Imagine having a state-of-the-art computer and only using it to play Solitaire. Absurd, right? Actually, that’s not uncommon in many companies. Not because employees sit on their computers to play Solitaire, but because they’ve got the tools to do a really great job and often neglect to use them. We were guilty of that, by the way.
Recently at Rootstack we decided to revamp our website and make it more captivating and interesting for our visitors: not just for the visual appeal, but also for the information we offered. It happens that the original home page was okay, but we needed to make it great. We realized we had the tools for it, but we weren’t taking advantage of those tools. Until we had a revolutionary idea: lets use these tools.
Enter [Google Analytics](http://www.google.com/analytics/) and [CrazyEgg](http://www.crazyegg.com/). Both tools scanned our website and returned analytics that helped us understand the behavior of our users and gave us insights on what we were doing right and what we needed to work on urgently.
*Google Analytics* lets you discover a whole bunch of details about the way people interact with your site. This tool is free for anyone to use and take advantage of, as long as your site receives less than 10 million hits per month.
Some of the key insights *Google Analytics* offers you are
- Traffic patterns and trends.
- Where visitors come from and what they do on your website, including pages visited and average time spent on each page.
- Which pages are most frequently visited.
- Where people leave your site.
- Which pages retain visitors longest.
- Search terms people are using to find the website.
As for *CrazyEgg*, this tool offers a 30-day free trial and lets you analyze several different pages at the time. Once the trial is over, you can sign up for any of their reasonably priced plans, starting at $9/month.
*CrazyEgg* has four different tools to help you better understand the activity taking place on your website. Here’s a brief snapshot on what each of them does:
- *Heatmap Tool*: As its name suggests, it allows you to see the most popular areas of a given page. It identifies hotspots, even when there aren’t any links available.
- *Scrollmap Tool* It lets you see how far down to people scroll on your page, and where they abandon it. Basically, you get to see which parts of your page work and which areas people ignore.
- *Overlay Report and Confetti Report*: The first report allows you to see the number of clicks received on each link of your page, while the latter offers you where traffic comes from segmented by different categories.
With *Google Analytics*, we found out people were mostly interested in our Services, Our Work and About Us sections. We knew most visitors came from Spanish-speaking countries, but we were surprised to know we were receiving high traffic from the United States We realized our blog attracts a lot of visitors as well.
*CrazyEgg* made us realize people were clicking on areas that didn’t have links on them. We decided to make them a hotspot and redirect visitors to the pages we knew now were of most interest. We also decided to position important content on the areas people were viewing most.
We created a strategy to improve our website and make sure we delivered the information our users needed, as well as make the navigation on our site as seamless as possible, thus ensuring a pleasant experience for our visitors. We are very pleased with our end result, but we are weekly analyzing trends in order to make our site stronger and better.
If you have a website and are seeing average results from it, take time to study what is working and what isn’t before you lose many potential clients. Take advantage of these tools to offer your visitors a great experience.
Let us know what you think in the comments, and share with us your experiences and suggestions of other tools to help you build a great website.