Your website plays a very important role in your marketing strategy. Building and hosting your website also costs time and money, so you need to make sure that you are getting a decent return on your investment.
It is important to monitor the behavior of your website visitors. Here some things that you need to pay attention to:
- The number of people visiting your website
- Conversion rates
- Average time people spend on your site
- The content that your visitors view the most
Google Analytics is a popular website analytics tool. However, it has a few limitations.
There are a lot of other great analytics tools with additional features and better interfaces. Here are some that every webmaster should consider.
1. SEO Analyzer
Most websites rely heavily on organic search traffic. Unfortunately, some websites are very poorly optimized for SEO.
Neil Patel created a very useful SEO Analyzer tool, which identifies SEO problems that need to be addressed. You can analyze the following factors with this tool:
- Onpage SEO errors
- Overview of your backlinks
- Page-level onsite keyword analysis
Patel’s SEO Analyzer is one of the best, free SEO analysis tools available. You can download your free report in less than a minute.
2. Link Research Tools
Analyzing your backlink profile is a very important part of SEO. Link Research is a great tool for studying incoming links to your website. It also provides detailed information on your competitors.
3. Crazy Egg
Google Analytics can tell which webpages your users are visiting. However, it can’t tell you which links they are clicking or why they are visiting certain webpages over others.
Crazy Egg gives you a more nuanced understanding of their behavior. It tracks the location of their clicks and creates heat maps, which helps you optimize the placement of their links.
4. Compete.com
Google Analytics only provides analytics data on your own website. Compete.com gives you detailed information on your competitors. You can compare and contrast traffic, SEO rankings and content marketing strategies.
Compete.com aggregates analytics data from Google Analytics and several other sources. It’s by far one of best competitive analytics tools on the market.
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5. Clicky
Google Analytics only recently started offering real-time analytics data. Unfortunately, the data isn’t always reliable, so it’s a good idea to have another real-time analytics tool.
Clicky is the best real-time analytics tool on the market. In addition to offering real-time data, it tracks user behavior that Google Analytics does not, such as downloads and video views.
Clicky also tells you what keywords your visitors are using to reach your website. This is another excellent feature that Google Analytics lacks, since Google stopped sharing this information with webmasters a couple years ago.
6. Spring Metrics
Spring Metrics costs $49 a month and provides similar data to Google Analytics. However, many webmasters are switching to it from Google Analytics for one reason – simplicity.
Google Analytics is a valuable analytics tool, but it takes a skilled web professional to data mine it effectively. The graphical interface on Spring Metrics is much more intuitive, so it’s easier for laypeople to follow.
7. Optimizely
Google Analytics is great for a lot of things, but A/B testing isn’t one of them. Optimizely has a much better interface for split testing data.
This is the perfect analytics tool for testing landing pages and other variables. It’s a good idea to test it with Google Adwords or another reliable traffic source.
8. 4Q
Most analytics tools rely on web traffic data. However, sometimes it is better to get input directly from your users.
You can use 4Q to conduct surveys and solicit input from them. They can report bugs and tell you whether anything should be changed on your website.
9. Clicktale
Clicktale is another great tool for identifying user behavior. It’s highly recommended by Eric Peterson, the editor of ‘Web Analytics Demystified.’
“One of the things that Google Analytics doesn’t do particularly well is telling you what visitors are paying attention to on a page and highlighting where those visitors are getting stuck during their visit,” says Peterson. ” Clicktale is essentially a video recorder for website visits and provides great detail about mouse movement, scrolling, and dozens of other critical visitor behaviors.”
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