Web Analytics Tool for Small Businesses

Analytics tools are useful in digital marketing campaigns because they offer you with a huge range of data about your customers, business and your marketing strategies. There are some analytics tools that record how users interact with your website exactly – where they hover but don’t click, at what point they abandon your site – and this information can be extremely powerful if you use it to revolutionize your website.

With the data stored by the analytics tools, you can identify which marketing efforts are effective in attracting the most web visitors, but more importantly, you are able to view which efforts are bringing in web visitors that are likely to convert i.e. from potential visitors into clients. Without measurement, you will be wasting both money and time resources.

5 Analytics Tools that Small Businesses can Afford

Thanks to the rise of the cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) start-ups, the analytics technology that powers today’s marketing efforts isn’t just powerful, it’s priced affordably so that even the smallest online businesses can benefit.

Listed below are 5 of the best services or tools that you can use to track and understand how people interact with your websites and social media profiles. Not only they are among the best, they’re available either completely free or at least offer a free version.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the dubbed as the “gold standard” for tracking website usage among web professionals and business analysts.

Its robust suite of web analytics is utilized by everyone from part-time sole proprietors to multi-national corporations.

Without using analytical tools to track your website performance, you will not have sufficient data you require to improve it constantly. This is even more significantly important especially if you are a small business owner who relies on your website to generate income for you.

The best thing about Google Analytics is that it is available for free and easy to install on your website. With Google Analytics, it is able to supply you with everything you need to track the visits you send to your website from digital advertising, search engines, email marketing and social media accounts. Even if you are a novice, once you’ve spent time figuring it all out on your own, you will find that Google Analytics is relatively easy to use.

2. Buffer

The next popular analytical tool after Google Analytics is Buffer. Buffer is a popular tool among social media managers to handle the huge number of tweets, updates, and posts they create on a daily basis to various social media accounts.

While the Buffer tool makes scheduling social media posts looks easy, it can also offer superb social media analytics. For instance, post engagements and interactions can be tracked directly from your Buffer queue.

There are 3 plans available – Free, Pro and the Business plan. You can sign up for their free plan if you possess less than 3 social media profiles and schedule less than 10 posts from your Buffer queue. However, for most small businesses with several social media accounts, they can choose the Pro version which only costs $15 a month.  For digital marketing agencies which manage more than 25 social media profiles, they can select the Business plan which will cost $99 a month.

3. Bit.ly

The third analytic tool is called Bit.ly. Bit.ly is known as the URL shortening service that allows you take a long website address and shrink it down to a shareable size. Over the years Bit.ly has evolved tremendously and now it includes a suite of detailed analytics that measure the reach of your shortened link.

Bit.ly can offer information about where and when your links are getting clicked. The ability to understand the type of audience that are clicking your links with the expanded analytics of the Bit.ly OneView tool is a good addition for email sales and newsletters.

4. SEM Rush

What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a strategy, a technique, or a process designed to increase traffic to your website. Its purpose is to attract online visitors to visit your website by increasing your rank on search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, or Google.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to the success of your website. The most critical part of any SEO strategy is the keywords you use to help people locate your site.

That means knowing the targeted keywords people actually use to search products or services like yours. Tracking and analyzing the keyword search term is one of the many important features of an SEO tool like SEM Rush.

It is important to note that SEM Rush’s services isn’t cheap especially their $399 Business and Enterprise plan, however they do provide a limited 14-day trial that includes 10 keyword searches a day and one project (website) you can audit and track over time.

5. Cyfe

The final analytics tool is Cyfe. If you’re searching for an all-in-one solution for managing your social media mentions, email clicks, website visits and a range of other metrics for your small business then Cyfe is exactly what you’re looking for.

Instead of collecting and store your data directly, Cyfe provides robust tools for building dashboards using information from other sources. You can integrate your data feeds from sources such as Bit.ly and Google Analytics into widgets you arrange to create the perfect dashboard.

The dashboards will display the data how you want to view it, so you can mix and match the widgets you build from your datafeeds to track everything from sales to brand reputation.  You can even build dashboards to monitor server administration and customer service.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, web analytics can help small and local businesses in many areas of business. The one mentioned above are one of the most essential ones for any business. Some marketing analytics tools are expensive but there are also some which are free and offer low-cost versions that help evenly level the playing field for businesses of all sizes. With constant development and improvement in digital analytics, there’s never been more opportunity for small business owners to reap the benefit of web analytics.