When business owners talk about analytics, they often mean web analytics. They talk about setting up tools like Google Analytics or Adobe SiteCatalyst to track pageviews, test variables, and evaluate the performance of their site. But they lack the big picture. While web analytics is certainly important, it is just one of the metrics that entrepreneurs need to be aware of, especially when starting their online business.
Here are five other types of analytics you should keep an eye on to uncover important information about your business, customers, and key marketing efforts:
1. Funnel Analytics
Your funnel analytics provides customer flow data through lead generation, checkout pages, registration, and other means.
While you can get basic funnel data from web analytics tools, specialized software can help you better understand your customer funnel. One of them is KISSmetrics, starting at $150/month, and MixPanel, with a free option where you can track up to 25,000 events for free. These tools can help you understand how acquisition leads and built-in funnels work.
As you explore your customer funnel, you can test and make changes to forms, buttons, language, and more. Improving your bowl is one of the main ways to improve your results.
2. In-place acquisition analytics
In addition, to know how people get to your site, you need to understand what they are doing on your pages. Where do they click? What are they hanging on? Where are they looking and, perhaps, what are they confused about?
This is where the heatmap tracking tools appear on mouse move and click. Mouse movement heatmaps show that you were the people who bring the cursor and move through your pages. This information can help you find out if users find your site intuitive. Heat mapping tools show visually the exact places where visitors’ cursors clicked on your site. This information can be useful for identifying usability or navigation issues.
Startups should use them early on so they can make any necessary site adjustments. Some handy tools include ClickTale, which offers both mouse and click heatmaps and starts with a freemium plan where you can explore up to 400 page views per month, and CrazyEgg, which focuses primarily on heat mapping and starts at $99 per month.
3. Client analytics
Startups often wait too long for customer surveys and forging feedback channels with their consumers. But with customer analytics, you can learn about unmet consumer needs and identify problems in your marketing, such as confusion in your messaging.
Try tools like ZenDesk, a customer service platform that allows you to respond to customer issues across all channels, track those issues, and improve communications. The starter package here starts at $24 per month. there’s also SurveyMonkey, an online research tool that offers a generous free plan worth trying. Another option is Qualaroo, a consumer analytics tool that starts at $79/month and makes it easy to poll your customers for quick feedback on their experience with your site and other consumer questions.
4. Life cycle analytics
To understand the best ways to communicate with customers, you need to collect data on emails, newsletters, in-app messaging, and the like.
Consider using tools like Customer.io, an email communication platform that helps you first understand how your emails and newsletters work, and then makes it easy to edit them to improve performance. It starts at $75 per month. There is also Intercom, which starts at about $50/month and can improve both communications and customer development by helping you identify and interview specific customer segments.
5. Marketing analytics
When a startup starts its marketing, it often promotes the channels it has the most experience with. But it’s a risky way to create a marketing roadmap. Marketing analytics tools that track and compare your marketing channels in one dashboard can help you understand which approaches work best, as well as measure the success of specific campaigns. From now on, you can decide how best to allocate your marketing budget and make the best hiring decisions while building your team.
To track and understand this type of data, you can try tools like HubSpot, a marketing automation platform that helps you see all your marketing channels in one dashboard view. Their offers start at $200 per month. Moz (Formerly SEOmoz) has also just opened beta for its marketing analytics solution ($99/month), which lets you manage all your inbound marketing efforts in one place.
In the era of analytics platforms, marketers are often overwhelmed with data. As a reaction, we tend to rely on the tools and data types we’ve loved for years, but that’s a dangerous approach. Instead, we should take advantage of the many new data types that can help.