So you built a great digital marketing team, came up with your marketing persona, created a business strategy, and wrote amazing content. However, you are not sure why exactly your business is not growing and why the conversion rate is not as you have dreamt it would be. Here comes the role of analytics. You need to stop and see what works for your business to do more of it and what does not really work, so you change it. Then you do that again and track to see if it works. To start with, you can find below 7 essential analytics tools that will help your data-driven business to measure the effectiveness of your actions and enhance your brand awareness.
The totally free software is probably the most important analytic software you will need to improve your website. Track which pages a visitor click on, how long they stay, and the actions they take; sharing the content on social media or clicking an ad. That’s not all. Google Analytics follow your visitors through all their journey on your website and tell you in which stage of the buying journey they stopped. You can even use the tool to study your audience; where they are from, what device they are using and even the browser they are visiting you through.
“For us and our clients, Google Analytics is hands-down the most important piece of technology we use. Without understanding from where users are coming, what traffic is converting to sales or leads, and what is working to bring traffic in, you can’t know what is working!” Swapnil Bhagwat, Senior Manager at Orchestrate Technologies/
Jaco:
For a more in-depth analysis of your visitors’ experience on your website, Jaco would be a great tool to do that. Jaco is like a full camera monitoring system for your visitors. You can get an actual recording of your real visitors’ session on your website as they click, search, move their cursor, type, and navigate across pages. See your website from your customers’ eyes including CSS animations and dynamic content.
Moz:
Not only that Moz helps you find great keywords to improve your ranking on search engines, but it also measures how good your SEO is by showing the actual Google search result for that keyword, including any images or AdWords ads that appear.
“The tool takes you all the way through the keyword research process — from discovering keyword ideas to getting metrics to building a list, filtering the keywords on it, and prioritizing which ones to target based on the numbers that matter.” Rand Fishkin, Moz’s founder
Hootsuite is a scheduling and automation tool for social media platforms, but it also offers very useful data to track engagement. Not only this, you get to track your team responsiveness rate to messages and comments. Another very important metric that Hootsuite tracks is the overall sentiment around your brand “positive, neutral or negative”.
Facebook Insights & Twitter Analytics:
While Hootsuite gives analytics for both Facebook and Twitter, the two social platforms have their own analytic tool. So for more in-depth analysis of each platform, you can use Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics. One really great feature about Facebook insights is that you see the reach of each post, in other words, who saw your post, and compare it to likes/shares “engagement”. With Twitter Analytics, on the other hand, you can keep track of engagement and impressions in up to a 4-week time frame.
Cause a wise man once said, “keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer”. SimilarWeb helps you plug in any website or mobile app and receive insights about their traffic and rankings, so you can compare the data against your website or others. It provides you with the website’s global rank, country rank, category rank, and traffic by country. Also, the overview of total desktop and mobile visits from the past six months, which are broken down by time on site, pages per visit, and bounce rate.
Cyfe:
This is the last tool in our list and it actually can help you monitor data across multiple sites and applications from the above-mentioned ones and even more tools like Google AdWords, Salesforce, PayPal, MailChimp, and WordPress. With a dashboard with up to 40 widgets, you can create real-time reports to download and share.
As the name suggests, with Mentionlytics you keep track of your brand’s mentions both on social media and on the web. Those mentions are also defined as “positive or negative” to follow your brand’s sentiment. Know all your top mentioners based on the largest number of followers and reach to them for more branding visibility. Help your social media managers answer comments or complaints faster. With Mentionlytics you can add more than one brand to track, so you can keep an eye on your competitors!
Conclusion
Finally, keep in mind that big data analytics technologies on their own are not enough. However, with them, you need well-planned analytical processes and people with skills to leverage the technologies to carry out an effective big data analytics initiative. Remember to utilize each tool depending on your business goals. It is also important to define the most important metric for your business in that stage to focus on and react upon.
Gather and analyse all Web & Social mentions to your brand
Mentionlytics works 24/7 and scans for pages and users mentioning your brand and your competitors. Get Share of Voice, Sentiment Analysis, Influencers and many other reports automatically.
