth! journal). With the explosion of web content, the best way to stay on top of what’s hot in the blogosphere is to use an RSS reader as we described in Bring it on. If you are trying to grow a business with help from a blog, of course you need to create an RSS feed so that your customers or prospects can subscribe.

Assuming you’ve made this basic step, you can use Feedburner as a way to publicize, optimize, and analyze the presence of your RSS feed throughout the web. Feedburner, purchased this month by Google, has been growing faster than MySpace and now manages over 750,000 RSS feeds. For a blogger, they make it easy to publicize (let other services know about you), optimize (make sure your RSS feed is easy to use), and analyze (figure out who’s subscribing and clicking through to your site). If you have enough traffic, you may even be able to monetize.

As the transition from email to RSS feeds continues, are you putting an RSS feed to work for your brand?

A 32 inch LCD HDTV can be yours at Wal-mart for just $597. Did you realize that these low LCD prices are also changing the outdoor advertising game?

Clear Channel’s  Taxi Media has created a network of 32 inch LCD screens (connected by satellite) that ride around on top of Boston and New Orleans taxis. These taxi-top LCD’s don’t feature static ads – they can carry 5 or 10 second animations (the feed growth! candidate).  What’s different here is the level of control.  You can change the graphics on the fly or even run different ads on different streets or at different times, opening up opportunities for optimization (we mentioned the web equivalent in The dating game).

With rates running at $450 / month for a 20% sign share, are you taking advantage of opportunities to rethink digitally enabled outdoor?

As with any communication or advertising, your website has a split second to work its magic – or your customer will just click away (what’s called a bounce). When you agreed to the design of your site, was that decision backed by data or was it shoot from the hip?

Now you can use Google’s website optimizer to inform your design decisions with knowledge of what worked and what didn’t. And for you research nerds like us, this tool replaces A/B testing (comparing version A to version B) with multivariate testing (comparing unlimited versions at once).

Once you’ve designed and tested the different versions of your page(s) (everything – photos, text, headlines, lay-out), you receive a detailed comparison report that will help you separate the wheat from the chaff. How long are you going to rely on your gut when (did we forget to say free!) tools like this exist?

Web site hits don’t mean anything. What’s important is creating the customer outcomes you want.

Google offers a free tool called Google Analytics. It lets you see if your website users are exhibiting desired behavior and achieving specific goals. Two days ago, the feed growth! idea entitled Two Thumbs Up generated 33 click throughs (as shown on this report) to the intimidatingly cool website of Toolbox Design - our graphic design partner.

Consider what the desired outcomes are for your site and use tools like Google Analytics to determine if you’re getting the behavior you want. We could have just as easily tracked listening to a podcast or downloading a PDF sales brochure. Do you know what your customers did on your site on Monday?