Other Analytics Tools Worth Considering
Google Analytics is a great analytics suite that allows you to gain deep insight into your traffic. It’s all you’ll ever really need to analyze how people find out about your site and what they do once they reach it.
That said, there are some specific tools that can work in conjunction with the insight you obtain from Google Analytics. For example, if you use MailChimp or a similar newsletter management system, you’ll want to pay close attention to the built-in analytics within that particular web application. Yes, Google Analytics will know when traffic came from an email campaign, but MailChimp Reports will tell or show you these figures:
- How many people the email was sent to
- How many opened the email
- How many clicked on the links within the email
- Which links were clicked the most
- A chart of open rates and click rates over time
- A comparison of your stats against the industry average
- How many people bounced (i.e., the email failed to be delivered), unsubscribed, or complained
And much more. If you have a mailing list handled through a service like MailChimp or Aweber, you should definitely pay attention to this data, especially if you make changes, like updating the layout of the newsletter. How did it affect your results? You can easily compare and see if your changes got you closer to your goals or introduced a regression.
Figure 18. Mailchimp’s 24-hour performance chart
Another useful tool is a good A/B testing suite. This enables you to serve different versions of a page to your users to determine which one is more effective.
You’re essentially running experiments. For example, you might have a sign-up form in one position on version A of your page, and in a different position or as a pop-up on version B. The suite will show version A to 50 percent of your traffic and show version B to the other 50 percent.
It’ll then tell you which one led to a higher number of sign-ups. If the difference is statistically significant, you’ll be able to switch your site to the winning version for good. This is a very common tool for optimizing landing pages, where the conversion rate really matters. In fact, if you are selling an e-book on your landing page, doubling your conversion rate means doubling your income without attracting any more traffic than you already were.
Optimizely and VWO are two popular, if somewhat expensive, options.[83] This is a crowded space, however, and many options are available to you should you decided to optimize your site by running experiments.
I mentioned before that I like to use Ahrefs for my advanced SEO needs. Ahrefs, Moz, and similar tools offer many analytics functionalities. A key functionality they offer is to analyze your blog for SEO faux pas, as well as tracking your ranking for desirable keywords.
These, in turn, offer you insight into how well your SEO efforts (or changes you introduce) are performing as far as Google is concerned. Of course, they’re also very useful for researching your competitors’ performance and new article opportunities.
It’s worth noting that there are alternatives to Google Analytics itself. It’s hard to compete with such an industry standard, so these suites will often offer some key feature that makes them stand out. For example, Mixpanel allows you to log specific events from within your site or mobile app and log them into their system, integrating with other analytics tools and more.[84] If you have a complex app and want to track complex interactions within your pages, this tool definitely goes further than what you can accomplish with Google Analytics (or at the very least, it makes it significantly easier). You likely don’t need it for a blog, however.
In fact, I can think of many other niche analytics tools, but I believe that using too many of them can quickly become overwhelming and a sort of overkill for bloggers. Start with Google Analytics, and add tools only when the need for them genuinely arises.