Boost Your Marketing Campaigns with These 5 Web Tools

Since joining the marketing industry primarily as a Web designer, I’ve worked with a myriad of different website tools to enhance our clients’ marketing campaigns and boost their effectiveness. The tools shown below are the ones we use on a regular basis at AdFicient, and ones we have gotten great results from.

Phone Call Tracking

Phone call tracking allows you to track phone calls based on advertising campaigns, traffic source, and search keywords. Essentially, it gives you the ability to view phone calls as website pageviews so that you can tie it back to see how effective your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords are.

Most business owners don’t understand the value of phone call tracking until they implement it and see the results. Understanding your audience is one of the most important things in marketing, and thus, analytics tools like these should be highly utilized.

The two industry-leading phone call tracking tools are CallRail and Mongoose Metrics. Personally, I prefer the simplicity and ease of use of CallRail, but you should try both to see which one works better for you. The implementation is pretty straightforward. You just need to adjust a few settings on their website, then add a small JavaScript code to your website and then you should be good to go!

Form Tracking

The concept of form tracking is a fairly new way to measure and understand your audience. It involves recording the actions of your audience when they start interacting and filling out forms on your website. The metrics it provides allows you to see things such as

• How many users start filling out your forms
• How many users completely fill out your forms
• How much time users spend filling out each field on average
• Which fields are most likely to drive your users away

Although there might be more than one form tracking tool out there, I have only used Formisimo and can only recommend them. Formisimo is pretty easy to implement. You just have to follow their setup process, which should automatically find forms on your website and if it doesn’t, you can manually enter the form ID and name you want to track. Then you just add a small piece of JavaScript to your website and should start seeing stats immediately.

Website Heat Maps

Website heat maps are a graphical representation of data that shows how your users move around your website and which links or buttons they’re most likely to click on. Heat maps helps you understand how your users use your website in detail.

Although eye-tracking heat maps created in usability tests are the most accurate, mouse and click tracking heat maps can provide enough insight to save you a lot of wasted advertising dollars. You can see whether your call to action is big or prominent enough, or if your users are having trouble finding vital information.

The two most popular website heat map tools are CrazyEgg and ClickTale. In case you’d prefer a self-hosted open source version, give ClickHeat a shot.

Split Testing

Split testing is a way for you to test different variations of Web page elements or compare a few completely different designs and layouts to find out which one is the most effective for you.

I’ve written before about split-testing techniques you can use to find the best solution for your website, so I won’t go into that again, but I will just say that split testing is perhaps the best way to improve your conversions. You can test many things at once and in many cases, you will be surprised at what converts and what does not.

Between all the split-testing tools I’ve used in the past, the two I recommend the most are Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer. They both do pretty much the same thing, it will just depend on which user interface you like better. Optimizely’s JavaScript code snippet is smaller so if you’re looking for less code clutter, Optimizely is probably a better way to go.

Speed Testing

Earlier this year I wrote about how to optimize your website for speed, and while it was an important thing to do back then, it is even more important today. Mobile traffic is at an all-time high and making your website load fast for those users is of utmost importance. Mobile users do not have lots of patience so if your website is taking its sweet time to load, chances are the users will give up and go somewhere else.

I use three tools to check the speed of my websites and they’re all slightly different.

• GTmetrix  - Uses Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow to measure your website’s performance. It also provides actionable recommendations to fix those issues.
• Google Page Speed – Google’s own website speed test. It will not test the actual load time of your website, but rather whether your website implements caching, expire, and other methods properly.
• Pingdom – It is the opposite of Google Page Speed in that it actually tests the load speed of your website. It also shows you each file that loads and which ones are taking longer to load than others. You also have the option of testing from a few different server locations.

Testing the load speed of your website on a regular basis is important as your website can slow down over time due to several factors. If you have too many pages on your website, then at least test the most visited pages such as your landing pages and the main homepage.