5 Best Web Analytics Tools for Tracking Your Website's Stats 

These website analytics tools allow you to know these crucial data in order for you to improve your  website.

As a business owner, it is crucial to track the number of people visiting your site each month. By using one or a couple of website analytics tools, you'll be able to know where these people are coming from, they time they spend on each of your site's page, and so on.

You'll also be able to track whether they've engaged via social media. You'll be able to find out if they were able to read a specific post after reading your tweet. You'll also be able to know if they visit your website's products page after seeing your Facebook update with a link on it.

Website analytics tools allow you to know these crucial data in order for you to improve your website, your products or services, and they also aid in website SEO audit.

Marketing and doing business online would be futile without tracking, so now's the time to look for the best web analytics tool if you haven't done so. Here's a short list of the 5 best website analytics tools you can look into:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most widely used free website evaluation tool by online marketers and business owners. It offers so many features which could be overwhelming for a first-time user. It may take time, usually a few hours, if you will peruse your stats.

You can get quite a lot of data including: your audience's age and gender; their geographical locations and primary language; the number of daily visits your website receives; your website's bounce rate; the number of returning visitors; and so on.

If you want to get started with Google Analytics, just sign up here.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a paid analytics tool that offers a 30-day free trial. It differs from other similar tools as it shows a visual graphic of where people click on your website. You can use this helpful data particularly if you want to determine which of your site's pages will work best for advertisements and promos.

If you wish to try this tool just to see if it fits your business needs, you can sign up for the 30-day free trial.

Qualaroo

Qualaroo is a paid analytics tool that allows you to insert survey questions (for visitors to answer) on pages within your website. This provides you more useful insights that come from real-time feedback. This also lets you give a more personal approach to engaging with your visitors as they continually provide answers to questions that will help improve your business.

Try their 14-day trial here before deciding on the paid plans.

Mouseflow

Mouseflow works like a surveillance camera because you can watch as visitors peruse your website. You can see where their mouse pointer goes as they do so. This may seem creepy, but it's quite helpful since you'll see first-hand your visitors' behavior.

This is a paid tool, but you can get started with a free plan. You can sign up here and get started.

Optimizely

Optimizely is an ideal analytics tool for A/B testing. You can test specific pages on your site and features, and compare them with other design or pages that you have. This tool will identify which version works better. So if you're trying new features on your website and can't decide on which direction to go, this tool can help you out.

You can sign up for a free starter plan and start running your A/B tests right away.

Trying out these best web analytics tools will help you decide on which ones to use in the long term. There's no single tool that can deliver every bit of data you need. Instead, go for complementary analytics tools/apps that will help you meet the demands of your business marketing needs.

If you'd like to try a free website evaluation tool, get in touch with us. Or better yet, click here to get started.

View User Profile for Crista McCandless Crista is a self-proclaimed geek who loves fiction, data analysis, growth hacking and everything Tolkien. At Fast Track, she helps businesses identify areas to improve and grow online with her ninja moves. She manages the digital strategy, including online marketing and search engine optimization. Follow her musings about world domination in Twitter as @crista_mcc.
Posted by Crista McCandless Friday, May 22, 2015 9:40:00 PM Categories: Google Analytics SEO SMB web analytics

15 Reasons to Perform a Website Audit 

reasons to perform website audit

It’s important to perform a website audit on a regular basis, particularly before a major website redesign. Evaluating your website can help determine if it's optimized to meet your goals, and for you to find ways to improve your website's performance.

If this is your first time or if it's been a long time since you've done website evaluation, seek out the help of a professional (an individual or a team) who has the technical know-how to execute this process effectively.

What are the benefits?

One of the main benefits of a site audit is achieving increased website performance. Generally, this is the ultimate goal for both technical and content aspects. A website evaluation allows you to check the strength of your site's technical framework, asses if it is search-engine-friendly and can be easily navigated by visitors.

An audit also allows you to enhance your SEO by identifying overlooked SEO opportunities, remedying poorly executed SEO practices throughout your site's content, and re-focusing your SEO strategy to put your site visitors first before the search engines. This protects your site by minimizing the impact of the constantly changing search engine algorithm.

Also consider reassessing your site's lead generation and conversion rates during evaluation. This will help you to identify overlooked opportunities to convert site visitors into leads. Remember to include relevant call to action statements and pinpoint deficiencies in landing pages to improve conversions.

Why do you need a website audit?

Below are 15 reasons why auditing your website is important.

(1) The internet is ever-evolving and, so are the standards.

(2) Change in best practices, software, device compatibility occur quickly online. Your site should be able to handle and adapt to these changes.

(3) It can help you find the probable cause as to why your site is not converting visitors into customers.

(4) You can derive insights from analysis reports with regards to how well the graphics are optimized.  You can also get insights into consumer behavior that could affect your strategic plan.

(5) Analysis reports provide insight on your website traffic rank (i.e. increase or decrease of site visitors), search percentages, and bounce rates, showing the popularity of content on your site.

(6) You have a basis for modifying your site's components that impede performance.

(7) Using the traffic report that your site audit has generated, check where your traffic is coming from and which keywords are being used by visitors to land on your site.

