In today’s interconnected world, running a website means more than building a brand and sell products or services. Many bloggers, webmasters and business site owners need to know more about their competition, the trends, what clients are looking up to, how they perceive the brand, and a lot more. The adage “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer” has become really apparent with the current trend. Knowing how your brand is doing against the competition is what all businesses should be doing to keep up or lead the competition – failing to do so will hurt your business badly. To do this, you have to gather all the data about you, your competition, and your clients, then measure and analyze them thoroughly. This includes, but is not limited to, website traffic, page views, conversion rate, clicks, heat maps, etc.
Website Monitoring Tools
Monitoring, measuring and analyzing data will not only tell you how good (or bad) your online presence is. It is more about knowing how to pivot and improve on the areas where you are lagging. Doing this will require more than 1 tool, but the result will give you a deeper and better insight about your audience and how you can improve your business. Here are 20 of the best website monitoring and analytics tools that we recommend.
#1. Semrush
Semrush is the top notch search engine marketing platform which offers more than 40 tools in one place. Though some of them are premium, you can use the free Semrush account to analyze your own or competitor’s websites. Using the keyword research, you can scale up your content marketing effort to rank high in Google and other search engines.
#2. Hashtagify
With many social media networks using hashtags to better identify interests, it is time that you take advantage of it. Hashtagify will help you find, analyze, and amplify hashtags to accelerate your business growth, brand awareness, and marketing effectiveness. They call it Hashtag Marketing – amplify your reach, identify and reach the right influencers, and make smarter marketing decisions. They also have a ton of resources about hashtags on their University section.
#3. Improvely
When you do online marketing for your brand, there is a big chance of having fraudulent clicks on your ads. And admit it, it really bugs to see many clicks without a single conversion. These clicks can come from a lot of sources like “real” audience, competitors, and paid-to-click affiliates who do nothing but to click on ads without any intent of converting. With Improvely, you can tell where all the clicks come from and fight click fraud, and you will have a working knowledge of how to improve your marketing campaign in line with your audience’s interests.
#4. ClickTale
ClickTale has a lot of tools to know how your customers interacted with your contents. It can show you heatmaps of where your visitors clicked, hovered the mouse, and scrolled to. Aside from these data rich heatmaps, users can also take advantage of form analytics, conversion funnels, site efficiency reports, and session playbacks, whether your visitors use desktop or mobile. Improve the user experience of your site and win customers through all of ClickTale’s tools.
#5. Mu Sigma
Big Data is gaining traction when it comes to knowing who your potential clients are. Mu Sigma will help you harness the goodies that Big Data offers. They are a decision sciences and analytics firm that can help businesses and organizations take Data Engineering to Data and Decision Sciences, and finally to Decision Support. Their main goal is to institutionalize data-driven decision making based on Big Data.
#6. CrazyEgg
This is another tool that will create heat maps and scroll maps of how your users engaged with your content and website. CrazyEgg will help visualize the interest points of your website, which page is the most or least popular, which links were clicked the most, and which parts drew the most attention. Scroll Maps will show you how far customers scroll to and where they abandon your site.
#7. BottleNose
This is another tool to monitor and analyze the activities of people, trends, and emotions using data from major social networks. Bottlenose can tell you when to engage your audience to create the best possible outcome.
#8. SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured is a huge social media analytics tool that helps their clients to set and optimize their strategy, and measure campaign performance with data coming from major social networks. Their tools will give you an in-depth look at your audience and competitors, and help you learn from your social media campaigns to create more engagements and turn potential clients to returning customers.
#9. Canddi
Canddi is about generating high quality leads by tracking existing customers and groups of customers’ web visits. What it really offer though, is the real time sending of email to your sales people to engage visitors while they are on your site. It offers many similar metrics to other tools we have listed here, like which customers are visiting, what their interest is, how long they have been on a certain page. etc.
#10. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo offers a ton of insights about which contents and keywords work for your audience. It can help you to view what your competitors are publishing and how their contents perform. BuzzSumo also aims to provide insight about the influencers on your niche, and then allow you to amplify and take advantage of the data from these people.
#11. Rival IQ
Staying ahead of the competition means you have to know who your competitors are. Rival IQ intends to do that – it provides you knowledge of your competitors movements and actions. It uses social media analytics to keep track of your competitors.
#12. UberVu (via Hootsuite)
UberVu uses metrics like Trending Stories, Real Time Influencers, Spikes and Bursts, and Awesome Geo Distribution Data to put you on top of the competition. You can ride the emerging trends, stories, contents, and influencers, to create awareness for you brand.
#13. Webmaster Tools and Search Console
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are popular and completely free tools for monitoring your website performance. There are many free tools to analyze the keywords, check the ranking of your popular keywords, check mobile usability issues and find crawl errors. These tools are aiming to improve the overall user experience and search engine position of your site.
#14. Alexa (Retired)
This is a freemium tool from Amazon that is used as web standards for monitoring global and local ranking of any website. This will help to understand the keywords that will rank higher, competitor analysis and compare traffic metrics of multiple sites.
#15. SumAll
SumAll is a tool that will put all your social media reports into one place, allowing you to see them all on a single dashboard. Their service is compatible with most social media networks, so you don’t have to worry that your other accounts may lag behind.
#16. Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is about how users interact and engage with your Facebook Pages. From the data that this tool can give, you can improve your posts to maximize engagement with the fans. You can also view the demographics of your audience with this tool.
#17. Compete
This is another tool that focuses on competitors to stay on top of the competition. It shows data about how your competitors engage their audience, and with this, you may improve your online presence and brand awareness. Compete is a great tool to measure your market share and how it performs against your competitors’ market share.
#18. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a tool to help you know your customers better. It tracks and provides reports about your customers – before they were customers and after they became customers. Kissmetrics can tell you what made the conversion possible.
#19. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most widely used analytic tools out there. It is free, but it provides a ton of data that may help you improve your marketing campaigns. Everything from page views to conversion rates, bounce rates to exit, GA will provide them. Reports are customizable to what is comfortable for you.
#20. iPerceptions
Worried what your customers say about your brand? Use iPerceptions. This is a survey tool to help evaluate your customers’ user experience. This is one of the best ways to know the things that you need to change, and therefore improve customer engagement.
Final Thoughts
The tools listed here are really meant to help you identify the trends, best possible time to engage your audience, who the influencers are, and which topics are hot for a particular niche. With the tons of data that you may get from these tools, you need to understand how you can use the data, and whether they are good or bad. Stay ahead of the competition by giving the best possible user experience to your customers.
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