Helpful tools for tracking user behaviour on your website

Liane | June 24, 2010 | no comments

Understanding and tracking user behaviour on your website is crucial to developing a seamless experience for future users, and making informed decisions about enhancements and even auxiliary marketing activities.

There are a number of powerful free tools available on the web that will give you more than enough data to accurately gain insight into what users do when they arrive on your site. Even the slightest text tweak of a landing page, or positioning of a button can make a world of difference.

Here are our top 5 tools for getting started:

Analytics

The mainstay of any web marketer, Google Analytics allows you to gather and analyse specific data about your website, such as, where your visitors came from and how long they spent on your site, which links they clicked on and which content they favoured more. It is particularly useful when coupled with online marketing campaigns, as it can show the various sources of traffic, be it third party ads, organic search results, or pay per click campaigns.

KISSmetrics is a customer development platform that provides analytics and insights for blogs, websites & web applications. It is different from Google Analytics in that is focused on the “split screen testing” and tracking “people” as opposed to “visitors” through the journey towards a desired result or “conversion.” It is not a substitute for Google Analytics, but instead a compliment.

Heat Maps

By tracking the mouse clicks of your visitors, you can establish which parts of your site are hot or not. Similar to analytics, but a more graphic display which makes presenting to non-tech people much easier. Heat Maps shows you where your visitors clicked on your site, even if they aren’t links – which perhaps should be. Feng-gui, clickheat, clickdensity, and several WordPress plugins are some of the available free software apps, but for $8 p/month, you’ll get a more well-known and reliable service with CrazyEgg.

Online Surveys

Get your visitors to solve your problems! Send out concise and non-invasive questionnaires to your visitors. By asking well-thought out and open-ended questions to your visitors, you can attain a clearer understanding into what the needs of your visitors. Use their feedback to understand what they’re search for and what you need to do to maintain their focus whilst they’re visiting your site, improve your site, or even make additions to your product offering. SurveyMonkey is a popular online survey software and questionnaire tool that offers both a free and pro service.

Sharing is Caring

Give users the power to tell others about your site. By implementing a “tell-a-friend” system into your site, you allow visitors to easily share some information about something they like, or something they’d think their friends would like. A “share” button is the easiest and quickest way to get your word out there. TellaFriend is a free service to apply to any website, while a Sharing is Sexy bookmark can be added to any WordPress site; and at a click of a button, your visitor can Like your site via Facebook’s Like button.

Search & Alerts

With all the activity on blogs, forums, and social media networks, it’s hard to track what everyone is saying, and more importantly what they are saying about you! Google Alerts coupled with a good Reader is a great way to aggregate where your name is being featured, and who’s saying what about you, leaving you in a comfortable position to respond to any comments. Twitter Search is also useful to keep you up-to-speed with what’s happening in the Twittersphere.