You have an effective distribution strategy and are consistently producing engaging content. You now need to understand how your content is performing and who is visiting your site. Also, how can you hook your audience to make them return? Here’s the catch: This service shouldn’t cost you half of your budget.
There are many options available for content marketers who are concerned about their engagement stats. Many of these options are free. Analytics tools are essential to today’s success in marketing.
Here are 10 content analytics tools.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the preferred platform for marketers. This is largely because it is completely free, has a lot of features, and comes with the authority of the Google brand.
Once you have added the Google Analytics code to your website’s HTML, it will track certain goals for you. This includes which pages visitors click on, how long they stay there, and what actions they take. The tool can also tell you whether visitors are sharing content via social media or clicking on ads. Google tracks every conversion that is made when a goal has been achieved in your analytics report.
Kissmetrics points out that Google Analytics’ most useful features-especially for retailers and marketers tracking sales–is the Goal Funnel. With it, you can create a string URL that consumers click through to purchase an item. It is possible to see how many people are making purchases and how many are abandoning them at certain stages. This information can be used by marketers to improve the buying experience for consumers.
Google will also report keywords that people search to bring them to your website, along with the browsers and devices they use. It may even include where they are being referred. To see which parts are driving the most traffic to our site and from where it is coming, I monitor its behavior often.
You can track campaigns driving traffic to your website, create custom reports using hand-picked metrics and set up alerts to receive your insights at specific times.
One of the biggest complaints about Google Analytics is that the information is too complicated and difficult to use. Google is working to address these issues with new tools such as Data Studio that allow users to turn data into visually engaging, shareable reports. Although the platform is not intuitive at the moment, it should become easier to use the settings over the course of a month. This will allow you to get the most from Google’s free service.
Also read: Best 10 Content Research Tools and Alternative Tools Like BuzzSumo
2. Bitly
Bitly is best known for its free link shortener. However, it does more than save space. Bitly allows you to share and analyze the performance of your links once you have shortened them.
Bitly, for example, tracks how many people click each link and the time they clicked it, right down to the hour. You will also see which social media platforms people shared the link on, so you can determine if your traffic comes mostly from LinkedIn and Twitter. Bitly’s map showing your link’s geographical distribution of clicks is shown below. This is useful for targeting future content and optimizing it.
Bitly collects data from all your links to give you a snapshot of how your content collection performed over the past hour, day, and week.
Bitly might not offer as detailed information as Google Analytics but you can still benefit from its free link shortener, clean interface, and other perks.
3. Piwik
Piwik’s software is free, but there’s a catch: You have to download it and make sure you host it on your own server. Piwik has similar features to popular analytics programs such as keyword search, event tracking, visitor maps, and keyword search. But what makes it stand out from the rest is its mobile app, unlimited data storage, and its ability to track visitors.
The Piwik dashboard can be quite complicated, which may prove to be a pro or a con depending on how much work you are willing to do. It takes patience and the ability to install the tags necessary on your website to make the setup work. Piwik is easy to use once you are familiar with it. There are many widgets available that can be used for any analytical purpose.
One of the most distinctive features is “row evolution”, which allows you to hover your mouse over any event or link, then click on the graph icon to view a detailed history for that data point. You can also sort rows and compare their performance on different platforms such as mobile devices and browsers.
Piwik allows you to set up email reports that will automatically notify you of changes in your content. This will allow you to keep track of the performance of your content and optimize it accordingly.
4. Open Web Analytics
Open Web Analytics (OWA), like Piwik, is an open-source program. Similar to Piwik, OWA does not limit the data that you can store and the websites you can monitor through it.
OWA offers information similar to what you will see on competitors’ platforms. This includes views, unique visitors, referral sites, and visitor location. OWA also allows you to track the click-stream of every visitor and pinpoint exactly where they clicked on your pages.
Divi Fernando highlights OWA’s three unique features on the Woorank blog. OWA is different from other analytics programs such as Google. Heat maps are used to track visitors’ clicks on your website. You can also record mouse movements to see how visitors navigate your pages. This will allow you to officially convert them. Third, the program offers Document Object Model click tracking. This uses code snippets that report on when visitors click on specific links, buttons, or images.
5. Clicky
More bloggers are expressing their love for Clicky, an analytics tool that boasts up-to-the-minute results. Clicky is a great analytics program that offers up-to-the-minute results. I believe it is necessary to include it on this list. Clicky won’t charge you if your website receives less than 3,000 page views per day. After that, pricing can vary from $9.99 to $79.99 per monthly.
Clicky offers something quite attractive at first glance. It provides similar in-depth results as Google Analytics but with a cleaner interface. What good is mining data about website performance if it’s not easy to understand and interpret?
