Analytics software shows how people are finding and using your website, what pages are converting well, and much more.
You should have analytics installed on your website whether or not you know how to use them. Because at some point, you may want some digital marketing help, and that person or team will need analytics to help optimize your business. They'll want historical data, so if you don't have any, it will slow their progress. User privacy has become an increasing concern, so a number of analytics companies now promote themselves as privacy friendly. Google Analytics is free and probably the best known / most widely used option. It is not privacy friendly, however, and limits historic data to 26 months, which hurts in efforts to track progress over time, look at seasonal fluctuations, track historic notes, and more. For these reasons, you may want to look at paid options, some of which have features that GA doesn’t have. Clicky is a paid, privacy-friendly option. It doesn’t have a beautiful user interface, but it’s not expensive and it adds a heatmaps feature, which helps you understand how people are moving through and clicking around on your web pages. (This is something GA doesn’t have.) Matomo is another paid, privacy-friendly option, it’s much more beautiful than Clicky and looks robust. It also has heatmaps, and adds an important feature: it tries to restore information about keywords that were used to find your website, which is powerful for search engine optimization and figuring out the types of questions that you could be answering for site visitors. Keyword Hero was one of the first tools I saw that tried to restore keyword details after Google stopped showing these. It is not an analytics company on its own, but will connect to Google Analytics if you're using that, giving you more information to work with. There are MANY other services you can explore, which you can find through a search online or articles like this. Just make sure you add analytics of some type to your site. Note that many site builders will have some analytics built in, but they’re not likely to be robust like these 3rd-party services. You can always compare vs. anything you have built into your website platform. |