Analysing your online efforts is perhaps the most important part of any online marketing strategy. Web analytics are the most useful form of feedback that any online marketer can obtain. We all know how important feedback is in formulating future strategies. The sheer size of the competition, the fluidity of the medium all means that a lot of online marketing strategy will be built on trial and error. Even the most talented and insightful marketers out there would have to admit that they’ve had their fair share of dud campaigns.
The beauty of online marketing campaigns is that you can gain instantaneous insight into the behaviour of your customers. You can find out how they arrived at your site. How much time they spent on your site and if they took the desired action while they were on your site. You can also pinpoint the features of your site that are driving revenue and the features that aren’t. Setting objectives and meeting them is crux of any marketers mission and web analytics allows you to test just how effective your strategy is. So, here’s a run down of all the web analytics tools you can utilise.
Web Analytics Tools
Webtrends: This tool gives you analytical insight into customer intelligence, behavioural segmentation and targeting and scoring. This tool is perfect for anyone wanting to measure and optimise their digital campaigns.
Mixpanel: This tool measures actions such as searches and shares to provide you with intelligence about the behaviour of people while they are using your site. Main selling point is its focus on actions rather than simply page views, which will give you deeper insights than sheer numbers can. You can also set up the tool so that it only tracks certain actions such as ‘reading the FAQ page.’
Woopra: Offers real-time insight into how individuals view your site across multiple devices. Also allows you to build profiles on individual customers and track their behaviour.
Kissmetrics: Similar to Woopra in that it delivers person-centric data in real time for the purposes of customer intelligence. Has the ability to also tie anonymous activity to known activity as soon as a visitor becomes a customer.
Google Analytics: Google’s web analytic tool is a goldmine of information right at your fingertips. Provides data on website traffic as well as conversion rates. Information can be broken down into devices, pages and searches to provide more specific analysis. Fantastic place to start off for the novice web analyist.
Parse.ly: This predictive analytics tool is perfect for online publishers who have a number of authors working for them. It allows you to track the performance of each author as well as each individual topic. This will allow you to gage web trends and ensure you are publishing in-demand content.
Funnel analytics tools give you insight into the flow of your online marketing efforts, for example, from the original customer engagement through an ad to a purchase through the website.
Full Circle CRM: This marketing performance management tool marketing that gives Salesforce users insight into their overall impact of their marketing strategies. An invaluable tool for the planning of future strategies.
Squeeze CMM: This tool generates reports and tracks audience activity and interests. Carries the benefit of allowing to track the ROI of content on your site. By setting up conversion funnels you can see if your audience is moving in the way that you expect them to, i.e. from point A to the checkout.
Insight Squared: Insight squared gives you everything and provided data on slaes, finance, marketing and support data. Also allows you to draw links between data sources and find the connection between them.
moz: Allows you to manage SEO campaigns and monitor your social media efforts. Automative service that will point our errors on your website as well as any opportunities for SEO
BrightEdge: Analyses the performance of your content and gives you tools for measuring and improving your SEO. Positions itself as a tool that will help you in optimizing your content to ensure it can compete with the flood of content that appears on a daily basis
SerpStat: Uses domain lookup to conduct in-depth competitive analysis based on SEO performance. This tool also allows you to conduct analysis on your competitor’s search traffic, queries and which competitor pages have the highest visibility.
Sally has worked in marketing, communications, and PR for over 15 years. She is the Chief Wordsmith at Wordly: a copywriting and content marketing agency that works predominantly with WordPress powered websites.
