Recently, a few people I know have asked me which tools I recommend besides the standard Web analytics platforms (Google Analytics/Omniture/CoreMetrics). I thought it would make sense to just post it on my blog, since frankly, I haven't been posting much at all, and I figured I could use this to get myself writing again. (Here's hoping.)
In any case, whether your online business is doing $100,000 or $100 million+, the name of the game is still optimization. I obviously can't speak to your online strategy overall, but I can recommend you at least do the basics to improve performance. In the old days of online marketing, you were often beholden to whatever vendor you were using to provide the tools you needed. Nowadays, there are many free and/or inexpensive SAAS (software-as-a-service) offerings you can use instead of or in conjunction with the other tools in your arsenal.
1) UserTesting.com: No more excuses! If you're not doing user testing on your site, you need to start. Now. There is nothing more compelling and educational (and frustrating) than watching real users try to do key actions on your site. After watching several user tests, you will undoubtedly have a list of actionable improvements you can make to your site that will improve revenue/sign-ups/[insert key success action here].
UserTesting.com makes it affordable, easy, and quick to do task-based user testing on both desktop and mobile sites. I've found it's great not only for learning more about your own site, but your competitors' sites as well. It's also helpful if you want to find out about differences between customer segments. Just make sure you are careful about how you set up the initial test and screener.
2) Litmus: Anyone who uses e-mail marketing to drive online sales should be using Litmus. With the plethora of browsers and platforms across desktop and mobile devices, it is very difficult to ensure your e-mails are rendering correctly. And if someone can't read your e-mail, you lose money. Now that the iPhone has overtaken Outlook as the #1 email client with 20% of opens, mobile email (and website) optimization has become even more important. Litmus can also be used to do cross-platform, cross-browser website and mobile testing as well.
3) Google Website Optimizer (soon to be Content Experiments): Every e-commerce site should be using an A/B or multi-variate testing tool of some kind to optimize, test, and iterate. Google Website Optimizer lets you set up, run, and track A/B tests so that you can improve clicks and conversion on your site. You can do everything from test images, pages, form field placement, templates, copy -- all of the components that make the difference between having someone engage with your site or not. There are more robust options for doing A/B testing, but Google Website Optimizer is free and a good way to get the hang of testing if you've never done it before.
When you set up an A/B test, always make sure that ahead of time, you've determined what you are testing, why, and what actions will be taken as a result of the test. A couple of examples of easy things to try include testing a different version or message on the homepage for new vs. returning visitors and testing different landing pages (and content/image/product combinations) based on referring source to improve conversion from a specific marketing channel.
4) CrazyEgg: The main reason to use CrazyEgg is as a heatmap tool. It shows you visually where people are clicking on any page of your site. Keep in mind that it doesn't tell you *why* people are (or aren't) clicking (which is why you still need to do user testing), but it will show you that people are ignoring your new top navigation bar or that they are really interested in the link you have buried at the bottom of the page (that apparently you need to give more prominence to). It works especially well for static pages vs ones with many dynamic components and it gives you data on referrer as well.
5) Clicktale: ClickTale tracks what users do on your site down to the keystroke and mouse click and records it all for you. It has a Form Analytics tool that is especially helpful on e-commerce sites, particularly for improving checkout conversion. Cart abandonment rates are still pretty high these days and this tool lets you see the nitty gritty, like how long it takes to complete a field and which form fields have the highest abandonments or the most back-tracks. ClickTale also offers heatmapping.
Hope this helps. Now get back to work! :)
