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Salesforce was first introduced in the market, Not many people were keen on using Salesforce when it was first introduced in the market. But over the years, the CRM has grown to become one of the most widely used customer relationship management platforms available. Businesses now use Salesforce extensively and one of the keys for its success is the vast array of apps that are available on its market. These apps are provided as an add-on and they will perform a specific set of actions. Here are a few of those apps that you must have regardless of the type of business you run and the number of customers you have.

Salesforce for Google AdWords

This is an add-on from the Salesforce stables and is usually included with the proprietary software (all editions). We all know that Google AdWords is one of the top tools used by marketing professionals and integration of Salesforce adds a whole new dimension to this tool. It is used for search engine optimization, which is also one of the key factors that determines the success of a marketing campaign. It also helps in lead generation activities which the business development team extensively carries out these days.

A+ Lead Finder

AdWords certainly plays an important part in lead generation. However, A+ Lead Finder will also help you considerably as you seek to generate more leads. You can integrate it with Salesforce to keep track of the activities of other teams. Also, it can be very useful when you have are multiple business development teams collaborating on a project from different locations. The publisher has provided around 50,000 lists to help you generate amazing leads.

Sales Activity Dashboard

One of the most stressful things for anyone running a business that spans different locations is that they have little control over what happens in those locations. They have to identify what they are doing right in the locations where your business is flourishing and what they are doing differently in other locations. This is why a sales activity dashboard can be so helpful. All the data that you get will be updated in real time and allow you to make strategic decisions on the go.

You will still have to put time and effort into using these apps. They will only give you raw data and a platform on which you can base your decisions. However, you can run your business much more effectively with the information they provide.

Grace is a CRM and Cloud Applications expert. She writes extensively on emerging trends affecting the cloud and social media. One of her favorite cloud solutions is Cirrus Insight, the leading application for integration of Salesforce and Google Apps.

Many webmasters constantly ask themselves what they can do to get more traffic. The desire to build more traffic is completely understandable. Without traffic, your Internet marketing campaign is meaningless. Without traffic, you will generate zero sales. However, traffic is often too much of a priority for many bloggers.

When you are generating traffic, you need to make sure that it is traffic that is actually going to provide some kind of value to your site. This can mean:

• Generating income (obviously)
• Getting links from awesome bloggers in your niche
• Sharing your posts on their social networks
• Joining your subscriber list

Any traffic that either converts into cash or helps you get cash indirectly is great. However, a lot of traffic won’t provide any value at all. In fact, if you really think about it, traffic can cost you in a number ways:

1. Bandwidth costs. Bandwidth does cost money. Granted, you usually need a ton of traffic to even increase your bandwidth a little. However, I know a webmaster who recently received over 60,000 visitors to one of his sites. Only  a tiny fraction of those visitors actually converted through affiliate purchases or Google Adsense ads. He was likely paying a noticeable chunk of change on bandwidth and hosting.
2. Google Panda. Google looks at traffic when visitors come to a site. Does that mean that having more traffic can’t hurt you? Not necessarily. After the Panda Update, the algorithm has started considering factors such as bounce rate and average time visitors spend on the site. That means that if you are attracting a number of deadweight visitors to your site, you may actually be damaging your search engine rankings.
3. Site crashes. What good does it do to generate so much traffic that your site actually can’t handle it? I know that this sounds like I have a case of hyperbole, but many sites have actually gone down because they had a viral article on Stumbleupon or Digg. The unfortunate thing about this is that social traffic from these kinds of sites tend to have lower conversion rates. That means that most of the traffic you bring in from them is unlikely to bring in any income. Unfortunately, once your site is down, you won’t be able to bring in traffic from search engines or other sources that are more likely to convert. Wouldn’t it be better to get a consistent flow of traffic that would be likely to bring you some real value? Also, you don’t want your visitors getting upset that you can’t handle the excess traffic on your site. Plan on bringing traffic in gradually and make sure that you have the resources to handle it. If you have a low-key hosting plan, you may not be able to be prepared when you suddenly have a really cool article go viral around the web.
4. Wasted time. That’s right. The biggest problem of all with worthless traffic is that you probably spent a substantial amount of time gathering it. I made that mistake myself when I started my first site. I tried to generate traffic by doing of all things, blog commenting. I was thrilled when I got a few clicks to my site here and there. Unfortunately you don’t want to spend hours of your time doing something that brings you traffic that provides you no income or value. Your time is valuable, so make sure you get a strong return on your investment.

