Marketing in the UK is pure guesswork for content writing services if you don’t have anything in place to measure the effect of your campaigns.  It is fortunate that when marketing online, gaining feedback for your digital marketing efforts is much easier than it is on the street due to a number of digital tools to help you.  Here are a variety of different tools to help you analyze your website traffic.

Google Analytics

With Google’s position as a dominant number one in the market for search, they have a dominant presence online, and it is no surprise that their analytics program is also one of the best.    Of the top 10,000 most popular websites in the world, more than half are using Google Analytics.  Perhaps that is how they became so popular?

Google Analytics allows you to see plenty of data about your website, even providing real time data accurate to the last 5 minutes so you can see the users currently on your site.  You can find out where your users are accessing your data from and even what they are accessing it from; a tablet, mobile or desktop, and then compare it to the overall traffic.

Spring Metrics

Spring metrics is a popular alternative to Google Analytics, however it only offers a 14 day free trial before you need to subscribe to a fully paid up version.  Many have subscribed though, having been impressed by the simplicity of Spring Metrics’ real time data, which tracks the users behaviour from landing on the website through the various pages until leaving it, giving analysts a better idea of exactly what the user is doing on the site.

User Testing

User testing is different to normal website analytics.  Usertesting.com provides data from users they pay to test your site.  The bonus of usertesting.com over simply inviting random people to have a play with your website is that the people at user testing will record the whole thing, take details of all the analytics and information and provide you with actionable ideas to remedy any problems or take advantage of strengths.

Usertesting.com has an online platform which can provide testers from all over the world including the UK, despite being based in America.  The users provided depend on their clients’ needs and which territories they are targeting, much like content writing services can provide different writers for different subjects depending on the topics covered by clients.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg offers you the opportunity to track where your users are clicking on your site with ‘heat maps’ showing the areas the mouse tracker spends most time at.  This can be very useful for usability testing, as seeing where users are clicking will indicate what they think should be interactive and will indicate any problems that they have with the site.

Woopra

Woopra is another site that offers real time metrics with data on what the user does in their entire time on the website.  An added bonus with Woopra is the ability to actually talk to the user, which is perfect if you are running a site where live text chat may be a help to the user, or if you just want to freak them out by commenting on what they are doing.

If you plan to use content writing services, then it is essential that you understand the contribution that it will make to your site.  Analytics can demonstrate whether the content you are using really is effective for your business and whether it is in the correct markets; if you have UK visitors to your site rather than US customers you may not have the ability to reach for instance, which is all essential information for any commercial website owner to know.