5 Easy-to-Learn Analytics Programs That Are Perfect for New Marketers

By Andrew Raso

Analytics doesn’t just involve your website traffic. There is a plethora of analytical tools that you can use in business and marketing to observe the competition, monitor user experience, and improve your own marketing efforts.

The massive selection of analytics platforms can make it difficult to choose the best ones for your website since some are more expensive than others, as well as more complex.

I’ve compiled a list of five analytics tools that are easy to learn, yet still offer tremendous value in the data and insights that can be pulled. These are the best tools for new marketers, startups, or growing small businesses.

1. Google Analytics

Google offers a completely free analytics platform, which you can easily implement by inserting a tracking code on your website. It is one of the simplest, yet most robust analytics tools available for free, and I use it daily, sometimes several times a day, to keep a close eye on campaign performance. It’s used by a majority of marketers for generating and tracking detailed statistics about the people who visit your website.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of data including:

• Who they are
• Who is new and who is a returning visitor
• Where your visitors come from
• Where they landed on your site (which page or piece of content)
• Where they left your site
• How they flowed through your site from start to finish
• What the conversion rates are
• Information on goals you set

There’s a great deal more beyond that, including data to monitor building backlinks and other SEO efforts. Google Analytics is the one tool that every business owner and marketer should become very familiar with. It doesn’t take long to learn how to make the platform work for you, and there are plenty of support materials and tutorials online for setting it up to track and report on your campaigns.

The greatest benefit is that Google Analytics is completely free, so whether you’re the best ice cream shop in a little town or the best online beauty supply store, there’s room in your budget for monitoring your metrics.

2. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a terrific tool for analyzing the user experience of your website. The service builds heat maps for your site, which track and display every click made on your website. This kind of heat map tracking shows you which parts of your site users find the most interesting, where their attention is drawn, and where they click the most.

User experience plays a big role in conversion, so understanding how clicks are impacted by layout and design elements combined with your calls-to-action can help you improve conversions and the overall user experience.

Setting up Crazy Egg only takes a few minutes and you can do it yourself, even if you don’t have any technical knowledge or coding experience. It’s also more cost-effective than paying for expensive eye-tracking studies or extensive use-case testing.

There’s also a scroll map feature that shows you how far people progress through your content before abandoning the page. This can be a great tool when optimizing and improving long form content or longer sales pages.

3. Optimizely

Optimizely is powerful platform that uses data analysis to help you make improvements to your funnel and user experience. The simple-to-use platform allows you to create different variations of your content and drive traffic to them separately in order to test their side-by-side performance (A/B testing).

The visual interface makes it easy to create those A/B tests (or multivariate and multipage tests.) Once your tests are completed, you can use the data to make improvements to the user experience and to improve the conversion rates of visitors on your site.

While Optimizely isn’t the only service or platform for performing this kind of optimization testing, it’s in my top five list because of its ease of use and the fact that I don’t need any coding or programming knowledge to start running tests.

Every opt-in, landing page, and piece of content within your funnel should be optimized for maximum conversions, and Optimizely is a good tool to start that testing. The fact that it integrates with leading digital analytics providers will give you a lot of flexibility in how you evaluate the data.

4. Clicktale

One of the things that Google Analytics doesn’t do so well is telling you what your audience is paying attention to when they’re on your website. It provides a tracking mechanism for the amount of time spent on page, but it doesn’t really offer any engagement data.

Clicktale, on the other hand, is a qualitative analysis tool. It records every action your customers take while they’re interacting with your website. Using this data, you can view reports and heat maps that offer several details about customer behavior, as well as conversion stats.

You can learn a lot about audience traffic on your website when you start analyzing mouse movements, scrolling behavior, and a full range of analytics similar to what you see with Google Analytics. That includes demographics, user trends, traffic sources, new and returning visitors, page views, bounce rates, page engagement, and efficiency tools that track errors linked to lower conversions.

5. BuzzSumo

Marketing is done through a lot of channels, and one of the best ways to market a business is through content. BuzzSumo is an awesome analytics tool that lets you discover the most shared and most influential content on the web.

Enter a search phrase, topic, or domain, and BuzzSumo will display content that has been viewed and shared the most online. You can also find top authors for specific topics to help you locate influencers, or perform a side-by-side domain comparison.

I use this tool on a regular basis to research content topics that my audience will find interesting, and I also curate content to fill the gaps in my editorial calendar. If you’re short on ideas, you can check out some of the most popular content and find a unique way to spin it or repurpose that content into something new you can publish to your followers.