Last week, I had the pleasure to present a webinar sponsored by Compete titled “How to Legally Spy on Your Competition.” Many people on that webinar requested a list of the tools that I mentioned on the call. I thought I’d share them here as well. For specific examples on how to use each of these tools, please check out the recording of the webinar.

1. How are your competitors doing now?

One of the most common questions heard across boardrooms, this question is much easier to answer today than ever before. This is a list of tools to provide you with an overall benchmark to do market research and provide validation of your marketing efforts:

Google Trends: With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s or segment of the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. This is a great way to compare your website, category, brand, or product lines and your competitors’.

ComScore: ComScore provides syndicated and custom solutions in online audience measurement, e-commerce, advertising, search, video, and mobile and offers dedicated analysts with digital marketing and vertical-specific industry expertise. This is great when you want a custom report benchmarking your transaction rates last quarter to several of your competitors’ and want to understand what factors influenced them.

Compete: Compete has a diverse sample of 2,000,000-plus U.S. Internet users that have opted in to have their online click stream behavior monitored. Compete normalizes this click stream data and is then able to determine the behavior of all U.S. Internet users. Compete.com is the only online competitive intelligence service that combines site and search analytics in one site. Compete will allow you to benchmark your site to your competitors’ by a number of standard metrics such as: unique visitors, visits, page views, Compete rank, average stay, visits/person, pages/visit, attention, daily reach, and daily attention. It offers a free trial and customized reports as well.

UserTesting: Sometimes you see the quantitative numbers in these other reports but you can’t understand whyyour competitors are getting the results they are. This is where I find UserTesting.com very helpful. UserTesting lets you “look over the shoulder” of people in your target audience while they use your website. You get a video of their session on a website as they talk out loud about their experience as they try to accomplish the task you set out for them. I often use this for PPC (define) campaigns. I’ll specify a term and have three users look at several ads (including my clients) and the landing page and ask them to evaluate the experience on each.

If you’re interested in running user tests for yourself and your competitors just send me a note and I’ll send you the task sheet I use for these tests.

2. Find out what is on your competitor’s roadmap.

Would it help to know what your competitors are planning so you can maneuver appropriately? These tools can give you some good indications.

Google search and News Timeline: There are several searches you can do to see if any of your competitors’ future plans have leaked online. They include searching for :

• site:competitor.com “roadmap” or “plans”
• Plan filetype:pdf site:competitor.com (there are many file types you can search for)
• Key employees
• Product lines and rumor

I also like looking at my competitors’ press releases for a year or two years at a time to see if I can spot trends in what and when they make certain releases.

LinkedIn: It has recently added a feature that allows you to follow companies, but you should be following key employees (especially HR) and spend time monitoring the groups they are in for clues to what they may be looking for in talent (just like when Apple was recently looking for several antenna engineers). You should also be looking for any job postings there and on other job boards.

SlideShare: This is another great place to find competitor roadmaps and plans.

Twitter Search: It doesn’t matter if you search from the website or have custom searches set up in tools such as TweetDeck, Twitter provides some incredible competitive intelligence opportunities. Search for tweets such as:

• hashtags of products, category, competitors, etc.
• Key influencers
• Competitors’ employees
• Conferences
• Industry associations

Facebook: Follow fan pages for interesting discussions with your competitors’ key advocates and early-to-market announcements.

Next time we will look at how to identify who your competitors are and your brand influencers. We’ll also explore how to find top media contacts and how to find out what untapped search marketing opportunities exist.

Have you ever wished you knew everything your competitors where up to? Well online it isn’t that hard.

1. SpyFu – Want to know what keywords your competitors are targeting in the search engines? Use this tool to download the list of keywords and adwords they are using. Don’t forget to visit their SpyFu Universty.

2. The Search Monitor – They have several tools including another great search engine competitive intelligence tool. The Search Monitor Track market share, page rank, ad copy, landing pages, budgets, day parts, and uncover new competitors on Paid & Organic Search. You can catch trademark abuse on paid search, track brand buzz web wide, as well Monitor your affiliates for TOU compliance, watch paid search activities, monitor ad copy and landing page copy, recruit your competitors’ affiliates.

