One of the true beauties of online marketing over other marketing efforts is the precision with which you can measure what is working and what is not very inexpensively which allows you to increase your return on investment. The more information you have to work with, the more effective you can be.

Being an uber-geek who loves research, I’m really drawn to the totally techie tools that can be used to measure their effectiveness. Unfortunately, for most small business owners, most of the really cutting edge technology is beyond our meager (in comparison) budgets.

For example, Eye Tracking Research that makes use of bit maps is very cool. It’s just not something that is really feasible to incorporate inexpensively. Still, we can take advantage of the information that is acquired and then find ways to apply them to our own websites and marketing strategies.

However, it is very possible to apply less advanced, but equally cool mapping to your site very inexpensively. One of the formats I’ve been testing is ClickTale – the free trial includes all sorts of nifty features including the ability to see videos of exactly what people do when then come to your site.