Three Tools that Make Analytics Even Better

GA is great for answering 99% of the questions I have about my website. Luckily, some other great tools exist that make answering that remaining 1% a lot easier. Here are three of my favorite:

1) ClickTale

This tool tops the list because it's spectacular. In GA, you can't easily get a visualization of where visitors are clicking on an individual page. GA's In-Page Analytics report is making progress toward that goal, but it's still in Beta and has a few kinks.

Enter ClickTale, which gives you a comprehensive view of everything visitors do on a single page. See heatmaps of where visitors clicked and moved their mouse (which the ClickTale staff says correlates about 85% with attention). You can also see in what areas of a page visitors spent the most time, and what percentage of visitors even scrolled down to a given section at all.

If that's not enough to blow your socks off, you can also see how many visitors hover over an item but don't click it and how long they hesitate before clicking it--plus a lot more. I'll forgive you if you stop reading this blog post right now and go sign up!

We recommend this as a supplement for many of our clients. It's especially helpful before a redesign, to know what elements of a page visitors are paying attention to, and what we can improve. The free version lets you track up to 400 pageviews, and for $99 per month, you can track up to 20,000--well worth it, even if you stay signed up only for a month or two.

2) PadiTrack

The great thing about PadiTrack (and the third tool, too) is that it pulls from your already existing GA data, making it even more insightful. PadiTrack is GA goal funnels on caffeine--you can create them on-the-fly using historical data. You can also segment your funnels. To top it all off, it's free.

Want to know if visitors from a particular referral source drop out of your checkout process more frequently than others? Want to know if any of the visitors who actually made a purchase are brand new, or returning, visitors? Oh, and did you forget to set up this goal a year ago, but still want data from back then? PadiTrack allows you to pull that info from GA.

3) Site Scan

Site Scan is a tool from another Google Analytics Certified Partner, EpikOne. It will scan your website and tell you if any of your pages aren't tagged with the GA tracking code. It can be helpful if you have a big site with lots of pages, and you're putting GA on it for the first time. It's also great if you're upgrading to the asynchronous GA code or changing to a different account number, to make sure you didn't miss anywhere.

Scan up to 100 pages for free, or more for $25 per month, which gets you lots of other features, as well.

Hope this helps make your life a little easier! What other tools do you use that supplement GA, or give you additional insights?