3. Yahoo! Site Explorer - Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site including your competitors, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

4. Compete Search Analytics – Enter a site or a category; get a list of keywords referring traffic to it or enter a keyword; get a list of sites it refers traffic to.

5. Copernic Tracker – automatically looks for new content on Web pages, as often as you like. When a change is detected, our Web site tracking software can notify you by sending an email, including a copy of the Web page with the changes highlighted, or by displaying a desktop alert.

6. Statbrain – Using several sources, Statbrain’s algorithm computes the number of visitors to a website based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any hit-counter information. Use this as a rough relative benchmark of your traffic to theirs. First run your website and compare the results given by StatBrain to your actual results to get a sense of its accuracy in your category. Figure out what the multiplier is and then try it on a competitor.

7. FeedCompare – If you use Feedburner to track your rss subscribers you can compare the size of your feed to others. Just like in #1 above, figure out your own multiplier and then compare it to the competition.

8. AideRSS now Postrank– Find out which of your competitors’ blog posts and topics are engaging people. This should provide you with a list of topics you should be covering. Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean your competitor’s opinion is right or even agreed with — but it does mean the engaged people are interested in the topic and therefore why not your opinion on the topic.

9. Xinu Returns – Xinu Runs a report from multiple sites to tell you how well a site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking sites and other technical details. How well are you stacking up against your 5 biggest competitors?

10. Google Trends For Websites – Enter up to five topics and see how often those topics been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. You can learn more on how to use this from our friend, Avinash Kaushik.

11. Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Again, Avinash explains how to use this well.

12. Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast tool – This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.

13. Microsoft’s Search Funnels – Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences. Search Engine guru Mike Grehan explains the value of these query chains.

14. WayBackMachine – Go back in web history to see how your competitors’ site has changed through the years. Look for the things that have stayed consistent, because those might have been the most successful. In the same vein, what have you changed on your own site during that time? It’s easy to lose track, particularly of your own work, and to think of your current site as “how it’s always been”.

15. Web Page Readability – By comparing the readability score of web pages you can optimize your writing and make sure that you aren’t creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

16. Attention Meter – Attentionmeter gives you a quick snapshot comparing any websites you want (traffic) using Alexa, Compete, and Quancast.

17. Websitegrader – Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. Also worth checking out Twittergrader to check on your competitors’ twitter accounts.

18. Google Alerts – set up searches for your competitors, key employees, and keywords to monitor their activity.

19. BoardTracker – searches across 37,000 forums representing more than 63 million threads. Set up your own custom alerts using RSS and the site’s search function to see what other people are saying about your competitors.

20. Twitter Search- track important keywords, competitors’ Twitter user names, and product names.  You can save these as RSS feeds or you can just save these searches in a tool like TweetDeck.

21. SocialMention – Enter in a search term and SocialMention will track down what people are saying about that term across different blogs and social outlets.  It will tell you how many times a keyword was talked about, the time frame, and let you subscribe to an RSS feed for that term or export the information as a CSV.

Care to share your spying secrets? What tools or techniques do you use?

Ask any designer what makes a great design for a web page or web site and you’ll almost always here the same common themes; usability, intuitiveness, feel/mood, eye catching, etc. Yet few will respond with what makes your business revenue – how the page converts visitors to take the action you want them to take!

Following are some practical and commonly overlooked elements of landing- and buying-page design to help answer some the above questions and help you think about design elements more objectively.

Lots of designers like to focus on color scheme too early in the process. Color isn’t the core of your design. There are six basic, equally important elements that make up effective design:

• Line
• Shape
• Value (lightness, darkness, shading)
• Blank (white) space
• Texture/pattern
• Color

Start with Element Prioritization

Determine the relative importance of all elements that will comprise a Web page. Not all elements are of equal importance. You may even want to assign a dollar or numeric value to each element in terms of revenue potential and based on size it takes up in the design. To be most effective, the layout must take this into account. Important elements may require specific placement on a page so that they may be more visually available to visitors.

