When I decided to throw my lot in with digital marketing, part of the appeal was working in an environment where finally there was real accountability! Online, data is everywhere – blogs, social media, web analytics, etc. – all with the potential to provide valuable insights into customer behaviour and attitudes towards our brand.
It’s amazing then that few marketers who play in the digital space take the time to truly understand and interpret the data. And if they do, it is often only a cursory glance at Google Analytics. The fact is that Google Analytics and other clickstream tools are only part of the equation. To get actionable insights from your analytics you need to have a full arsenal of tools that also covers (at a minimum) user experience; social media analysis and site surveys.
- Google Analytics
The industry standard of clickstream tools, and better yet it’s free. If you have a website you should at a bare minimum be using GA to understand what people are doing on your website. - Qualtrics
Once you understand the what, you need to understand the why. A robust online survey tool that allows you to create on-exit surveys (like Qualtrics) will let you find out from your visitors why they came to your site and if they were able to achieve that. - Mouseflow
Complementing your clickstream data is a tool that visualizes what your visitors did on your website. Mouseflow lets you see how visitors behave on your website by realtime recording and playback of sessions from which you can generate heatmaps for clicks and mouse movements (such as scroll behaviour) as well as some standard analytics. - Radian 6
While it’s great to know what’s happening on your website, it’s also pretty damned important to know what’s happening beyond it too. Radian 6 is my favourite tool for social media monitoring, allowing you to listen in and analyse conversations taking place all over the world about your brand.
So there you have it, some of my favourite tools for analysing online data with the goal of gleaning actionable, strategic insights.
If you want to find out more about web analytics, I highly recommend heading over to the brilliant and inspiring Avinash Kaushik’s blog.
Good stuff, always helpful. Have you looked at Crazy Egg? Do you rate Mouseflow over that?
Thanks for the comment Dan.
I like Crazy Egg a lot but went with Mouseflow due to the realtime recording and ability to see the interactions.
Still though, Confetti view in Crazy Egg is very cool and unique to the product.
wow great insight. i’m so new to this world and still trying to figure things out. i can’t even getting my google analytics to work! ah well…hopefully in time. but thanks again for this wonderful post. it really helps give us some direction
Thanks for stopping by.
GA is a good first step and worth spending the time to figure out how it relates to your business objectives.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mal Chia, locspoc. locspoc said: RT @malchia: New post: 4 Killer Tools For Online Analysis http://bit.ly/bQXx8w [...]
Great post Mal, will be checking out Mouseflow, had not heard of that before…also second your recommendation of Radian6 – their tools are user friendly and service/support is excellent. Especially handy for regular client reporting as well as monitoring and analysis.
Some other online analysis tools are our Heartbeat and MAP services. Heartbeat provides social media monitoring, while MAP offers social media analytics. Both services feature geo-demographics, automated sentiment and the ability to identify and engage with opinion leaders. You can get more information at http://www.sysomos.com/products.
cheers, Mark
Mark Evans
Director of Communications
Sysomos Inc.
Hot tips, Mal! My two main sites are both built around WordPress’ CMS, and I find WordPress Stats and Feedburner Stats to be very useful in monitoring movement through and to our sites, including RSS metrics.
Hey there and thanks for the Radian6 kudos
. Mouseflow is new to me and I’m headed over to check them out now. Thanks for the tip!
Katie
Community Manager | Radian6
@misskatiemo
[...] I’ve said before, part of the beauty of the online space (social, included) is the wealth of data available to [...]