Last Updated: 7 months ago by BrodNeil
Digital Marketing does not need to be difficult or expensive and can often be run on a sensible budget without high management fees and still produce a reasonable return on investment.
Whilst it’s very straightforward to say that, in practice, it may be difficult for someone with limited or no digital marketing experience, but fortunately there are some free digital marketing tools available on the market to help your digital marketing activities be a lot simpler.
Let’s take a look at some of the tools and how they can help you.
Google Analytics
This free digital marketing tool is one of the holy grails and gives you incredible insights into the locations, journey, and usage of users to your website.
Google Analytics gives you key facts at a glance, the total number of visitors, average time on site, average pages per session, and your bounce rate – All key information that can help you better identify and measure the success or changes to your website.
Google Analytics gives you insights into specific pages, such as how long someone is looking at a specific and what the bounce rate for that specific page is. This is good information, especially if you notice a page has a time on site of just a few seconds and a bounce rate of 90% for example – It could indicate a problem with the page.
But how do you find out if there is an issue with the page?
Firstly, you can check the page yourself in different browsers across desktop and mobile devices and see if there is anything obviously wrong.
Secondly, you can use a special tool called Inspectlet.
Inspectlet
This handy tool allows you to record visitors on your website and see them clicking about and interacting with your website and web pages.
Using this tool, you can check the pages and data for that Google Analytics highlights as having an issue and see what the issues are with real website visitors.
By watching back the recordings, you will see if people are scrolling down a page or just seeing it load and then bounce, whether there are any slow loading times or loading issues, and then make any necessary changes.
The tool won’t tell you if there’s an issue with your content, such as if the content is boring, but if you have a wall of text and find people just skimming through and there’s no imagery or headlines to break everything up, then that could be your first port of call – To make the page more engaging or ‘sticky’.
Optimising your website for conversions is key, after all, the changes and issues you identify using Analytics and Inspectlet need to translate into better figures such as more signups, more sales, more people falling down your funnel.
So, how do you manage your conversions and what is a conversion?
A conversion is when someone completes a goal within your website, for example buying a product.
Let’s say you sell a widget and 100 people visit your website. Of these 100 people, 1 person buys your widget, that gives you a conversion rate of 1%.
So, by tweaking things on your page e.g. imagery, colours, text you may get 3 of those 100 people to now buy your product, giving you a conversion rate of 3%.
Google Optimiser
This tool allows you to run tests on your website. You can create two variations of a page and on one variation make a change, such as using a different image and send 50% of your traffic to one page and 50% to the other page and seeing which variation creates the most conversions/sales for you.
You can find Google optimizer over at: https://marketingplatform.google.com/intl/en_uk/about/optimize/ however it can be a little complex and you may require the help of a web designer to set up the initial code if you aren’t able to do so yourself, after that, you can run tests, run variations and measure the success of these new pages.
You may find that you have a page speed issue and that your website is taking a long time to load – Usually, anything over 4-5 seconds is considered slow – so you may want to improve your page speed.
GT Metrix
GT Metrix is a free tool that scans a web page and tells you the total load time as well as issues such as too slow servers, too large image files, and a list of other items that you can improve to better improve the speed of your website.
You can even measure the speed of your website from different key points around the world and see how fast your website is for international visitors.
GT Metrix also shows you a really cool waterfall, so besides getting a grade out of 100% you can also visually see what elements are loading in which order on your website and potentially slowing your website down.
If your website is taking 10 seconds to load and 8 seconds of that are a blank page because it’s loading a chat app before the rest of your website content for example, then re-ordering your scripts so that your website loads in the first 2 seconds and the chat in the last 8 seconds would be the first step to improving usability.
This article was provided by Craig Murphy of ALT Agency who has over 20 years’ experience developing websites and optimising them for conversions. ALT Agency is based in Birmingham, West Midlands, and offers website design, development, and SEO services.