8 Website Analytics Tools for Marketing

At its core, inbound marketing is all about analytics.

Sure, creativity, content, a customer-centric focus, and enthusiasm are all essential to inbound, but another important facet is discovering what works, what isn’t working, and what can be improved in order to maximize results. Analytics drive every inbound action you take and move you toward success for both your company and your customers.

Your website is the cornerstone of how you market your business, so analytics that measure how it performs take on even greater importance. Which pages are people visiting the most? Which pages are converting? Many great tools are available to help you get a better look at how well your website is performing, along with what competitors are doing with their sites.

We’ve detailed eight of those tools in this post—use the knowledge gained from these resources to improve your website.

What Are Web Analytics Tools, and Why Should You Use Them?

These tools offer insights into how your site is performing. Marketing analytics measure traffic, page views, clicks, and so much more. They collect and analyze your data, as well as your competitors’ data.

With this information, you can better understand your customers and apply that knowledge to improve your site for a better online experience and increased conversions. Insights into how your site is performing and how your customers are behaving help determine what parts of your site work and what parts need improvement. These tools should be used to track keywords that drive traffic to your site, your social channels, page performance, and trends over time.

Eight Marketing Tools You Should Be Using

Different analytics produce different data, but the underlying goal is the same: to measure the performance of your web presence. We’ve divided the metrics into four different areas of focus, with two tools in each area, for a total of eight recommended tools you should be using.

Social Metrics Advertising Tools

• Facebook Page Insights: This is a free, built-in feature available for your company’s Facebook page. It can be used to see whom your posts are reaching, who’s liking your posts, and where your visitors are coming from. You can also see data on how your page’s performance is trending over time and how visitors are engaging with your content. With this information, you can optimize your social presence to increase likes, followers, and shares.
• Twitter Analytics: Another free social tracking tool—and you don’t need to be advertising on Twitter to use it. Use this to learn more about who your followers are, where they are coming from, and what topics they find interesting. This tool measures engagement to show you which tweets are reaching the most people and how to make your content more successful.

Testing/Optimization Tools

• Optimizely: This platform provides companies with a simple solution for improving website pages through A/B testing. With this tool, you can easily make changes to a page on your site and test to see if your new version is better than the old page. Use this to figure out how to make a successful website and achieve performance goals. No coding experience is necessary. 
• Google Content Experiments: This is another free tool from Google that helps you test and choose between different versions of your website or landing pages. Find out which parts of your page or content generate the most clicks or conversions. This tool then measures how each page performed and shows you which is the most effective. Once you find your highest converting page, you can make it live for all visitors.

SEO/Competitive Intelligence

• Moz: This SEO toolset is perfect for tracking and improving your search engine rankings, as well as tracking your competitors’ rankings. With Moz, you can track keywords by campaign or location, see how you rank on both desktop and mobile devices, find out who your top competitors are, and much more—all in one package. This is a great tool that can help optimize your site and improve your rank.
• SEMrush: This is another great tool to compare your performance to your competition. Perfect for companies that advertise on Google or other search engines, this tool shows how you rank among your competitors and even lets you see information such as copy, keywords, and budget. Along with these features and tools, you’ll gain valuable insight and recommendations that will help you improve your website’s performance, ranking, and advertising.

User Behavior

• Google Analytics: One of the best and preferred analytics tools for marketing—and it’s free. Google Analytics tracks web traffic to your site and collects data, such as keywords, that can be used to improve your visitors’ online experience. Find out which keywords are bringing the most visitors to your site. Get reports and information about your visitors and conversions. Figure out where you might be losing visitors, and why, so that you can improve those pages and keep them from leaving.
• LuckyOrange: Want to learn more about how your visitors navigate your site? This tool shows you just that. With heatmaps, user recordings, and other visualizations, you can see exactly what your customers are doing on your page. LuckyOrange shows you where people are clicking and where they aren’t, how far down the page they’re scrolling, and more. This is a great tool for improving your site’s design and content by learning what your visitors find most interesting or useful. You’ll get information on where people are coming from and which areas of your site are catching their attention.

Analyze and Take Action

Undoubtedly, website analytics can provide solid insight into how well your inbound strategies are performing. Many options besides these are out there, both free and paid versions.

Whatever tools you choose, the key is acting upon the findings. If you know something on your website isn’t working right, test alternatives and try something different. Figure out what you want to focus on and what you should be tracking, select the right analytics, and let the data guide your success.

This post was originally written on April 18, 2017, and was updated in January 2020.