• For every page, you must answer the question: What action do we want the visitor to take on this page? List these in order of priority.
• By first considering the design in grayscale, you can determine what elements stand out without color getting in the way. Note: a fabulous tool that will turn any existing web page you have into grayscale is GrayBit.
• Use brighter/bolder colors on elements such as buttons and header banners that reinforce the action you want a visitor to take on that page.
• Button size, position, and shape can also influence the visitor’s perception of how important an element is.

Position

Position refers to the relational properties of elements on Web page. No element exists in isolation; all are affected by the surrounding elements. A large, dark element, for example, may functionally obscure the presence of an adjacent small, light element.

Evaluate the positional relationships including size, shape, color and proximity of all the elements. Ensure each is visually “available” to the visitor. You may want to use the battleship grid layout concept I’ve shared in the past.

Contrast

Contrast is the difference between the light and dark areas of the page design, the juxtaposition of black and white representing the strongest contrast. Contrast dramatically affects readability and a visitor’s ability to spot elements critical to the persuasive process. Contrast is an important design consideration when people with impaired vision require assistive technologies to render Web pages readable.

When considering design contrast:

• Look at all design mock-ups in grayscale first. Colors evoke emotion. Introducing them first distracts you from the ability to see potential contrast problems in a design.
• Avoid too many dark colors.
• Avoid too many light colors. We were just involved in a site audit where the gray text on a gray background rendered the sites main offer too difficult to read. Simply changing the background shade can make the elements pop out.

Expectations

This is the design’s ability to employ basic conventions online users have come to associate with e-business. Sure, conventions can seem limiting and uncreative. But an online business must provide both a design and a layout that helps the visitor accomplish her task efficiently and without frustration.

• All text hyperlinks should be underlined or at the least very obvious.
• View Shopping Cart/Checkout links should be near the upper right corner. You may want to include a phone number as well here.
• Full contact info should reside in the footer navigation.

• What other things are you doing that confuse people and their expectations?

Perception

• Of speed. That should be the visitor’s impression of how quickly the site and each subsequent page appear onscreen. While a site can load with an absolute speed, it’s possible to give the impression it’s loading faster by prioritizing critical information and loading it first. Ideally, the visitor will engage with that information while secondary information is still loading. Actual speed and the perception of speed are often inversely related. The real influences are the users’ experiences and their ability to complete the tasks they came to accomplish.  Have you checked the load time of your most important pages lately?
• Of time spent on task. This is the visitor’s impression of the length of the persuasive process from beginning to end. Structural designs that use five pages when three would suffice needlessly waste visitors’ time. At a smaller level, forms that “look” long — even though they may not request more information — are often perceived as requiring more time to complete. In general, the longer the visitor perceives it will take her to accomplish her task, the more frustrated and disinterested she becomes. When was the last time you watched your visitors trying to complete these tasks? If it’s been a while, order 5-8 usability tests on UserTesting.com for $29 each. You’ll get a screen recording as they talk through what they are experiencing on your website.

How well designed are your landing pages and key buying pages?

I just got back from speaking at the Bolo Conference and AZIMA event in Arizona. They were both well organized events, with very attentive audiences. At the Bolo conference I premiered my latest presentation, Trim the Fat: How to use Personas, Analytics and Human Psychology to Improve Marketing (more on that soon). The reception to the presentation was extremely positive. But I am not here to talk about myself, but to talk about one of the other keynote presentations at the Bolo Conference.

I had the privilege to interview Guy Kawasaki before his keynote presentation at Search Engine Strategies New York last March. You can listen to the interview on WebMasterRadio.FM. Guy’s presentation is a detailed hands-on illustration of how Guy uses Twitter. You can listen to a previous version of his presentation about how to use Twitter on WebMasterRadio. Guy splits no hairs, as he is aware that some people do not like his approach to marketing on Twitter. However, the audience loved his hands on approach as he walks them through using Twitter with this collection of links on how to demo Twitter he uses as his outline.

