Features of analytics tools

A website is most often created for the development of personal business and its maximum expansion. If the created site does not help to get the desired result, then you may need to use specialized web analytics tools.

Web analytics tools can help you find the answer to almost any question about a website or its visitors. But today the variety of tools is extremely large and they all have individual advantages. If you find it difficult to find the services you really need  — we suggest you consider all the main types of web analytics tools, the features of each of them and determine which ones will really help in your case.

What web analytics tools do

Web analytics tools collect data to show how visitors come to your website and what actions they perform while on it. They also allow you to measure performance by tests and goals to see how your website is performing, where performance can be improved, and the impact of the actions you take to improve it. Among the things that website analytics tools can tell you are the following:

 

• How do people find your site?
• What do they do after they get there?
• What content do people interact with on your site?
• When does activity increase?
• Why do some users buy and others don't?
• How can you increase attendance?

Some applications also include data from social and mobile applications that overlap with a broader category of digital analytics.

Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool

Many businesses are starting their site analysis with Google Analytics, the most popular web analytics solution, used by more than 29 million websites. This is a free and fairly reliable service for many small businesses. With Google Analytics, you can understand which channels bring you the most traffic, and see metrics like:

 

• page views;
• unique page views;
• average time spent on the page;
• failure rate.

But there is no tool that can provide all the necessary information. Owners of corporate sites often use a combination of additional tools to obtain the maximum amount of data.

When will Google Analytics not meet your needs?

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but you can't always get answers to all your questions. As digital marketing strategies become more sophisticated, you may need to find tools that make it easier to access detailed information.

 

Google Analytics also gives you little insight into how your site interacts with you: you won't be able to adequately evaluate the bounce rates and time spent on the page. The program is also difficult to use for those who do not have deep technical knowledge. In addition, there are times when you want to get more information about your users than Google Analytics can offer. There are other types of web analytics software that will be more suitable for things like testing and meeting users and how they use your website or application.

Content analysis tools

Content marketing teams catch what media publishers have known for years: If you publish a lot of content, it's best to have a good measurement system. Given how difficult it can be for content-oriented people to use tools like Google Analytics, it's best to choose tools from the content analysis category. They help measure how different audiences evaluate and disseminate data from news portals. The information obtained allows us to understand how best to attract readers and stimulate conversions.

 

Customer analysis tools

Customer analysis tools delve deeper into customer behavior than other common web analytics programs. They receive visitor data from a variety of environments, such as a cell phone, email, and the product being analyzed. You can create segments based on behavioral patterns, and then predict and offer products and services that different groups of customers can purchase.

 

Convenience Analytics Tools (UX)

Ease of use analysis tools are specialized applications that allow companies to analyze what users do on the page. They record how people interact with the site and its elements, so the internet marketing or product team can assess how different functions are perceived. With these statistics, businesses can make changes to a page or user interface and see how those changes affect the popularity of the service by measuring user behavior.

 

A / B and multidimensional testing tools

You can sometimes perform a simple A / B test using a common web analytics tool. But if you plan to regularly test and optimize elements of your website, you will benefit from a special testing tool. And if you plan to run multidimensional testing that checks multiple variables on a page at once, you'll definitely need this tool to accurately integrate the results.

 

Social network analytics tools

Social web analytics tools are important for landings focused on audience growth and engagement in social networks. While other tools may offer some features to help with this - such as including social media data for your content — you'll need a special tool if your business is heavily dependent on social media participation. Some social analytics tools provide only analysis, while others also allow you to manage your publications.

 

SEO-analytics tools

If you use search engine optimization, you definitely need a specialized SEO tool in your web analytics toolkit. It will be able to provide keyword data to indicate new traffic opportunities, as well as provide backlink data pointing to the website. This is key because the number and quality of links pointing to a website is an important ranking factor for Google.

 

General tools of enterprise analysis

Those companies that deal with large amounts of data face unique challenges and therefore need tools designed to process them. Enterprise-level web analytics tools are solutions designed specifically for businesses with huge amounts of data - which are attended by hundreds of thousands or millions of views per month. At this point, you begin to face the need to separate valuable data from unimportant, inaccurate and erroneous data and receive the necessary information in a timely manner.

 

Open source web analytics tools

Open source web analytics tools give you more freedom and control over your data than cloud-based solutions. Your IT team can use and modify the source code to create their own software so that you can store and analyze data as conveniently as possible. This type of software is local because you store it (and all the data in it) on your own servers.

 

Product analysis tools

Product analysis tools measure how people interact with a digital technology product or application and use it, not the website. These analytics tools are used by product development teams to improve user interaction. They can see if users are interacting with the new feature, and some product analysis tools further measure website data.

 

How to choose the best option?

As you can see, there are many web analytics tools — and the information that everyone provides is very important. But keep in mind that using too many tools is not always good, because each of them adds time, money and your attention.

 

Wondering how to find out which web analytics tools are best for you? The choice comes down to your team's priorities:

• If you have a small business card site, you may only need one tool, such as Google Analytics.
• if you are focused on growth with the help of SEO, then, by all means, equip your team with a specialized tool of SEO analysis;
• If you've reached scale through content marketing and want to increase your return on investment, it's time to consider a special content analysis tool.