Welcome back! I'm excited and honored to announce that I am going to the be author of a new book called 'Website Optimization - An Hour a Day'! Learn More About the Book

Last week I finally got to attend the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, and attended some great sessions (and got to moderate some too – thanks to Jim Sterne!) In particular, I learnt about some great new free tools to help optimize websites and online marketing efforts. So I figured I would share the wealth and let you all know about these tools too! So let’s get started…

Twitalyzer- this is a great new Twitter usage analysis tool from the web guru that is Eric Peterson. It allows you to determine your very own Twitter usage rating, and it allows you to analyze other Twitters influence  too(people, companies, you name it). It breaks your usage down by things like influcene and genorisity. According to my ratings results, I guess i’m pretty worth following on Twitter, because I have an 86% noise to signal ratio – in other words, I only put out good stuff (follow me and find out for yourself!) For those of you who are avid Twitter user, I suggest you go use this great free tool right now…

BTbuckets- imagine being able to segment your website visitors into different ‘buckets’, and then be able to target and automatically show them content based on what bucket they are in?  Well with BTbuckets, you can now do this and make your site an even better user experience! For example, if a user visits an electronics section of a site often, they would automatically be shown a section devoted just to electronics when they come back to the homepage. Cool eh? I definitely recommend you go play around with it – one of the easiest things you can do is just simply show different messaging depending whether the visitor is new or returning (much like you see at the top of each blog post on my site).

WASP - This is a great new tool for web analysts, created by a web analytics expert, Stephane Hamel. It allows web analysts to easily check out their web analytics tool setup, and do quality assurance on it. It works on hundreds of different web analytics tools (tracking tools, testing tools etc), and can be a real godsend when trying to trouble shoot tracking issues.

Abandonment Tracker – This is a pretty innovative new tool – it allows you to track and recapture the users that abandon your website (and yes, every website has plenty of users that abandon early that need rescuing). They have a free basic version, and also a full paid version, loaded with advanced options that actually allow you to automatically email users who abandon your website. In particular, its great for trying to recapture visitors who left during registration or a shopping cart. Definitely worth checking out!

So there we have it. Some great new tools that any web marketer or web analyst should be checking out and putting to good use!