The ability to measure and analyse your business’s online statistics is the best way to make sense of how effective your online presence is. In other words, to understand how current and future clients engage with your content will give you the insights you need on what to do more or less of when communicating online.
As we all know it is important to ‘know your audience’, and luckily there are plenty of analytical resources out there that give us priceless data and statistics (typically via reports) about our visitor engagement.
There are analytic tools available for most, if not all, of your online platforms – from your official website to your Facebook page. Analytical awareness has many benefits, including dramatic increases in your website’s SEO and ROI.
The most well-known analytics services include Google analytics, LinkedIn’s built in analytics dashboard and of course Hootsuite. Analytic tools often use a lot of lingo specific to the online marketing process – here we give a briefing on some of the most common terms you’ll come across.
The first step to analytics is making sure you have signed up to the tools most useful to your particular needs. The saying “the more the merrier” is not necessarily true in this case, it is more about which online pages you use the most and which ones you need more insight into.
With that in mind, here’s a list of our top 5 analytics tool picks:
5) SocialBro: This tool is solely designed for monitoring and finding insightful conclusions on your Twitter usage on daily basis. Great news! – most of its features are free if you have less than 5000 social contacts. That means you can find out when the best time to post is, who’s following or un-following you and what their twitter activity looks like.
Simply sign up via SocialBro’s main website and from there on in you can access insights and reports on your SocialBro dashboard. If you have a Hootsuite account then you can add a SocialBro ‘stream’ to give you quicker and constant insights while you post.
4) LinkedIn Analytics: If you don’t already have a LinkedIn account, you should probably set one up ASAP. LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking platform, where you can create your own individual profile, as well as a multi-user company page. LinkedIn Analytics is attached to your company’s page and gives you free insights into the scope of your reach, ability to engage and other interesting trends
3) KISSmetrics: This tool offers a great system that can look at the relationship between your official company website and ROI, while also tracking why you lose or gain in website visitors – so that you can maximize conversions (particularly useful for e-commerce websites). Anyone is eligible for a 14-day trial of KISSmetrics and from there a number of billed subscription plans are available.
2) Hootsuite: This tool helps you both organise and analyse all of your social media pages. Sign up and connect all of your social media pages to Hootsuite’s dashboard streams by entering in login information.
You can add up to 3 pages for free (Expert uses it for insights into our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages). For more than 3 pages and an endless amount of reports and graphs on visitor behaviour you have to sign up to subscription plans.
1) Google Analytics: Personally, we use Google Analytics to find out more about our website’s audience, what they tend to view and how they discover our website. On top of that the tool allows you to track the landing page quality, conversions and poorly performing pages via its sophisticated dashboard.
Other features include insights into website SEO, cross-device measurements and AdWords integration. In other words, Google Analytic can operate as a broad-spectrum optimisation service.
The features you want to use and the popularity of your site will decide whether you need a standard (free), or a premium (billed account) account. If you have a Gmail or a Google+ account you are already one step ahead in signing up to this handy tool.