Have you heard Guy Kawasaki give this presentation (either live at a conference or the recording above)? Some people feel Guy Kawasaki is a Twitter spammer who uses bots and automation to drop urls all the time. What are your thoughts about how he uses Twitter? Would you use it the same way or just take out a few of his tactics and tools (which ones)?

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. UserTesting.com
UserTesting.com has built a large panel of users who will record their on-screen actions and voice as they use your website. For each user’s test session, you get a video and their written summary. It costs $29 and is typically ready in one hour. The users are pre-screened to ensure they can follow instructions, stay on task and verbalize their thoughts. UserTesting is fast, easy and inexpensive. Users are prescreened and rated by previous clients so the quality of feedback is pretty good. It can also be quite valuable to see how your site runs on various users’ computers. The control panel is limited, however, so you can only specify age, income, gender, and computer/Web experience. If your target audience is very specific, you might want to run tests with your own customers. UserTesting.com allows you to do this but it’s a bit more work.

2. Silverback
Silverback is an application for Mac computers that also records a user’s screen and voice as they browse a website. The interface is extremely simple and meant specifically for moderated usability testing. The program carries a one-time fee of $49.95. If you have easy access to people with whom you can test your site, and a Mac laptop, this is a great solution. You simply arrange to meet somewhere with Internet access and run the test. You end up with a recording that you can easily edit and post on the Web. The software even enables webcam use to embed the user’s facial expressions in the corner of the final recording.

3, 4. Ethnio + UserVue
Ethnio enables companies to recruit their own customers for testing. Add the Ethnio JavaScript to a Web page and it automatically launches a periodic pop-up offering a reward for participating in a usability study. When a user chooses to participate, a notification is sent to the person who will moderate the session. The moderator can then telephone the participant and use a screen sharing service like UserVue to record the session. Ethnio costs $400 for 200 recruits and a UserVue subscription is $149 per month.

This is an ideal combination because you get real users and you can ask questions during the session to better understand user behavior. The drawback is that this solution is more expensive and quite time consuming. Don’t forget, you’ll need to offer some sort of compensation to the users.

5. 5 Second Test
5 Second Test allows website owners to upload images that will be reviewed by random Internet users. Users view the image for just five seconds then click on the screen to indicate areas of the images that caught their attention. Using text fields provided on the screen, they describe what they saw on the places they clicked. This is a free service. 5 Second Test is useful for understanding users’ first impressions of your site. You’ll need to review others’ sites in exchange for your review.

6, 7. FeedbackArmy & Mechanical Turk
Quickly and inexpensively get workers at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to provide written answers to questions about what they think about your site. It costs $10 for 10 reviews.

You could go to Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) directly and save a little money but FeedbackArmy is easier and still very inexpensive. The quality of responses varies dramatically, so you won’t necessarily get 10 helpful reviews for your $10. The advantage here is that you can get a higher quantity of responses — look for repetitive feedback. This is a bit more quantitative approach than watching a video of each user where you might find problems that even the user doesn’t realize they are uncovering. FeedbackArmy has two similar competitors, EasyUsability.com and 3rdPartyFeedback.com.

8. Feng-GUI.com
Feng-GUI uses software to analyze uploaded images and provide image owners with heat maps, symmetry analysis, and focal center/attention information. Their software does not track mouse movement or clicks (instead relying on a predictive algorithm), and the free version does not offer face or text detection. Price ranges from free for a standard heat map on an uploaded image, to $1,000 for 700 images. By paying for the product, you receive premium analysis, including customization options for the reports.

