Quick: How many visits did your website get last month?
How many of those visitors were new and how many were returning? What percentage of them completed a contact form … and what percentage left the website right away?
Understanding how visitors are interacting with your website is a crucial step to improving your online performance. You can change colours, update your content and promote discounts all you want, but without this data, everything is just guesswork.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution; conversion tactics that work well on one website might have no effect on another.
Here are 4 tools that are vital for peering behind-the-scenes of your website:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the foundation of insightful web analytics. Best of all, it’s completely free to use.
The interface is pleasantly intuitive; even a beginner can quickly access basic information, such as site visits, bounce rate and traffic sources.
At the same time, Analytics records an incredible depth of information so that you can dig deep to understand how visitors browse your website.
Here’s a real world example where the data can inform your decision-making:
Are you wondering whether or not you need to move to a responsive website to better engage mobile and tablet users? Well, take a look at your traffic. If half of your visitors are browsing your site on mobile and if they exit the site quicker than your desktop users, you might be alienating a significant portion of your audience.
Setting up “Goals” takes your web analytics a step further. Code can be used to track certain events on your website, such as when a customer fills out a contact form. Tracking these goals tells you everything about your leads, including where they came from and what pages they visited, so that you can find out what inspired them to contact you.
A good practice is to set up automated reports that can be sent to you and members of your team on a periodic basis. This gives you timely insight into the performance of your website.
Search Console
Search Console is another free tool provided by Google that gives you a valuable look at your visitor data.
Search Console will report any issues with your site, such as broken links and problems with your sitemap. Resolving these can increase the number of pages on your site that Google crawls, increasing your visibility.
Search Console is also a vital tool for search analytics. You can sort all the pages on your website to see which have received the most clicks and which have been seen most often in the search engine results.
Comparing these two numbers will give you the Click Through Rate (CTR) of your organic listings. If your website is constantly showing up in the search results, but not getting clicks, it suggest that you might need to update your title tag or meta description for conversions.
Crazy Egg
There are a variety of tools online for click tracking and heat maps, but one of the more commonly recommended solutions is Crazy Egg.
This tool goes a step farther than Google Analytics by recording data about where on the page users are clicking and how far down the page they are scrolling.
This is an incredibly valuable way to analyze how users experience your website or landing page. If visitors aren’t clicking through or exploring your website, it might be time to reevaluate your content or design.
Moz
Moz is one of the internet’s best resources on all things SEO.
After signing up for a Pro Account, you can get a thorough look at the fundamentals of your website’s SEO performance. Moz tracks historical data on your key indicators, such as your website’s spot in the search rankings for your target keywords, or the number and type of backlinks your site is acquiring.
Moz will also identify SEO issues with your website, such as duplicate content or missing meta descriptions, in a helpful graph. Updated weekly, the Moz dashboard you can get a detailed look at why you may be succeeding or falling behind your competitors in the Google rankings.
For a complete understanding of how you can use web analytics to improve your website ROI, contact RC Design. We can arrange a full demonstration of these tools and identify how you can take your web performance to the next level!
