How do we test our website performance using free tools like Google Analytics
Is not enough to have a complete and well-designed website if it doesn’t meet the objectives set for it. In order to determine whether these goals are met, you need to find a way to measure if your website does what it should do. From all the indicators that we follow regularly, I will talk about 5 that we analyze in www.toky.co and that you could check on your website as well.
- Website Traffic Is the number of visitors to your website.
2. Traffic sources Visitors that come directly by typing your domain on the browser, from search engines, external sites, social networks, links in e-mails or from paid ad programs like AdWords campaigns.
3. Conversion It is the part of your site traffic that meets your goals. These can be purchases for eCommerce sites, sign ups for services like Toky or even register on a mailing list if you have a blog.
4. Bounce rate It is the percentage of visitors to your site traffic that is leaving the site after viewing only one page; basically are those who come and go.
A high bounce rate can indicate that your site’s content is not relevant to visitors. If you have this problem, you should look to optimize your texts, images, and other content to engage the visitors.
5. Time on site Is the average amount of time a visitor stays on your website; a low value usually shows a lack of interest in your content, similar to the bounce rate.
To discover these indicators we use the following tools:
SimilarWeb
This tool in its free plan doesn’t require registration and allows you to check several indicators for any website. You just need to type the domain you want to evaluate and it will give you a lot of information, including the 5 indicators mentioned above. It also allows you to find the countries where you have more visitors and the traffic sources.
If you can’t see data for your site, it may be because it is too new and SimilarWeb doesn’t have the volume of data required
We use this tool to do a quick check of our site, so we can do a follow up every time we need it.
Google Analytics
This tool is perhaps the most widely used monitoring tool with more than 22 million websites installations. But this is not just because it is free, but because of the large amount of information that you can get. With this tool, you can access detailed information that will complement the analysis of the suggested indicators without any restrictions presented by the free plan of SimilarWeb.
Google Analytics requires an installation process that can go from inserting a javascript code on your website to copy and paste the tracking code that you will recognize because it is similar to this example UA-12345678–9. Everything depends on how is your website made.
Google Analytics can also give you the following information:
More details about website traffic
- Country and city where they come from.
- What operating system and devices are used to see your site. If you find many visits on mobile devices and your site doesn’t adapt, you’ll lose many visitors.
- How many new and returning visitors come to your site.
Other important details:
- Which pages get more visitors and which are the most where they leave your site.
- Data about age, gender and interests of your visitors
- Traffic flows; which pages your visitors see first and how they navigate your website until they leave.
In Google Analytics you can define objectives, which may be on the suggested indicators or even specific pages; for example in Toky, we want to know the percentage of people that visits our [sign up page] (https://beta.toky.co/register) so we created a goal to show us how many visitors come to this page and how they get there; it is also important to check the time on the site.
How about giving users visiting your site an easy way to call you? Look what Toky has for your business. Visit www.toky.co
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a solution that will allow you to make a more customized monitoring of your website. With this tool you can do more than check visitors stats, you can keep a record of actions on the site and clicks on certain buttons or links; You can also register users of your website to have more detailed events and activity control.
From the marketing perspective, Mixpanel can help you to find active and inactive users by enabling event logging for every user, in addition to a detailed analysis of each behavior, which gives an extra dimension to your website analysis. You can combine this data with indicators of other tools to identify areas for improvement. Information on user retention is quite interesting because it helps you to know how often users return to your site or if there are some who come once and never return.
For each event, additional user data is recorded to a better segmentation of the information. Data such as country, city, language, etc. is recorded too.
Mixpanel free plan has a maximum limit of events per month, but they are more than enough to start your analysis.
The installation and use of Mixpanel requires some knowledge of javascript, but it is quite simple. Everything is just a matter of inserting javascript code on pages you want to monitor.
We invite you to try and explore these tools and get more out of your website. Remember that your website like any other tool must remain functional to meet its objective, which can only be achieved with a constant review and adjustment; so you should analyze both your site and your SEO strategies.
Do you want to know how Toky work? look at this infographic
Originally published at blog.toky.co on July 8, 2016.
