One of the most outstanding differences between Internet marketing and traditional marketing is the amount of ROI tracking you can do. Not only can you track if your efforts are working but you can get feedback that allows you to make changes which will improve your results.
Sadly, when we first start working with new clients, we see that many of them don’t even have proper tracking set up. They might have analytics installed but nobody took the time to implement Google Analytics goal tracking. This means that you are flying blind in terms of making meaningful improvements to your website marketing.
Another problem is that many people aren’t even aware of the amazing new analytics software that can help you improve your marketing or are not willing to spend the money on new technology.
This first post in a series will give you an overview of some of the most essential web analytics tools to use to track and improve your campaigns. Subsequent posts will illustrate in greater detail how to use each of these web analytics tools.
Back in the day, website analytics tools were expensive. When Google Analytics first came out and was free, we almost couldn’t believe it. Now, pretty much everyone has it and at the very least can see what marketing tactics are driving traffic.
To get the most out of it, setting up goals in Google analytics is absolutely essential. Goals can be things like how many people downloaded an e-book, filled out a contact form, bought things in a shopping cart, or even watched a video.
A few amazing things you can do with Google Analytics for free
- Create custom Google analytics dashboards to see important data first
- See what marketing tactics are driving traffic
- Discover how long people stay on your website and how many pages they visit
- Determine where users are located
- Use in-page analytics to see what things get clicked on the most
- Learn what people are searching for on your website
- Understand what pages get visited the most and why
- Identify your worst pages that have extremely high bounce rates
- Learn why people abandon your shopping cart
- See how many visitors are coming from mobile and if they are satisfied
When I was doing keyword research for this post, I was amazed to see that 1 million people search for the key phrase “Google Analytics” every month! There is no question that Google Analytics is a great first step for tracking your return on investment and how you are building your authority.
There are some things you just can’t get with Google Analytics and so I recommend installing other tools like ClickTale or Crazy Egg.
What is ClickTale? Here are just a few of the features and benefits to help illustrate what it can do for you:
ClickTale provides customer experience analytics such as the following:
- Video playback of actual website user sessions
- Heat maps of where customers are focused on your website
- Scroll maps that let you see how far down users are scrolling
- Form analytics that help you diagnose and fix problems with your forms
- Increase conversions by discovering where visitors are bailing out
ClickTale pricing: starting from $99 a month.
Looking for a ClickTale alternative? Crazy Egg is somewhat similar and starts at $108 a year.
If you don’t know what you’re customers are doing then you can’t fix site problems. If you want to build your authority using content marketing, then you absolutely need to know how people are interacting with your thought leadership.
Customer experience analytics tools like ClickTale look deeply at actual user sessions and provide something very different from other website analytic tools.
HubSpot is different than Google Analytics in the sense that it is an all-in-one Internet marketing tool. It also tracks more in terms of actual people than just data points. For example, when a user fills out a form on your website, or downloads an e-book, their contact information is sent into the database. Every time that person comes back to your website, you will then be notified by HubSpot, not only that they have returned but what pages they have visited and what actions they have taken.
When you are looking at the pages that the person visited, you are often also looking at a picture of them that has been imported into the database. This gives it a much different feeling than looking at IP addresses.
Being able to see what actual users are doing on your website allows you to improve your sales process and deepen your understanding of website visits.
HubSpot attribution tracking allows you to see over a long time span what marketing tactics are paying off. Google Analytics only looks at the last few months of data in regard to tracking conversions. HubSpot, on the other hand, can tell you if somebody initially had a first touch with your website because of Facebook, came back fourteen months later from an organic search but then bought today because they clicked a Google PPC ad. That kind of data is critical in determining where to put your marketing budget.
One of the other outstanding features of HubSpot is that it allows you to do marketing automation. If somebody downloads an e-book, an automated workflow system will allow you to send follow up emails, such as every few days, to nurture them down the marketing funnel.
If you are serious about Internet marketing, then you should be getting a lot of leads. If you are getting a lot of leads, you need to follow up with them regularly and that can be impossible to do without automation and a sales database/process.
Some of the key features of HubSpot are:
- Keyword research tools
- Blogging tools
- Social media management
- Search engine optimization
- Content management
- Landing pages
- Email marketing automation
- Attribution tracking
HubSpot is a leader in what is called Inbound Marketing, where the focus is on providing helpful information in order to gain trust as opposed to merely advertising or trying to constantly sell something.
HubSpot Pricing is dependent on how many contacts you have in your database but starting prices – billed annually – are as follows:
- Basic: $200 /month
- Professional $800 /month
- Enterprise: $ 2,400 /month
HubSpot alternatives are tools like Infusionsoft and SharpSpring.
Authorities don’t skimp
There are many other website analytics tools out there but these are three of the best. If you are serious about being a thought leader and tracking the return on your marketing investments, then it’s time to dish out some cash for the tools that are now required.
While you can certainly get by with just Google Analytics, authorities aren’t in the business of just getting by.
What are some other website analytics tools that you find essential?
