Ten years ago, the success of a website was dependent on the traffic generated. A web designer needed to create a website and attract as many visitors as possible. Five years ago, traffic was still important, but more and more website owners widened their approach to doing online business. SEO experts focused not only on traffic but also on conversion rate.
Nowadays, we are talking about Internet marketers who need to delight the customers. There is a significant shift from attracting and converting visitors to offering the best services and delighting them. Also, the role of web designers has changed. Initially, a web designer needed to create a website. Across time, he/she needed to optimise the website to attract more people and convert them into customers. Nowadays, a multidisciplinary team is required to satisfy the website’s audience.
It’s needless to say that any website is more or less an online affair. In this context, understanding the needs of your audience and delivering the right message is the key, but it’s easier said than done. People are different, have different needs, and are inconstant. Finding out what they need is a never-ending struggle. Luckily, there are tons of tools to understand a website’s visitors better.
Choosing the right tools to better understand your website’s audience is a time-consuming activity. We compiled a list of awesome tools that will help you connect with your customers. Some of these tools are well-known and hard to replace while others are less famous but efficient and deserve your attention.
Tools to Test Speed and Mobile Friendliness
Speed and mobile friendliness are two key facts for any website. Mobile traffic has surpassed desktop traffic, and this trend won’t change. A website that loads in five seconds has 60% more page views per visit and a 35% lower bounce rate than a website that loads in 19 seconds. This Google report sheds some light on this topic. No matter the website’s purpose or target audience, all of your visitors will appreciate a mobile-friendly website that loads fast.
1. GT Metrix
GT Metrix is a tool that offers a complete analysis of a website’s loading speed. Any tested website gets two scores (Performance and YSlow), and you get recommendations to improve the speed. GT Metrix includes a free pricing plan.
2. Think with Google
Think with Google is an app that should be used before launching a website because it gives you an overview of the performance of the site. You have serious problems that should be resolved ASAP if you don’t get “Good” or “Fair” scores. It offers a score and a report on mobile friendliness, mobile speed, and desktop speed.
Analytics Tools
1. Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are two primary tools that are indispensable for any webmaster. You can’t call yourself a webmaster if you don’t use these tools regularly. While both of them have many common elements, there are differences between them. Briefly, Google Analytics measures the traffic of your website while Google Search Console provides information about the website health, strong points, and elements to improve.
2. Wistia
Invisia says that 51% of marketers consider video as having the best ROI from all types of content. Apart from that, 4 out of 5 consumers will more likely watch a video than reading text. So, using video on your website makes the visitors’ experience more enjoyable.
Wistia is a tool that should be at the root of your video marketing strategy. It not only allows creating and tailoring videos, but it also offers actionable information about how the videos are consumed. For instance, it let you know when the users watched the video, their location, the devices used, or the engagement. Wistia comes with multiple pricing plans, including a forever free one!
3. Quantcast
Quantcast teams well with Google Analytics. While the latter offers data focused on traffic, the former is targeted at visitors. Quantcast provides valuable information about audience demographics, trends, and return rate for the entire website or for sections of content.
The first step to better understanding your website’s visitors is to create the profile of the average visitor, and Quantcast is a reliable tool in this regard. On top of that, Quantcast is free of charge!
Usability Checkers and Heat Map Tracking Solutions
The above tools are enough to shape the profile of the average user. The next step is to improve the design of the website. Regardless of the talent of the creators, a website is never perfectly crafted. There is always room for improvement. Your website is not an exception, and these tools are gold for determining how people interact with it.
1. Usability Hub
Usability Hub is a tool to test website design performance. You have at your disposal five types of tests that are accomplished by human users. By using Usability Hub, you get honest and unbiased feedback from objective users. There is a free plan, but it lacks may useful features. Unfortunately, the basic, pro, and team plans are pretty expensive even though you get actionable data about your website.
2. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is another tool that provides insightful tips about how users interact with your website. The mighty power of Crazy Egg consists of heat, scroll, overlay, and confetti maps. The heat map shows the most popular areas of a web page, the scroll map reveals how far down the page a user scrolls, and the overlay map details the number of clicks on each item of the page. The confetti map offers granular data about visitors’ sources, search terms, or devices used. Overall, Crazy Egg gives you precious information about your website’s design. Sad to say, there is no free pricing plan.
3. Smart Look
Smart Look is a good alternative to Crazy Egg if you are on a tight budget. It doesn’t offer the entire Crazy Egg functionality, but it’s a robust heat map tracking solution. You are required to insert a tracking code into your website’s code, and you get access to a lot of impactful information. For instance, you may see how a user moves the cursor and which web pages are visited. If your website is visited by less than 20K visitors a month, you shouldn’t pay for Smart Look services.
Miscellaneous Tools
All the above tools provide on-site information. Undeniably, this data gives serious hints about the behaviour of users. Still, you can’t accurately know their opinion. Honest feedback is as valuable as a complete traffic report. Therefore, you should make a trade with your website visitors — give them a discount or a freebie in exchange for honest feedback. Here are some tools that help you find out what your audience believes about your brand.
1. Survey Monkey and Typeform
Both Survey Monkey and Typeform are simple to use and appreciated by users. Create a set of questions about your website and ask people that subscribed to your newsletter to answer to them. You can ask for feedback without offering incentives to subscribers, but the response rate will be pretty low. By offering an incentive, the response rate will grow considerably.
The downside of this method is that you get feedback only from people who subscribed to the newsletter. They did that because they are interested in what you offer. Consequently, their answers may be biased.
2. Wootric
Wootric is a powerful solution to send Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. The idea behind an NPS survey is deceptively simple but truly efficient. It consists of a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend my brand/product/service to a friend or colleague?” The scoring for this answer is based on a scale from 0 to 10.
An NPS survey won’t offer too much data about your website’s audience, but it is useful because you get a grade for user satisfaction. If you get a positive NPS score, it means that you understand your customers and are on the right path. Take into account that NPS scores widely vary depending on the industry you are in.
Conclusion
Understanding and satisfying your website’s visitors is a harsh job that requires a lot of time and unlimited resources. Aside from that, you will never fulfil the requirements of your entire audience. However, you should try to do your best, and these tools may help you. Of course, there are many alternatives to all of them.
We are deeply interested in finding out what tools you use. Did you use any of the above suggestions? Please share your experiences with us!