Top 5 Tools for Tracking Your Web Metrics

 

The best tools for understanding user behavior:

Google Analytics [free]

We’ll start with what has become the standard in web analytics tools for businesses of all shapes and sizes (and it’s not the standard just because it’s free). Google Analytics is actually one of the most robust and powerful analytics tools out there. It will help you understand exactly what your visitors are doing on your site. If you run an e-commerce site, Google Analytics can track your transaction data and help you identify which pages on your sites drive the most sales. Beyond user behavior data, Google Analytics does a great job giving you a sense of your user demographics, showing you where you users are from, what types of internet browsers they are using, and even the size computer monitor they are using. While Google Analytics has reams of data available which can be overwhelming, they have thankfully recently added educational tips within the application so you can turn to help at any point.

Compete [Free and paid options]

If you want to know how much traffic your competitors are getting, Compete is the site for you. While limited to U.S. visitors only, Compete provides competitive data so you can see exactly how your top competitors are performing online. Compete will also help you find related sites that you should be keeping an eye on. Compete has a large suite of advanced, paid tools for deep analysis of advertising data, sales data, and more. But, for most small businesses, the free offering that provides competitive traffic data will be plenty useful on its own.

Google Content Experiments [Free]

Formerly Google Website Optimizer, Google has now rolled this tool into the free Google Analytics product. While we already talked about Google Analytics, this feature is so useful that it’s worth talking about independently. Very similar to Optimizely, Google Content Experiments lets you see how two different versions of a web page perform so you can optimize your site. Unlike Optimizely, you don’t get a point-and-click interface for making changes to your site, but Google does take care of all the heavy lifting regarding analyzing the data and telling you which version of the page is better for you and your businesses. Best of all, this functionality is free and easy to use.

The best tools for tracking social metrics: 

Twitter Analytics [free]

Thankfully, some of the best social analytics tools are built right into the tools you are already using. For Twitter, log into their advertising site and click the “analytics” tab in the top navigation. You don’t have to advertise on Twitter to use this feature, so you can just ignore their buttons and links that encourage you to place an ad. Within Twitter’s analytics suite, you can see who your followers are, where they are from, what they are interested in, and even get the gender ratio of your followers. You also get an analysis of your tweets so you can see which tweets reach the most people and create the most conversion.

Facebook Page Insights [free]
 
If you run a Facebook page for your business, then the built-in Facebook Page Insights feature provides detailed analysis of your posts—who they are reaching, who is liking them, and how your Facebook performance is trending over time. You can even see data on visits to your Facebook page and where those visitors came from. Like Twitter Analytics, you can also get summary demographic data on your fans and the people that read your posts. All in all, Facebook Page Insights provides fascinating and actionable information so that you can optimize your Facebook presence and increase your likes and content shares.

Now that you have all of these tools, the next trick is to figure out what you should be tracking. If you run a small business, finding the time to analyze your data can seem like a daunting task. Fortunately it doesn’t have to be, and I’ll go into more detail about the top metrics you should be tracking in a follow-up post.