Looking Beyond Website Analytics For Audience Insights: 5 Great Alternatives
Team Streams
September 3rd, 2021
Team Streams
September 3rd, 2021
As marketers, we are always trying to gain more audience insights and learn more about our customers.
We ask questions such as
You probably rely on Google Analytics to gather a lot of your audience insights — and for good reason.
It's free and simple to use. While GA does offer an excellent peek behind the curtain at who your audience is, it can’t tell you everything.
Here are four great tools that can provide you additional audience insights.
Google Analytics might be able to tell you that you have a high bounce rate. But it won't necessarily tell you why.
Customer feedback will always provide you with excellent audience insights.
You have a lot of options when it comes to customer feedback. Some essential areas you should be monitoring include:
Social media @ mentions - If your customers are tagging you in Insta stories or writing you messages on Twitter, keep track and actively respond.
You may quickly notice patterns. For example, you may see that many Twitter users tell you they are experiencing a loading error on your site, or some Instagram users may highlight a product fault.
While many have shifted away from picking up the telephone in some industries, calls are still a key source of leads.
For example, if you work in an industry that has a primarily older target audience. Or perhaps in a service such as emergency plumbing or dentistry where audiences are searching for immediate answers. In both of these examples, calls are important.
Google Analytics can't tell you which marketing campaign led to a lead calling you. A call tracking tool can.
Tracking phone calls will help you assess what marketing channels your audience is most receptive to.
According to Search Engine Journal, phone calls have a conversion rate of 30–50%. If you are not tracking these calls then you are losing valuable insights into your audience and marketing campaigns.
Google’s page analytics plugin gives you extra audience insights that Google Analytics alone cannot.
The plugin will show you how users interact with your website. It removes the need to add tracking code through elements of your website and can show you what links, CTAs, etc. users have interacted with.
It will also give you some insights into why users have interacted with elements of your website. These audience insights will help you optimise your website layout, improve user experience, and increase conversions.
Heat maps are another tool that will help you improve user experience and website layout.
With a heat map, you see a visual representation where users are interacting with your website. There are tools out there, such as Crazy Egg, that provide huge amounts of data on user clicks, attention, and scrolling.
From these heatmaps, you can see what users scroll, stop scrolling, interacting, and don’t interact. You can optimise your website layout to eliminate dead zones and content that is ignored. Use your audience insights to give your visitors the website they want and boost conversions.
Google Analytics is a great tool for marketers. It provides a lot of audience insight,s but it can't tell you everything. Incorporating other tools into your marketing plan to review how users interact with your website and to ask for feedback will complement all the insights you gain from Google Analytics and boost your campaign results.
See inspirations here:
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