There are a wealth of tools out there to analyze your website and content data. This is absolutely instrumental in developing your long term digital marketing plan, as you’re able to adapt your tactics based on what’s working, and utilize new features in local search or content marketing.
Here are our top tools for website analytics and data analysis.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a robust and free tool to track visits and events on your website. It is by far the industry standard in website analytics. Some of the basic metrics to measure are sessions, pageviews, average pages per visit, time on page, and also track individual pages for differences in these metrics. You might find that one page does better than another, and be able to implement changes based on that data.
Here are some quick tips for Google Analytics:
- Use Google Tag Manager to implement the tracking code. It requires two short pieces of code, but you’ll be able to track events on your website like phone calls and contact form submissions.
- Filter your business and home IP address from tracking in the settings, that way you’re not getting data from your own staff.
- Connect to Google Search Console so you can see what search terms people are using to land on your webpages.
- Explore the ‘Acquisition’ and ‘Behavior’ tabs to get a feel where your users are coming from, and how they are interacting with your website.
- Check out ‘Events’ under the ‘Behavior’ tab to see what actions people are taking on your page (this only works if you’ve setup Google Tag Manager).
Google Search Console
Search Console shows data about your website’s presence in search results. It shows what keywords you are ranking for, and how many impressions and clicks you’re getting for each search term. It will also show your average position in search results, which is a great tool.
If you’re logged into Search Console and you enter relevant keywords into Google, an information bar will appear and show you how your website is performing for that particular search term (provided you are ranking for it). It will also show your performance vs the past 30 days.
Heatmapping
There are a number of heatmapping apps on the Internet , and if you’re really looking to increase your conversions (number of website users that submit a form or call your office), a heatmapping is a powerful tool.
Here’s how they work.
They track where people are scrolling, hovering their mouse, and clicking on your website. You’ll need a certain amount of traffic, say hundreds or thousands of pageviews per month. We suggest turning the app on for a month or so (it will slow down your website slightly, but shouldn’t make a huge difference) and then looking at the data.
You might find that people tend to hover on the left side of the page, or the top menu bar, and you could move some items around like your click to call phone number and contact form, then see if it improves your click-through-rate.
Over time, you’ll discover some best practices for your homepage and landing pages that may be counter-intuitive but actually work to increase your conversions.
