One of the essential rules for home business Internet marketing, and for marketing of any business, is to know if the product or means you are using to market is working or not. It's amazing the number of entrepreneurs that spend time and money on home business Internet marketing and don't track it. By tracking we mean that they don't keep track of how and why people inquire about or buy their products and services. They don't know if the ad that they ran in the paper is the reason someone called for their technical help, or if the speech that they delivered at last week's Chamber of Commerce luncheon might have lured that new customer.

Home business Internet marketing is successful only if the money and time spent on the effort to bring in new customers and new revenues does not exceed the profit made from that expense. A crucial part of determining Return on Investment (ROI) is knowing what Internet marketing tool works for your home business and what does not.

Buying a home business Internet marketing analytic tool that can help track results makes good business sense for several other reasons, one of which is to determine what users and potential customers like about your Web site and what they don't. Home business Internet marketing analysis software can tell you which pages were visited most frequently and the common exit and entry pages.

Exit pages are important, because if the page that a large number of consumers are exiting from is not the order confirmation page than that tells you that something about that page is driving users away from your site. Knowing where you go wrong so you can correct it is a crucial piece of Internet marketing information for your home business. Knowing the entry page gives you an idea of which of your home business Internet marketing tactics and resources worked.

Most Internet monitoring tools let you know which browsers and operating systems your site's users have. You can find out, for instance, how many have Macs, how many have Windows based systems, how many use Internet Explorer and how many use Netscape. You'll be able to see if consumers are also trying to navigate to pages - those that no longer exist. These broken links must be fixed quickly or the message to these users is that your home business is not efficient and you'll have lost that marketing opportunity.

With these monitoring tools installed for your site you can also keep track of your conversions (consumer visit that results in a sale) and determine the source of the visit as well as the path on your site that that buyer took to complete the sale.

Nor are home business Internet marketing and tracking tools costly. Some of the best software and services are priced at a low $20 a month.