9, 10. ClickTale, UserFly
Both ClickTale and UserFly offer silent movies of your users’ interactions with your website. You place JavaScript on your Web pages that causes users’ mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes to be recorded. The result looks like a screen cast of the user’s screen. ClickTale also provides a written report with detailed information including heat maps, link analytics and form conversion rates. ClickTale is free for up to 400 page views and then pricing gradually increases to $790 per month for 240,000 page views. There Form Analytics will help you optimize all those forms that people abandon on your landing pages and websites. UserFly ranges from free for up to 10 page views per month and gradually increases to $200 for 10,000 page views.

11. BT Buckets
Engage your users with a free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.

12. 4Q from IPerceptions
When evaluating how you website is doing obviously it helps to get your customers’ opinions. This free tool helps you answer four important questions:

* How satisfied are my visitors?
* What are my visitors at my website to do?
* Are they completing what they set out to do?
* If not, why not?
* If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?

13. What’s the Buzz?
a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword. To do that, it does five things:

* It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days
* It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword
* It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword
* It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search)
* It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

14. Bad Neighborhood Link Checker
scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.

15. Backlink Social Celebrity SEO Tool
discover who bookmarked a webpage and who linked to that webpage. The bookmarks are searched for in the various social bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, Raw Sugar, and others. The backlinks are found using Google and Yahoo!.

16. Webbed-O-Meter 2.0
can help track how effective you are at inspiring consumer generated content online, call it buzz marketing, social media marketing or viral marketing.

17. Website Grader
provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

18. Spider Simulator
help you find out for yourself how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your visibility.

19. Spider Test
Shows the source code of a page, all outbound links, and common words and phrases. used on a page.

20. Google Talk Chatback
Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don’t need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.

21. Google Analytics
web analytics with “enterprise features” and a ton of plugins and hacks.

22. Yahoo! Analytics
still in beta, but incredibly powerful. It is currently available with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store plans.

23. Google Website Optimizer
Free A/B and Multivariate Testing. I’ve written the book on it, Always Be Testing.

24. HiConversion
adaptive multivariate testing solution requires dramatically less visitors than any other solution. This enables you to run a fairly large multivariate test with relatively small number of visitors. As a result, you will be able to explore the largest number of new ideas within shortest period of time.

25. Piwik
This is an open source web analytics solution.

26. Linkscape
allows access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains.

27. BacklinkAnalysis
Get a look at what keywords websites are linking to you with.

28. Trifecta
Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.

29. Google Webmaster Tools
see which phrases you’re ranking well for, what pages are causing problems for Google when crawling your site, which pages are getting the most links, rss subscribers, etc.

30. Morgue File
offers free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

31. OpenAds
for sites that want to serve and track advertising.

32. Sitescore
analyzes the quality of incoming and outgoing links, keyword density, page titles, plagiarism, popularity rank, the usage of popups and the effectiveness of site’s structure. Sitescore also grades the printability, readability, spiderability and usability of the page as well as spelling and W3C compliance. This is no longer available for free, sorry.

33. mon.itor.us
use this to monitor uptime, website performance and other hosting abnormalities.

34. Orangoo Spell Check
spell check your website.

35. The Scrutinizer
offers 283 tools to test your website in one place.

36. Product Indexation Check
use this handy tool to check how many of your category or product pages are included in the major search engines.

37. Kamplye
allows your visitors to give feedback on your site, via a little button that sits at the edge of each webpage. Also offers Google Analytics integration.

38. Google’s Free Custom Search Engine
create your own custom search engine, indexing your website or add additonal websites as well.

39. Microsoft AdCenter Search Funnels
Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences.

40. Crazy Egg
track what visitors are doing on particular page and shows you what links they clicked via heatmaps and various overlays.

41. Loop11
run online, unmoderated user testing. It is designed to essentially replicate the process of lab-based user testing, albeit online and unmoderated.  The primary purpose of Loop11 is to facilitate the collection of quantitative usability data, something that is otherwise considered too expensive to gather.

42. Scrutinizer browser
a web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system. Using this simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design.

43. Firebug
this plugin for Firefox provides a number of development tools. For the purposes of analysis, Firebug will allow you to monitor and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within your browser.