Clicky provides a detailed list of every visitor. This includes when they visited, their location, the source they were referred to, how long they stayed on your site, and what actions they took. Clicky provides heat maps for every visitor in real-time, not only for a group of visitors but also for each individual. This feature is only available to analytics programs that are experts in heat maps information like Crazy Egg. Clicky stands out from its largest competitors.
Clicky integrates with Twitter to allow you to track Twitter mentions of any URL, keyword, or account. Clicky’s website explains that Twitter’s built-in search only goes back about one week. However, Clicky can provide an almost unlimited history of tweets including summaries of activity by user and hashtags as well as links and sentiment.
Also read: Top 10 AI Tools and Platforms To Scale Your Content Marketing Efforts
6. SimilarWeb
Do you want to spy on your rivals? This is legal and completely legal. SimilarWeb allows you to plug in any mobile app or website, get insights about traffic and rankings and compare the data with other sites.
You can view the website’s global rank and country rank by entering a URL. A breakdown of mobile and desktop visits over the past six months is also available. These are broken down by page views, time spent on site, bounce rate, and pages per visit.
SimilarWeb also shares useful data reports, such as top referral sites, organic search traffic and paid search traffic, traffic from social media platforms, breakdown of traffic, traffic from subdomains, ranking of similar websites, and categories that are of interest to your audience (e.g., News and Media, Business and Industry).
7. SEMrush
SEMrush also helps you to get ahead of your competition by researching keywords for display ads, organic, paid search, and link building. You can simply enter a URL, keyword, or domain in the search bar to gain access to a wealth of information. This is a sample search for eBay.com
A website’s or keyword’s traffic can be viewed by users in the form of backlinks, organic search, and display ads. Below this data you will see live updates for top organic keywords, organic competitors, paid keywords, and paid competitors as well as sample ads. You can also browse through indexed pages and backlinks.
8. Moz Keyword Explorer
Although SEMrush is a popular keyword search tool, Moz, an SEO software company launched its own tool in May. It is more extensive than other keyword search tools and takes the manual work out of keyword research. Rand Fishkin, founder writes that the tool “takes the whole process of keyword research from discovering keyword ideas to getting metrics, building a list, filtering keywords and prioritizing the ones you want to target based upon the numbers that matter.”
You’ll find five metrics at the top of this page that can help you assess the value of the term for your content efforts. Clicking on the SERP (Search Engine Response Page) analysis will show you the exact Google search result, with any images and AdWords ads.
Moz provides suggestions for up to 1,000 related keywords, ranked according to relevancy and volume. If you need fresh ideas, you can filter the suggestions to show keywords that come from multiple sources.
The service is completely free but there is a limit to how many searches you can do. The service is free for two keyword searches per day. Community members receive five additional searches. You can either purchase the standalone service for $600 per annum or become a MOZ PRO member to gain more extensive access to the tool.
9. Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard that allows you to monitor data across multiple websites as well as applications, such as Salesforce and Google AdWords.
You can view all this data in one location, and you can customize your dashboard with more than 40 widgets that can be used on different platforms and sources. You can make your own widgets if Cyfe doesn’t have what you need. Upload external data from your source, CSV or Google Sheet. You might like a donut graph showing certain results in different colors, such as orange, blue and green.
Once your dashboard is set up, you can create real-time reports that you can download and share. Cyfe can also be connected to your TV so you can rotate multiple dashboards on one screen.
Also read: Top 10 Free Business Name Generators for Your Business
10. Google Search Console
Google’s search insight tool, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, was renamed to better reflect the “everyone who cares” about Search, including “hobbyists and small business owners, marketers, programmers designers, developers, and SEO experts.”
This platform helps you ensure that your Android app or website is Google-friendly.
Google Search Console assists website owners in optimizing their pages with three key resources:
- You can view search analytics reports that show you how often your website appears in Google search results. They also show you how many clicks, impressions, and queries prompted those results. To compare search results between desktop and mobile users, U.S. visitors, and UK visitors, you can also use the data to determine how they compare.
- Alerts for issues or errors Google will notify you if a URL is not crawlable by Google or returns an HTTP error code.
- You can test if Google “understands” your content. You can check if the Googlebot is able to access a page from your website using a program called Fetch as Google. You can also see if the bot is blocking resources like images. You can then go back and fix the issues if necessary.
Connect your Google Analytics pages to your Search Console pages for the best experience with Google data. This will allow you to see a better view of your site’s performance.
Last Line
One option is to choose one of these platforms, while another allows you to try out different tools and then upgrade. You can track important engagement stats with any content analytics tool, regardless of your budget.
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