The observation “I know half my advertising dollars are wasted. I just don’t know which half.” was credited to department-store magnate John Wanamaker over a century ago, and this sentiment is still often true for business owners today. And if you’re a small business with limited budget, it’s even more important that you spend your hard earned money wisely and effectively.

Luckily today, there a number of useful tools to help small business owners be better informed and become more effective with their online marketing, and this is a précis of an article I recently read.

Google Analytics. If you have a website you should have this free tool installed and some regular automatic reports set-up. It provides comprehensive information about how many people are landing on your website, how long they stay, and what they click on etc., and from this information you can create a far better website.

Facebook Insights. If you use Facebook for business, this tool is useful to track your ‘fans’, the effectiveness of your posts, and how many people are directed to your website from Facebook, or from other sites to your Facebook page.

Moz Analytics. This service helps you track your social media marketing, links, and content marketing all in one location, plus gives you an insight into what your competitors are doing e.g. how many people are visiting their websites and how they are getting there.

Clicky. Provides ‘heat maps’ for your website to see where visitors click most on your web pages. You can track individual visitors to your site and see what actions they took, and this available in real time.

Crazy Egg. Similar to Clicky but contains additional features such as where the user has come from or the search term they used to find you etc.

Mouseflow. The main feature is that you can see exactly what a user does when visiting your website, to the extent that you can actually watch their mouse moving around and filling in forms (useful to see if people don’t like your form or give up half-way through).

Mint. There is a one-time fee for this tool, and contains some great features such as being able to see information about how your visitors got to your website etc.

If you have an online presence and not using the resources, I strongly suggest you check them out and see what they can do for you – they provide great information all at your fingertips.