The average Australian spends roughly 10 hours of the day engaging with internet connected devices. With this in mind, the idea of any modern business not having an online presence is madness. For some businesses, the way customers interact with their online presence alone can bring success or failure.
Fortunately, there are plenty of tools available to track and optimise your online presence, even if users are not necessarily on your website. If you want to stay ahead of the game, here are the five best tools you should be using right now.
Google Analytics & Search Console
These two are absolute classics and something we install as standard on all of our websites. These free Google services provide you with an abundance of tracking data on how users are accessing and using your website.
They allow you to view a massive amount of tracking data, from high-level audience demographics to live website user tracking at an individual level. If you haven’t used Google Analytics before don’t worry, there are plenty of tutorials around the web and it’s very easy to learn. Google Analytics and Search Console are staples for any website and should be added as a first priority!
Google Tag Manager
Google has created Tag Manager as a system to quickly and easily add code snippets to your website, usually for the purposes of traffic analysis and marketing optimisation. What this means is that once included, you can add and remove various tracking codes to your website’s header. So while Google Tag Manager doesn’t provide any analytics in itself, it allows anyone to add or remove tracking codes (such as Google Analytics) with very little technical knowledge.
You may need a developer to install this service, but from thereon the interface is simple and learning minimal. The extent of this is pretty much just copy and paste work and most reputable services provide very clear instructions on how to do this. The back-end interface also allows you to activate these code snippets based on different factors such as pages, events and other variables. The control and flexibility this tool offers give any user the capacity to install any major tracking tool they might need.
Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel allows you to leverage your Facebook advertising by creating different audiences based on the way users have interacted with your website. It allows you to track users on your site based on a number of different of events that have occurred, such as page visits, purchases, registrations, searches and more.
If you are serious about Facebook advertising, this is a very good way of targeting your audience at a very personal level. The Facebook Pixel events tracking can be somewhat difficult to install, but tools such as Google Tag Manager make this job much easier.
Yoast
Another classic in Web Development, especially for WordPress. Yoast is a WordPress plugin and another tool we install on websites as a standard. If you’ve done any research into web marketing you’ll know SEO is incredibly important.
One report suggests that over 50% of all website traffic comes through organic searches (search engines). For this reason, if you don’t feature high in these rankings your site can quickly become irrelevant. Yoast offers easy to follow steps that allow you to optimise your website for SEO. SEO is a complex and wide-ranging topic, but Yoast offers some simple steps to get your website moving in the right direction.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a relatively new contender on the analytics scene after releasing its’s beta in 2014, but it’s a very powerful tool for tracking advanced website statistics. If you’re serious about tracking and user experience this is the tool you want to use. HotJar records tracking of individual user experiences on your website, as well as heat maps of mouse movement, clicks and scrolling. It also allows you to poll and survey users about their experience on the website.
HotJar offers these services with variable prices depending on how much you want to track, but if you’re serious about tracking user experience this is a tool you’ll want to check out.
While these tools can be time-consuming to set up they are worth it in the long run. The world is becoming more connected to the internet everyday and being competitive is the only way to stay relevant in this increasingly crowded space.
If you want to chat about websites, marketing, or anything in between, don’t hesitate to give us a call!