As you strive to bring traffic to your site, you are going to need to make sure that you are bringing high-quality, converting traffic. Many websites fail to reach this goal. There are a couple of reasons this mistake arises. I will discuss this in more detail in a later post, but as prelude let me say the following:

“All that traffic must convert, otherwise you get hurt.”

I know that’s kind of a cheesy way of remembering, but sometimes simple rhymes are the only way we remember key lessons without having to actually make the mistake ourselves.

Analytics Tools Benefits for Websites

Setting goals is a must for any website. You also need to know how you will reach those goals. Ultimately, your goal should be generating a steady stream of income. Income does not come in over night. Before you generate a steady income, you need to successfully build traffic. Traffic itself isn’t important. You must know your target visitors and draw them to your site. That’s why you need analytics tools.

Analytic tools help you monitor who is coming to your site. Your visitors are obviously a very important metric. When you build your site, there are three things you need to look at:

• Traffic. You want to know the extent of your reach. Your traffic is the best way of measuring reach. How many people visit your site every day? Is the traffic consistent?
• Demographics. Who are the people coming to your website? A steady flow of visitors is great. However, you need to make sure you are reaching the right audience. You need make sure you are reaching people who are going to buy your products or services.
• Behavior. What do your visitors do when they reach your site? What content do they access and how long do they stick around?

Identifying your traffic statistics is essential to your marketing plan. A strategy isn’t enough. You need to know how your strategy is working. What analytics tools are available?

Top Analytic Tools

There are many great analytic tools that you can use to assess your traffic stats:

1. Google Analytics. Google Analytics is probably the most popular web analytics tool. Google Analytics will tell you whether they came to your site directly or found you through a search engine or referring website. You can also learn very specific information about your visitors, such as: what city in the world they are located in, how often they come to your site and what content they accessed. The tool will also tell you what browsers and tools they are using when they visit your site.
2. Yahoo Analytics. Yahoo offers its own analytics tool. This is not as widely used as Google’s, but it offers two things Google does not. It provides real-time traffic statistics and much more detailed demographic data on your visitors. Yahoo Analytics may be much more valuable than Google’s tool. If you are serious about measuring your traffic, you may want to take a look at it.
3. Alexa. Alexa offers a number of features you won’t find from many other analytics tools. You can get detailed audience profiles and long-term traffic stats on your site. Alexa also ranks every website in the world according to the level of traffic coming to it. The effectiveness of Alexa’s traffic ranking has been questioned, but it is still a standard used by many Internet users around the world. You can also use Alexa to view traffic stats of your competitors.
4. Compete. Compete is another web analytics tool that allows you to evaluate analytics of any website. It seems to be much more effective than Alexa. According to an article on Dragon Blogger, Compete provided detailed traffic results within 2% of those of Google Analytics. Compete offers detailed information on the audiences of your site. You can find out the age, income and genders of your audiences. The premium version offers very complex information, which can be great for evaluating your competitors.
5. Crazy Egg. Another popular analytics tool is Crazy Egg. It’s a little more specialized than these other sites. The real benefit of Crazy Egg is that it provides a detailed analysis of what links your users are clicking on and where they are visiting. This provides the obvious benefit of telling you what pages your users are visiting. Additionally, it can give you an idea of how to structure the format and anchor text of your links and where to place them to improve the effectiveness of your squeeze pages and improve the structure of your website.

Implementing Analytics Tools in Your Website

You will need a detailed understanding of your customers if you intend to maximize conversions and improve traffic. Why wouldn’t you want to know who is coming to your site and what they do there? This information will give you an edge over any competitors who aren’t doing the same thing.

Image republished with permission by Shannon Paul