Giving Thanks for Business Tools: Google Analytics and Snagit Editor

As a member of the marketing strategy team at OpenView Labs, two business tools I cannot live without on a day to day basis are Google Analytics and Snagit Editor. It’s that special time of year when we should all give thanks, so I want to show my love for these two fabulous tools that make my life a little bit easier. I use Google Analytics primarily to track the analytics of OpenView’s corporate blogging site.

Nearly every day, I check the stats related to our blog’s search engine traffic, new visitors, bounce rate, referring sites, etc — at the end of the week, I report the blogging statistics to our management team so they can stay abreast of our activity. One of my key goals for Q4 is to boost traffic coming from the Search Engines by 50%. While there is nothing I can magically do overnight to increase traffic coming from Google (other than perhaps paying my friends to do a Google Search for “Devon Warwick BizDev OpenView” 100 times a day – no, no, I’d never do that), traffic stats indicate to me that our backlinking efforts are gradually paying off, or if the stats are dipping, perhaps I need to work with our bloggers to make sure they are using the best keywords and optimizing their posts each week. Google has made their analytics site very user-friendly, and the amount of data I am able to extract from this free tool is downright incredible.

Moving on… Snagit Editor, a leading screen capture tool, is da bomb. I honestly use it a minimum of 5 times a day. Whether I am creating a weekly blogging report, editing content such as case studies and needing to share edits with my freelancers, or presenting a screenshot of a website design to the team, Snagit is an amazing tool. Once you take a screenshot, you can tweak the capture, add comments, adjust colors, etc. Snagit is not free (it’s about $50 for the license) — but it’s worth it. What business tool are you most thankful for this year?

Happy Thanksgiving!