Understanding how your website is performing is crucial, whether you’re managing an e-commerce store, a blog, or a personal portfolio. It characterises the accessibility and usability of your site, which affects your business. If the website runs smoothly, more leads and sales will be generated.  It also improves the website’s ranking on search engine results pages. But it's not as easy as we think. To carry out data-driven decisions, of course, you will have to know which tool to use to measure the impact of your website.

In this blog, let's talk about the tools that allow you to understand whether your website is working for you or not. 

Which tool helps you measure the success of your website?

There are not only one but several analytics that can help you to track, analyse and optimise your website. Ensure that you leverage the valuable information they provide thereby, improve your online presence.

• Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the go-to web analytic free tool that can let you track and analyse your website’s traffic. One can easily understand a user’s behaviour, consumer decision journey, types of audience visiting your website, how much traffic your website is getting and much more. It lets you measure your advertising ROI and assess keywords audiences use to find your website. GA4 introduced significant changes, especially with automatic IP anonymisation and improved data privacy features. 

One thing to keep in mind is that larger datasets may be subjected to sampling issues and anonymous data and limited data reporting are its drawbacks. 

• Google Search Console

If you are looking to refine your web performance, take full advantage of the Google search console. Anyone with a Google account can access it. It helps website owners monitor and maintain their site’s presence in Google search results. GSC provides you with the sites that link to your webpage, the search queries your site appears for, the position of your content in search results and much more. It’s not uncommon to see system messages popping up, giving important notices about pages with indexing problems, spam and core web vitals.

GSC has its own limitations. Many consider this as the most critical and often understated SEO tool. Data latency can sometimes be an issue and there is often sampled and incomplete keyword data. This can make it more tricky to get the most precise picture of keyword performance. 

• Ahrefs

For anyone serious about SEO, Ahrefs is a titan. Ahrefs helps boost the organic search traffic of your website.  Whether it is keyword analysis, page grader, conducting site audits, or tracking SERP ranking, Ahrefs delivers deep insights into competitive performance. One of the things that sets Ahrefs apart is its most active crawler, which ensures that the data provided is fresh and relevant. It is highly recommended for professionals as you can explore historical ranking data with customisable charts. 

Ahrefs does have a few downsides. It lacks SEO reporting features, basic UX functionality like complex navigation and cluttered dashboard and there is no mobile app.

• Semrush

If you want to improve your website’s ranking on Google, you can easily do that using SemRush. You can do keyword research, content optimisation, analyse your competitors and much more. SemRush creates customised reports and has a range of free integrated marketing toolkits, with each containing features that help to monitor and improve your SEO. It provides users with new opportunities for link building with the fastest backlink discovery tool. Also, site audit features check your website for technical SEO issues. 

The only drawback to SemRush is its pricing. It is definitely premium, which is a hurdle for smaller businesses and beginners. Furthermore, since it is a cloud-based tool, a stable internet connection is always required to get the most out of the tool. 

• Hotjar

Think of Hotjar as the detective for your website. Hotjar shines with its very powerful feature of on-page surveys giving insights into what visitors think about your content.  As a heat mapping tool, it allows you to analyse in depth where users click, scroll, and spend the most time on a page. It also provides you with areas of improvement through session recordings. However, Hotjar is not compatible with mobile apps. 

• Qualaroo

If you are looking for advanced survey tools, Qualaroo stands out as one of the most intuitive platforms for data collection. As a survey tool, Qualaroo makes it simple to gather feedback and deeply understand the user experience. For example: The pop-up Nudge surveys collect customer feedback in real-time and start working on resolving the issues. For a marketer, this is a gold mine as It is very handy when it comes to analysing lengthy feedback and making sense of it. Even though Qualaroo is packed with immense features, the reporting functionality could use some improvement and the price is a bit on the higher side. 

• Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is one of the easiest-to-use tools for optimising website performance. It is a perfect tool that can share UX flaws that are found on the website. This program has the function of a heatmap, scrollmap, user session recordings and confetti reports of where your users are coming from. Key features of the tool include A/B testing, conversion funnels etc. Crazy Egg is really easy to set up and you are ready to go in minutes. Despite its ease of use, website users may still need the experience to interpret findings effectively. Additionally, some of the deeper analysis can be time-consuming.

• ContentSquare

For a content-heavy website, ContentSquare is the go-to tool. It assesses using Artificial Intelligence on how users primarily interact with your content. It’s especially useful for understanding how you can make content even more appealing. The experience replay feature in Content Square works like session recordings which can be particularly valuable for UX teams. It provides product analytics, customer feedback and digital experience analytics. However, some features are a bit buggy and unintuitive, which might slow down the optimisation process. 

• Kissmetrics

For B2B companies, Kissmetrics is an excellent choice. Kissmetrics offers a cost-effective web analytics solution to help grow your website traffic and conversions. It is a cool tool that allows you to track customers better. It has a cohort analysis feature, which analyses customer behaviour over time. You can now better understand who your best customers are, what they do, and what they like. This tool has behavioural analytics, segmentation and email campaigns all in one place. 

Be aware, dated UI, poor data retention policy and expensive pricing are the limitations which can be deal breakers for many. 

• Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics stands as an industry leader tool, which gives you a granular understanding of your website visitors' behaviour. Adobe provides real-time data processing, customisable segmentation, and calculated metrics for comprehensive analysis. This instrument can be very easily used for report writing and for statistical and trend review. Calculated metrics are a key feature, generating in-depth insights and superior data visualisation when used along with other ad hoc analysis features.  There is also the option of measuring several KPIs in order to form a narrative of website traffic patterns. However, the pricing is somewhat prohibitive for smaller businesses and sometimes can be slow.  

• Clicky:

Clicky is a web analytics solution enabling a real-time understanding of user behaviour. This tool portrays total visitors, pages viewed, downloads, signs up etc. Clicky provides accuracy in revelation into their action, heatmaps, custom dashboards and keyword rankings. The tool also offers video recordings of user sessions. Clicky has a simpler interface and if you are a small business owner or a website with moderate traffic, Clicky is perfect for you. Even though user-friendly, some users may be overwhelmed because of its advanced features.

• Bitly:

Bitly stands as a trusted partner for those who actively share links on social media. In addition to its link-shortening capabilities, Bitly tracks the number of clicks on shared links. It offers QR code generation, useful for offline marketing structures. It acts as a personalised link monitor that empowers you to get your shared content effortlessly. Even in the free plan, you can get a count of how many clicks went through the URL. Bitly lets you see which interactions impact your audience the most. The main downside? Custom domains aren’t available in the free plan.

• BuzzSumo: 

BuzzSumo is a valuable tool for content marketers looking to stay ahead. Being an epic research and analysis tool, this tool helps you identify trending content, how content is shared and identify influencers in your industry. It directs you to share content and higher ROI on your SEO campaigns. A lot of functionalities like social media stats, and filters are also available. There are also some limitations worth considering. The price of monthly service is very high and the navigation can be confusing at times.

These are the conversion rate tools that make the meaning of 'visitor' a bit loose, so to speak since they transform these website visitors into devoted customers. Regardless of what your goal is - perhaps you’re trying to drive sales, campaign registrations or social shares, these tools provide invaluable insights. Use these versatile tools to make your website much more successful than ever before by harnessing the power of conversion. With these tools in your arsenal, you don’t only think about winning, you actually do set it up deeply. Simply start, investigate, and let the tools wander, roam and sail the decks of your website and have a need for nothing else except starting an investigation. May your digital journey be filled with roaring success and exciting user experiences!