3 Helpful Tools to Monitor Website Users and Collect Data

If you have a website, you likely understand the struggle to best optimize it to maximize sales-qualified traffic and increase conversions. It is essential that you not only understand how your users find your website but also how users are currently using and navigating your website so that you can make the necessary changes to increase your conversions and create a better user experience.

The Importance of a Great User Experience

If you've spent any time on the web, you know how frustrating it can be to go to a website and struggle to find what you came there looking for. Or when the design of a website is confusing, causes you to rabbit trail, and then you can't find your way back to a location where things kind-of made sense. Nobody is a fan of these kinds of experiences, which is why it is very important to evaluate the effectiveness of your website layout, design, and overall user experience constantly. 

Just like everything on the web, people's search habits and expectations of what they are to find on a website changes seemingly every day. This is why it is of the utmost importance that you try to understand the people coming to your website and how they are using it. You always want to ask yourself where you can improve content, page layout, menu organization, etc. 

But how can you know what users are doing on your website? Is there a way to see that information? Yes, and we'll cover three great ways to do that. 

3 Helpful Tools to Track a Website Visitor's Experience

We love our tools, and we want to share three of the tools we have found to be the most helpful at Tribute Media. We vouch for these tools 100% and use them constantly to help our clients!

Google Analytics

One of the best tools on the web to analyze user statistics is Google Analytics. It helps you to have a better understanding of how users are not only using your website, but how they are arriving there in the first place. This could be through a number of means, including the percentage of users coming from search engines (known as organic traffic), other websites (known as referrals), or through traffic directly to your URL (known as direct traffic). You also can find out about how users navigate your website's internal pages, where they are dropping off, and whether or not they are completing your desired goals.

To get the most accurate analytics data, you have to let analytics run for at least one full month, but preferably closer to three or more before you start seeing trends. The longer you let analytics run, the more accurate statistics you'll begin to see, as sometimes specific statistics will encounter various anomalies in a given month.

Year-over-year data is where you can start digging in and observing trends. Every industry ebbs and flows during a year, so month-over-month data can be unhelpful in some ways. When you view year-over-year data, you start to see where those ebbs and flows are versus where things are falling short because changes may be needed on your website. 

Hot Jar

Hot Jar is a heat map and session recording platform to help you with conversion and user experience optimization. With this tool, you can:

• Analyze user behavior analytics through the use of heatmaps and session recordings
• Get clear visual data about what is happening on your site
• Understand the context about why people behave the way they do on your site
• View and segment visitor recordings. It's nice to see where users get stuck, repeated page visits, and when they leave your page.

SEMrush

An all-in-one marketing toolkit, SEMrush provides data for SEO, paid traffic, social media, content, and PR purposes, as well as market research. 

With SEMrush, you can do things such as:

• Conduct SEO audits
• Track keywords
• Learn more about your competitors and how you compare digitally
• Audit your backlinks and clean them up
• Improve your PPC efforts with SEMrush analysis and optimization options
• Spy on competitors' social media performance
• Evaluate your website content and identify areas of improvement
• Analyze your digital brand presence
• Get market insights and spot new opportunities for growth
• Get data for sales prospecting and lead evaluation

Stats to Keep an Eye on as You Review Website Data

Website Errors

The number of website errors and warnings you have on your website is a clear indicator of where you've got problems. These should always be high on your priority list of things to take care of.

Bounce Rates

Monitoring the bounce rate of your website is important because it can indicate how well your search engine appearance (for example) lines up with your website content and what users are expecting to see. The bounce rate shows the percentage of users that leave your website immediately upon arrival without completing any other action. Bounce rates can be all over the board, but a sign of a real problem and misalignment can be a bounce rate over 90%. 

Domain Authority

There are a few things that factor into your domain authority score. One of the greatest contributors is backlinks. If you have a lot of spammy or inappropriate links pointing to your website from outside sources, then your website's domain authority is going to hurt. Getting rid of bad backlinks should always be a priority.

View Where Users Leave

Discovering which pages users choose to leave your website can be very insightful. If they are leaving after converting, then there is no need for concern. However, if they are dropping out in the middle of the process, there may be things that you can alter to better keep users attention and continue to lead them through the buyers journey.

Conversion Goals

Setting conversion goals is incredibly important. You can monitor the percentage of users who are filling out your contact form, making a purchase or downloading gated content. This percentage can tell you how well certain things on your website are converting and where there may be room for change or improvements. 

Not sure how you're doing? Schedule a meeting with us and we'll dive into the data and show you where you could use some improvements.