Tracking the impact and ROI of your online marketing is a challenge. Many different pieces are involved in the puzzle, and because of this, you need to have a strong understanding of the goals of your campaign, as well as what specific aspects need to be tracked and analyzed: increased lead generation, sales, and/or conversions. One basic condition is to establish what platforms you are going to utilize in order to successfully meet the objectives. If you skip this step you will end up with data that doesn’t relate to anything impossible to put into any context. As the impact of social media on online marketing campaigns increases, the number of tracking tools available increases as well. The following basic tools and metrics enable you to measure your online presence while employing a multitude of platforms to integrate all sorts of statistics.

The basic metrics to look at are click through rates, total time spent, number of conversations started and the frequency of visits. Below are some useful analytics software to track website data like traffic, visitors, pages per visitor, and traffic sources.

Google Analytics – generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website, tracks visitors from referrers, to search engines.

Omniture – a publicly held online marketing and web analytics company; the leading solution to optimize ad spend and conversion.

Woopra – a comprehensive and information rich hosted analytics service. It is similar to Google Analytics but provides real time stats and a number of additional features, such as the ability to chat real time with visitors to the site.

There are a number of various tools for analyzing your social media efforts as well. If the main objective is to track the frequency of visits to your Twitter page and the click through rates of your posts, make sure to let the following tools do the analysis for you.

HootSuite – manage all aspects of your Twitter account including scheduled tweets, record statistics and organize followers.

TweetMeme – tracks the most popular links on Twitter every five minutes; aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular by analyzing links that users have “tweeted;” organizing and categorizing them.

Bit.ly – a URL shortener that provides you with analytics information like number of clicks, traffic sources, and what time clicks occur.

TwitterAnalyzer - analyzes your influence on twitter, filled with comprehensive stats that calculate daily tweets, users who are retweeting your messages, and their unique reach.

No matter what you are looking to achieve, keep in mind that every step in your campaign, from determining objectives and platforms, to measuring success and analyze the results, is a interrelated wheel where synergy needs to be created in order to experience increase conversation, brand recognition, and ultimately sales.