How to Give Your Best Keywords and Search Terms to Your Competitors

What you get for free may cost you more than you think.

Do you use free website analytics provided by a search engine? If you do, you may be giving away information that would otherwise give you a competitive advantage. Let's think about this: Search engines make money by selling advertising that sends traffic to websites. One of the ways search engines sell this advertising is by showing their potential advertisers data such as website traffic, visitor locations, and search terms used to find websites. How do search engines get this information? One way is from the analytics software that they give away for free.

Essentially, after all of your marketing and search engine optimization efforts to find the best search terms to get the most effective traffic to your site, your search engine is going to give that information away to your competition.

Here is a scenario that illustrates my point:

1. You have a small local electronics store with a loyal customer base, and decide to launch your website with free website analytics from a search engine.


2. You send a mailing to your customer base announcing your great new website.


3. Your customer visits your website, and is excited by the new home theater system you offer, and plans to visit your store the next day.


4. The free analytics tool provided by a search engine stores this website visit, and also stores that the customer searched for or visited "home theater system" on your website.


5. Your customer continues his internet browsing, soon landing on a different site that has integrated advertisements from a search engine.


6. The search engine providing those ads now has enough information to present competitive ads to your customer, such as "Home Theater Systems On Sale - click here" from the data gathered from your customer visiting your website.

Using website analytics provided free by a search engine virtually guarantees that your customers will see competitor ads. Remember, search engines make nearly all of their revenue from advertising.

Do you buy advertising from a search engine and use their free website analytics tool? If so, do you really want the search engine to know how much money you make from each advertisement? If a search engine sees that you are making $250 from that $5 advertisement, do you think they will hesitate to start charging more for the same ad?

Bottom line: Using free website analytics tools from search engines may end up costing you customers (by leading your customers away to competitors) and increasing your advertising expense at the same time.