Best of Google Tools & Tips for Internet Marketing Resource Center 

If you're looking for an introduction to good, basic measurement analysis, Google Analytics is an excellent first step. Sign-up is easy; you just need a Google.com account to create your Analytics account. Installing the tracking code on all the pages you want to track takes minutes. The results appear in a dashboard format. Eventually, you'll probably upgrade to the more advanced tools and tech support that are part and parcel of the paid-for analytics packages. In short, if paying for a web analytics package was a barrier to finding out what exactly is going on with your website, that barrier has been removed.

Chrome is Google's answer to Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Chrome had just cracked the 1% market-share floor at time of writing but has the potential to chip away at the leading browsers because of its lean structure and speed.

On the plus side, after just a few pages surfed, Chrome learns enough about the user to display screenshots of the top six pages visited. This visual reminder potentially will help marketers who rank tops among their customers.

However, its users tend to be more advanced. So, if you have a techie audience, their adoption rate might be higher. Add Chrome to the list of browsers in which you want to test your Web pages. If you don't have it installed, use Browsershots to test key pages.

No search tool on your website? There's no need to panic, as a Google Custom Search Engine is an easy-to-use way to build your own customized vertical search engine for use on your site. You can specify which sites should be indexed within your custom search engine. Perhaps you only want to include your own website, or maybe you would like to include sites from partners or divisions of your company. You might choose instead to give your own site higher priority and ranking within search results that include the rest of the Google universe. You might even allow your site visitors to offer site suggestions for your search engine database. In any case, it's up to you, as is the look, feel and functionality of the search engine, powered by Google.

CAVEAT: In our experience with the customized Google search tool, it does not offer the granularity we would like to see in terms of reportage. At the time of writing it appeared that it will not report on specific keyword searches unless there were a minimum of twenty searches for that word. For the big guns, the level of detail we are looking for is probably not necessary, but if you are trying to finetune your site you may want too see very specific results. However, it is cheap and it gets the job done efficiently.

This tool gives you all kinds of information about any keyword/phrase in which you are interested. You'll find out how searches for that keyword/phrase peak and ebb over time, where geographically your search is most popular, and what other keyword/phrases are used to conduct similar searches.

For example, at the time of this writing, we tested the tool using the phrases: "Web analytics" and "Web metrics". The use of the phrase "Web analytics" has increased dramatically over the past four years while the use of the phrase "Web metrics" has decreased.

How can you harness all this data? Suppose you're trying to figure out which product attribute to emphasize in an ad or on your website? As an example, this tool could help you figure out what's more important to your audience: reliability, safety or price. Type in your terms, and see which ones resonate more with Google's searchers.

Need more advice? Google gives you a great how-to guide here:
http://www.google.com/support/insights/bin/answer.py?
answer=96693&topic=13973