The top tools for tracking the success of your website

Nowadays, nearly every business, big and small, has a website. Websites are a great way to promote your product and/or services. They provide information, case studies, images, contact details and sometimes office maps or directions. Overall, a website contains anything and everything a potential customer could want to know about your business. However, no matter how amazing you might think your website is, it could be under-performing for a multitude of reasons. Here are some of the top tracking tools we use and recommend:

Google Analytics

Here at onebite, we use Google Analytics to measure website traffic and user trends. Google Analytics provides acquisition data about the sources of website traffic, such as organic search from links on search engine results pages or referrals from social media links. The key use of this is to understand what marketing channels or digital platforms your business should be utilising to bring the best users to your site. The majority of your traffic may be coming from social, such as being generated via Facebook advertisements, but if your organic search traffic has a higher conversion rate, it may be time to put your focus into SEO to improve the organic rankings of your website to capitalise on this trend. Strategising how you reach new consumers is just as important as solidifying current client relationships.

Google Analytics will also tell you how your users are using your site, with information like what pages they visit and how long for. This type of data is very useful to help you decide what your best pages are to focus on optimising further, but also what pages aren’t performing as well and may need some attention and updates to bring them up to speed. For a more detailed overview of how to best utilise Google Analytics, check out our Google Analytics 101 glossary of terms to help you.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is any website owner’s dream. The tool is used for measuring website performance in Google. SEO performance is key to internet-wide success nowadays and knowing what search terms bring up your website or webpages is incredibly important. Getting to the top of Google is much harder than some may think – it’s a real battlefield out there. However, knowing which search terms and keywords are leading people to your domain means you can optimise for them as effectively as possible to bring people to your website. Google Search Console will be able to inform you of how many impressions (views) your domain gets for each term you are ranking for and how many clicks those links are getting. This allows you to see what terms you may have high impressions for, but a low click through rate, so you will know these are opportunities to increase clicks for that term by optimising page titles and meta descriptions and bring more people to your site.

Moz

Moz works amazingly alongside Google Search Console but also as a standalone tool. The main use of Moz is to measure SEO performance and provide insightful feedback in statistical data. The vast amount of data and insights available for how your website is doing across search engines means you and your clients can see the numbers behind both success and shortfalls. To spot problem areas, the current rankings of selected keywords and phrases are sought out by Moz and compared against your competition. This direct comparison, paired with the useful insights and optimisation opportunities provided, will help to point your business in the right direction, up the search result rankings, with your competition beneath you.

Google Lighthouse and Pingdom

Google Lighthouse and Pingdom are two different platforms that work well as standalones or together. Here at onebite, we utilise both of them to measure the performance and speed of the websites we work on and build. High-speed web performance minimises bounce rates and ensures that when your visitors come to your site, they stay there. We all know that clicking on a link to be greeted by a loading animation for too long is the number one reason we will abandon the site.

We understand that you don’t necessarily need both of these platforms, but they are extremely complimentary because both of them offer recommendations for improving performance. These recommendations tend to differ and vary every time, so usage of both tools means you get a broader perspective of recommendations that work for you; you can pick and choose which next steps work best for you, your budget and your capacity.

We hope our tool recommendations have been insightful and helpful. Knowing how your website is doing is all about how your users are getting to your site, what keeps them there and ultimately gets them to perform the action you want them to and convert. Yes, keep it up to date, make it pretty and have fresh content available, but don’t forget to make sure what you are doing works for your users, keeps them engaged and encourages them to come back for more.