(8) You'll be able to identify and repair broken links which are affecting your site's functionality.

(9) HTML errors, that present website pages incorrectly on browsers, can be identified and fixed.

(10) The analysis can provide a review of how/why your site is too slow.

(11) Erroneous page output is often caused by incorrect character setting and this can be identified and fixed during the audit.

(12) Ensuring that your site contains 'link juice' is another reason for performing site evaluation. It checks link juice flow to pages which helps in achieving optimum search engine ranking.

(13) Download time is often impacted by the size of your website, so an audit is necessary to also achieve optimized bandwidth usage.

(14) You can also check if website security has been compromised via security audit. This requires the use of a server and security testing software.

(15) Human error such as duplicate input of page titles and metadescriptions can be checked and fixed during an audit.

There are still many other reasons to perform a site audit to ensure that yours is secure, safe to users, and compliant to all the applicable standards. However, as mentioned, you will need the expertise of a professional company that offers this type of service.

Fast Track has been performing website audits for our customers for years, and we'd love to provide the same service to you. Contact us today and let's get started.

View User Profile for Crista McCandless Crista is a self-proclaimed geek who loves fiction, data analysis, growth hacking and everything Tolkien. At Fast Track, she helps businesses identify areas to improve and grow online with her ninja moves. She manages the digital strategy, including online marketing and search engine optimization. Follow her musings about world domination in Twitter as @crista_mcc.
Posted by Crista McCandless Monday, April 27, 2015 12:10:00 PM Categories: B2B B2C Google Analytics SEO small business tips SMB web trends website

Is This Common Oversight Screwing Up Your Google Analytics Data? 

Google analytics data

Google Analytics is like a jigsaw in that we can have great fun and joy studying it, but it doesn’t come fully assembled out of the box. We need to piece it together bit by bit in order to create a more reliable picture of what’s really happening on our website. As standard, Google Analytics is lacking in accuracy because of: 

  • Cookie deletions or disabling, 
  • Server reporting errors, 
  • JavaScript errors or disabling, 
  • Private browsing, 
  • Cross device usage,
  • Browser timeouts,
  • And much more1

All this makes it difficult to track what’s happening on your site with any kind of certainty. Some of these are more important than others and some of these we can fix quite easily. One of the most important things, often-overlooked, but relatively easy to fix, is the inclusion of staff’s behavior in your Google analytics data.

Internal Traffic: A Cardinal Sin

Sometimes, your website is used by staff for information gathering, checking, referencing, answering customer queries and the like. Other times, there may not be a difference between the front and back end, with staff using the online checkout to process phone orders. Either way, if employees uses your website regularly for anything at all, you should remove that data from your analytics.

If you don’t remove your internal traffic from your Google Analytics metrics, you’ll skew your data and cloud your vision of what’s happening on your site.

Your Staff’s Sixth Sense

Staff that use your website regularly tend to know the site like the back of their hand. They know it from front to back, on a subconscious level. This means they’ll do things like:

  • Skip over pages on their way to finding something in particular, improving your user journey stats.
  • Use short cuts and workarounds when searching for information, helping hide the hard to find sections.
  • They won’t read because they know where things are, so their average time spent on page is a lot less.
  • They may use it a lot more, making your unique user engagement higher than it naturally is.

Staff will overlook nuances and navigate with efficiencies that casual users wouldn’t and they’ll do it all on a subconscious level because they’ve done it a million times before. This will warp your view of what’s happening and compromise your judgement of your sites performance.

How to Fix Internal Traffic Data Compromises

If you haven’t removed your internal traffic from your metrics yet, all is not lost. You can get things under control by filtering your internal IP address/es from your stats, like so:

1. Go to Admin:



2. Check in the ACCOUNT, PROPERTY and VIEW sections and make sure you’re viewing the correct website that you wish to disable the internal traffic for:



3. In the VIEW menu, on the right hand side, go to Filters:



4. Click + NEW FILTER.

5a. Make sure that Create new Filter is selected, then give your Filter a name. Use something recognisable like ‘Internal traffic’. 



5b. Ensure that Predefined Filter is selected, then change traffic from the ISP domain to traffic from the IP address.


5c. Enter the IP address that you want to exclude and click Save.



Note: If your company has more than one IP address, you’ll need to create a new filter for each separate IP.

You’ll now see your new Filter in the Filters menu:



This won’t remove internal traffic retrospectively. In fact, nothing you do with Filters or Goals or Event tracking will work retrospectively. They’ll starts tracking from today, so whenever you make a change like this, use annotations to mark it on your timeline2

Accurate Data = Informed Decisions

Without removing your internal traffic from your Google Analytics data, you’re leaving yourself open to needless and unhelpful inaccuracies and errors. This will create an inconsistent picture of what’s happening on your website and cloud your decision making judgement. If you don’t have accurate information, you can’t make informed decisions. That’s the whole point in using something like Google Analytics in the first place, isn’t it?

References

1 http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/01/31/why-is-google-analytics-inaccurate/

2 http://www.fasttrackteam.com/the-secret-google-analytics-feature-that-will-change-your-life-forever-.aspx

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Posted by Wednesday, August 6, 2014 12:45:00 AM Categories: Google Analytics SEO