When it comes to digital marketing and promoting your business, the process can become overwhelming. Determining what tools would be helpful can feel like a mountainous task.
You may work with a marketing agency to handle your digital marketing needs, or you may feel empowered to complete them independently. Whatever the case, we have created this blog with some helpful tools that can help in your business venture.
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a beneficial tool for scheduling social media posts and alleviating the stress of posting everything individually. Additionally, Sprout Social provides good analytic insights into how your social media channels and posts are performing.
The main dashboard can give an initial view of engagements with posts for some of the most popular social media platforms:
- Etc.
The reports section helps you navigate more deeply into how your social media posts, channels, and profiles are performing over a period of time. It offers the chance to look into the top-performing posts, how one profile’s performance compares to another, and how tag or paid performance plays out.
Sprout Social is one of several tools that GreenMellen is certified in, and it is an excellent tool for looking at the social data gathered from your business platforms. This tool offers a scheduled demo and free trial to test out before committing.
If you are interested in social media marketing and would prefer the workload to be on someone else’s plate, then GreenMellen is happy to help.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool that allows you to dive into how your site is performing for search results. It can also alert you when there is an issue with your site, providing the opportunity to be proactive in optimizing it.
Google Search Console collects organic search traffic and shows different reports like:
- Search Results
- Discover
- Pages
- Video Pages
- Page Experience
- Core Web Vitals
You can check for any issues with your site via Overview, Removals, Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, and the Security & Manual Actions section. Not only is this a helpful tool for ensuring issues are handled on your site, but it also tells you what keywords were most searched.
At GreenMellen we review these reports and analyze the data collected to tell a story, provide solutions, and help grow marketing for your business. The more time you dedicate to investigating it, the more you can do for your business.
3. Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4 is a tool that provides many different avenues for digging into your site’s traffic. You can create reports, events, and filters to structure your data collection how you desire.
Once set up, you can see all traffic versions from Organic to Paid, Geographical, Time Referential, Devices, and Sources. You can also connect Google Search Console to your GA4 account, allowing you to be in two places simultaneously. Some reports available in GA4 include:
- Acquisition
- User Acquisition
- Traffic Acquisition
- Engagement
- Pages and Screens
- User Attributes
- Tech
- Sources
GA4 is a more intensive digital marketing tool that requires more time to learn and understand. There are videos and courses available that can be completed to help you navigate this data tool.
4. Fathom Analytics
One popular analytics alternative option is Fathom Analytics. This data tool has been a great data resource to use in addition to Google Analytics 4 because it offers things that GA4 does not.
We recently did a more in-depth comparison between the two analytics tools. The biggest comparison was that Fathom Analytics is more beginner user-friendly and they pride themselves on ensuring user privacy and no spam traffic within the collected data.
The entire Fathom Analytics data can be found on one dashboard rather than bouncing around from report to report. Within the dashboard, you can see the graphical data for a desired timeframe as well as mini reports for:
- Pages
- Referrers
- Device Types
- Browsers
- Countries
- Events
- UTMs
You can click on individual metrics to view more in-depth data. For example, in the pages section, you can click on “/” to see more data collected for the home page. Setting up events for Fathom is less complicated than in GA4. Similar to GA4, it takes some devoted time to learn everything Fathom Analytics has to offer, but it takes less time than GA4.
5. Mailchimp
Mailchimp allows you to send emails, newsletters, business updates, and more in bulk rather than individually. It also collects and reports data on each email that is sent, with data details including:
- Opens/Open Rate
- Clicks/Click Rate
- Bounces
- Unsubscribes
- Email List
- List Growth
- Email Heatmap
Mailchimp collects data from emails and organizes it so you can easily analyze how they have performed. In the Analytics section, you can see an overview of your email marketing insights in the dashboard with near real-time analytics.
In the Reports section, you can check out the collected data for each email and see how our marketing performs. You can also create custom reports to get more in-depth analyses of email performances.
Email marketing can be a missed opportunity if not considered. It is a good way to test different aspects of your emails while seeing how the strategies might impact your business.
6. Clarity
Clarity is a free tool used to report site performance and user behavior. Clarity collects snapshots of web pages from a site and allows you to see page heatmaps.
Adding a new project to your Clarity account is easy due to Clarity’s step-by-step guidance. Once your new project is added you can explore the main dashboard, which will have many different mini reports available to you upfront.
You can also view recordings of user sessions to see where they navigated on the site, where they clicked, and how much time they spent. The heatmaps section offers insight into the top pages interacted with and provides data on where most clicks occurred for a particular page. You can also connect your Clarity project to Google Analytics for extra data connections.
Some of the metrics that Clarity reports include:
- Sessions
- Dead clicks
- Rage clicks
- Excessive scrolling
- Quick backs
- Referrers
- Channels
- Scroll Depth
Clarity collects data directly from your site and displays it in digestible forms to learn more efficiently. It gives insight into the client or customers’ experience and how the site might be doing well or could use a change.
Clarity is a great tool if you want more insight into how users interact with your site and how things could be improved. Clarity is easy to navigate and use while also having a user-friendly setup process.
7. Moz
A great tool for search engine optimization and digital marketing efforts is Moz. Moz tracks data on searched keywords and provides you with broken-down data on the keywords found.
After creating an account and adding your site to Moz, you can view a dashboard with many mini-reports on the keyword data collected. When looking at all that Moz has to offer, you can review things like:
- The dashboard
- Insights
- Rankings
- Page optimization
- Site crawl
- Links
In addition, you can explore domain overview, competitive research, keyword research, link research, and more. The dashboard alone provides numerous statistical insights into how your site is performing and how you can improve your digital marketing efforts.
This tool is a great resource for implementing new keywords and optimizing content on your site. Moz can assist by alerting you when there may be any technical SEO issues. This tool helps you get ahead of the competition and optimize opportunities.
8. Databox
Databox connects multiple data sources in one area rather than bouncing between sites. Databox offers a free trial and free tier making the choice easier for users to commit or leave after trying.
Databox can connect data sources such as:
- Google Analytics
- Mailchimp
- Help Scout
- Google Search Console
- Quickbooks
- HubSpot
- Social Media Accounts
- Ad Accounts
- and many more
They also continue to add more data sources to their arsenal for future connections while, in the meantime, providing resources that can help create a bridge from one data source to another. In Databox, a business owner can create individual dashboards, looped data boards, and templates. One can also use the metrics offered by Databox or create and establish their custom or calculated metrics.
We use Databox to create digestible databoards for clients to see their site, digital marketing, email marketing, social media, and other data results.
Databox offers a creative experience when creating databoards. For data sources like Google Analytics, there are limitations like the inability to filter out spam data. So some of the numbers may differ between the databoard and Google Analytics itself. Databox is a useful tool for seeing and analyzing collected data in one area; offering more efficiency to your task list.
Which Digital Analytics Tools Are Best For You?
Many tools can help you collect data on your business and your digital marketing efforts. Most resources offer free trials, which can alleviate some stress when determining which tools you may or may not want to commit to.
These tools we have discussed in this blog are only some of our favorites at GreenMellen, and we continue to explore new opportunities to ensure we are providing the utmost value to our clients.
Determining where to begin in your digital marketing efforts, how to collect beneficial data on your business, and choosing which tools to implement might feel like a tiring or daunting task. If you have any further questions or need digital marketing assistance, the GreenMellen team is happy to lend a helping hand.
