Using Analytics effectively to measure your site is one of the best ways to see what's working and what's not working in order to improve!
Analytics done right can really help you understand your site and make positive changes to improve things.
People used to think of analytics in terms of "hits" and that gave you an arbitrary number to measure relative change against.
40 years later and analytics have come a very long way!
Now we measure how effectively websites help customers achieve your business's goals. We measure how fast a site responds, if it's available 100% of the time, if its SSL certificate is valid, how it ranks in search engines, how individual keywords popularity changes, as well as how people actually interact with the site on different devices.
Here's a list of analytics and measurement tools for your consideration:
- Z Google Analytics
- Z Fathom Analytics
- Z Hotjar
- Z GT Metrix
- Z Google Pagespeed Insights
- Z Uptime Robot
- Z Google Trends
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Things to know about Analytics and Measurement:
Google Analytics is about to have a major change in July 2023 it will stop using Universal Analytics UA) and move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Historical data will not be transferred between the new services, so you'll be starting from scratch.
Whilst Google Analytics is "free" - beware that there's no such thing as a free lunch! As part of the terms and conditions, you're agreeing for your analytics data to be passed to Google in America and processed there. This is a bit of a privacy issue and you should be sure to mention you're using Google Analytics in your Privacy and Cookie policies.
You may want to consider Fathom Analytics as an alternative. Whilst it comes at a cost, data remains within the EU
