I’ve starting an online experiences gift voucher company. What would you say are the best web analytics tools out there?

I’ve started an online experiences gift voucher company. What would you say are the best web analytics tools out there? Also, what are the key measurements I should be looking for when going through my traffic figures?

There are actually quite a few different tools that you can potentially use to cover every single element that you want to track well. However, there are some easy wins you should start with.

Basic metrics tool

• Google Analytics – This is a great tool to use to cover off all the base metrics. Some people believe that Google is spying on your website with this tool and perhaps they are. But who cares if they are spying on your website if you aren’t doing anything wrong?
• So, what’s great about this tool?
  
  • Free: $0.00 is a great price point! Again the only downside is that Google now has your data.
  • Depth: It’s comprehensive and gives you almost too much information to handle.

Getting more detailed

If you can check your analytics daily while running a start-up, then you are doing pretty well. For entrepreneurs whose website are their entire businesses, then you might want to get more detailed. Here are some tools I would recommend:

• Userfly: A great tool to help you watch what your users do on your website.
• Crazyegg: A tool that shows where users specifically click on a webpage. This helps you improve conversion. It will actually show you where they click but there is no button, so you can adjust your site and add a button.

For 20 other analytics tool you can check out this article by Invesp.

Key measurements

Analytics is superb when you already have quite a bit of traffic, although early on in a site’s development it’s a little tough to see trends.

Here are some of the stats you might want to look at when your traffic picks up.

• Number of visits: This is your core metric. How many people are actually going to your website? You might want to break this down and have a look at where they are coming from, ie. What sources of traffic are your biggest volume and which ones convert the best?
• Number and type of keywords
  
  • Generics versus brand: A great way to judge how well your site is performing in the search engines is how much traffic you are getting from generic keywords versus just your brand name.

    If people are coming to you only because of your brand name you might want to consider improving your natural search. The more generic search terms you are getting to your website the more new customers you will start to bring in.

  • Longtail variants: Once your site has been up for a while and you are getting some decent traffic you can look into what are some of the other ways people describe your service.

    Usually this comes in the form of five to seven-word keywords like “great six-year-old cakes for boys” or “pink mufflers for Holden Barinas”. These are great topics to post about on your site and perhaps great niches to open up into.

• Conversion rate of keywords: A report on conversion rate of keywords is crucial to determine which words make you money. These are your money keywords and the ones you want to dedicate more time to ranking higher and fixing up their landing pages.
• Top 50 pages improvements: Why focus on all your pages when normally 20% of them deliver most of your sales? With your limited time improving that 20% of keywords that brings in 80% of your sales will help you focus and achieve results.

Simple improvements on those pages like adding another paragraph to answer a potential question of a customer will all add up over time.

• Increase sales to non converting pages:
  
  • Look at your top pages and sort them by conversion rate, find the pages that are low converting but have high traffic. These pages have the greatest opportunity to open up new traffic sources.

Find these pages and review them and the types of keywords that are going to them. What changes can you make to help this page convert?