If you spend time and money driving traffic to your website, then surely its worth spending a little time seeing what impact your efforts had on your overall performance.
Is traffic up or down? What is my best referral channel? How is my site converting? What is the quality of the site traffic like? These are just a few simple questions that every website owner and marketer should know as an absolute minimum.
Part of me is shocked and the other part is not surprised that there are still so many businesses, of all sizes, not utilising powerful tools such as Web Analytics.
Contently confirmed that 45% of marketers still don’t formally evaluate their analytics for quality or accuracy or, even worse, don’t know if they do or not. This is a very scary statistic given that the data is available. In fact we have more data now than ever before.
Whether a website is about transacting, content consumption or lead generation the quality of traffic being driven to the site can be easily measured and optimised appropriately.
In the main, Web Analytics has been adopted and used to improve website conversion and performance. However, there are still instances when people feel that Web Analytics tools are there to ‘show them up’ rather and being a tool to help and support them make smarter decisions.
According to MediaPost, less than 30% of small businesses use Web Analytics, call tracking or coupon codes. 18% of small businesses admit to not tracking anything at all.
With free tools such as Google Analytics available to website owners, there is no reason not to be tracking efforts, using the data to make smarter decisions that will increase overall business performance.
The great thing about Web Analytics tools is that there is soooooo much data available. However, the downfall of web analytics tools is that there is soooooo much data available. Unless an end user knows the questions to ask, it is easy to get lost. But this is the key. Have a specific question in mind before starting to look through the data AND understand what is success for your specific business. Your business KPI’s should be standardised across the business so that everyone is driving in the same direction as well as talking the same language.
Here are just a few of the great tools available today to help you further understand how your website is performing.
Analytics Tools
Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a powerful and free analytics tool for website owners and marketers. Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.
Search Console: Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results.
Bing Web Masters: Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service as part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine which allows webmasters to add their websites to the Bing index crawler.
Bitly: Bitly Enterprise – branded links, mobile deep linking, omnichannel campaign tracking, audience intelligence – gives the world’s leading brands a holistic, unbiased view into an increasingly complex digital landscape, and a powerful way to see, control and own their customer experience across the internet.
Open Web Analytics: Open Web Analytics (OWA) is open source web analytics software that you can use to track and analyze how people use your websites and applications.
SimilarWeb: SimilarWeb gives you global multi-device market intelligence to understand, track and grow your digital market share.
SEO Tracking Tools
Moz: The SEO toolset that’s got it all: keyword research, link building, site audits, and page optimization insights, in one.
Ahrefs: Ahrefs stirred the stagnant field of backlink analysis and kick-started a new round of competition among SEO tool providers back then and quickly became one of the world’s best backlink analysis tools.
SEMRush: Online marketing is never simple. But marketing tools should be! SEMrush originated as an in-house toolkit that we used for our own marketing efforts.
Majestic: No other site or search engine gives you as much detailed information about how the fabric of the web is knitted together.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider: The SEO Spider is a desktop program you can install locally on PC, Mac or Linux which crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps to evaluate onsite SEO.