44. Web Page Analyzer
Spiders your page to determine page load time and offers detailed recommendations.

45. Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug
Using Firebug plugin, it shows you the impact of objects that slow your website down.

46. Page Speed by Google
Similar tool to YSlow plus lots of additional resources to speed up your site, including how to optimize your code.

47. Site-Perf
get an accurate, realistic, and helpful estimation of your site’s loading speed. The script fully emulates natural browser behavior downloading your page with all the images, CSS, JS and other files – just like a regular user. A unique feature is that site-perf.com allows to measure packet loss ratio with reasonable precision.

48. Smush.it
Online image optimizer if you want to learn how to speed up your website and optimize images you can read about it in one of my previous posts.

49. Dynamic Drive
Shrink the size of your images.

50. Web-Resizer
another online image optimizer.

51. SEO Blogger
Optimize Your Posts As You Write with this FireFox plugin from WordTracker

52. WordStream’s Free keyword research tool
Nice interface to do keyword research

53. LotusJump
SEO tool that provides you an ongoing task list of what you need to do to improve your Search Engine Rankings.  It breaks down the tasks by:

• Social Profile Tasks
• Q&A Tasks
• Social Bookmarking Tasks
• Buzz tasks
• Content Generation tasks
• Competitive Backlink tasks
• Directory submission tasks

54. SiteYogi
examines how well optimized your site is for search engines as well as the number of backlinks you have, various social media rankings, whether your code is valid, and how well ranked your site is.

55. Notify.me
It eliminates the need for you to constantly check on classified listings, blogs or social networking sites. Notifications are delivered to your destinations of choice such as instant messenger, mobile phone, email, desktop or web application.

56. Crowd Science
is an online measurement service that builds detailed reports on the demographics of your website audience.
Using site-centric research techniques and some cleverly constructed technology, Crowd Science helps website owners and marketers drive ad sales, direct content creation, and reduce the time and money spent on research.

57. Google Ad Planner
a tool that gives fantastic insights into understanding behavior of visitors to your website in context of the broader ecosystem. My friend Avinash, wrote a great primer on how to use it for competitive intelligence.

58 + 59. Google Trends for Websites & Google Insights for Search
compare volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

60. GobbledyGook Grader
evaluates your written content (press release, brochure copy, etc.) and checks for use of gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words. You’ll receive a grade together with a full report.

61. AdQuants
is a tool that offers competitive research related to any keyword or URL you provide. Similar to Spyfu.

62. Camtasia and now Camtasia for Mac
Make screencasts of your products, demos, etc. The power of videos to persuade should not be underestimated.

63. Concept Feedback
Receive quick, actionable feedback from a professional community by uploading a concept (a website, logo, advertisement or other.

64. Chalkmark
Quickly run a test on your UI prototypes to answer any nagging questions about usability.

65. IfByPhone
automates and tracks inbound, outbound and web initiated phone calls to any phone through a suite of pre-built phone applications that are instantly activated, configured easily without any programming and updated in real-time via an easy-to-use website. Integrates with web analytics tools.

66. Mongoose Metrics
provides phone call analytics for both online and offline marketers. Customers use our service to better understand which of their campaigns drives phone calls and to see phone call reports directly within their web analytics package of choice.

67. ClickPath
tracks all conversions generated from your online advertising, including phone calls, and ties them back to the exact keyword or ad source.

68. PaymentCentral
Offers an automated service that allows customers to complete their online transactions by telephone. I blogged about someone who does something like this, in Sorry, I don’t give my credit card online.

69. MarketMotive
Tools are great, but you need to know what to do with them. Learn internet marketing from the basics to the bleeding edge, through online video, weekly webinars, conference calls and anytime-Q&A with the top minds in Internet marketing, including, Greg Jarboe on online publicity, Avinash Kaushik & John Marshall on web analytics, Todd Malicoat on SEO, Matt Bailey, Jennifer Laycock on social media, site usability & architecture and myself on conversion optimization.

What are some of your favorite free or low cost tools to make websites better?