4 FREE tools to help you understand how your new website is actually doing

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If you've been following the last few posts in this series, then perhaps you finally got the courage to press that damn Publish button on your website, but then––?

Crickets. Actual f*****g chirps! (one site visitor yesterday, another today, 3 this afternoon...)

In fact, each visitor feels like one single cricket chirp. Where are the rest of the crickets? 🦗

You’re excited for each person taking time out of their day to come take a peek at your business's home on the internet, but then you begin to think:

• 5 pageviews the whole week?

• How is this website ever going to actually help me?

• How do I know what to change to make it better?

That’s yet another good-news-bad-news situation, my friend, because the bad news is that we’re not talking about marketing in this blog; that’ll be in the next one.

The good news is that we ARE talking about what tools you can affordably use to monitor this new bundle of joy and make it better.

New businesses are on a tight budget, I get it, so it’s always helpful to know what tools are available that work really well, while not breaking the bank.

While you learn what to use, and what things you can be watching for, you’ll also be tweaking as you keep track of these insights.

Don’t look at 5 pageviews as a failure.
It’s not wrong. It’s not right, it just IS.

We’ve all been there, myself included.

Every new website starts here, and without running paid ads (which I never recommend, for reasons I’ll cover in the next post), quite literally, no one knows you exist yet!

In this day-and-age, websites take work to promote before you can develop a brag-worthy online presence, and so it’s good to go into this ‘launching thing’ with the knowledge that you’re not going to suddenly be raking in the dough, the likes, the follows, and the page views with a brand new website.

On the other side of that coin though, because I’m about to share these tools with you, you’ll be able to see where people might get hung up, which pages people abandon faster than others, which pages people stay on longer than others, etc.

And that insight will HELP you understand how people actually use your website vs how you THOUGHT people would use it.

With that insight, you can make constant tweaks as you learn, and make your website better & better for your own audience.

The perk to this? Google sees that you’re updating your site constantly. That things are changing for better (or for worse) but that you’re adjusting everything frequently.

And Google? They love frequency.

Frequency means predictability & that gives both Google and your followers/visitors/fans/clients/buyers/whomever, a reason to come back and hang out on your site.

Plus, with time and constant tweaks to help your viewers use the site more efficiently, people will stay on it longer, and Google will take notice.

It all works together, in your favor. So I encourage you to give this a try!

Are you already in the mini-course? If so, log back in to catch Lesson 5; if not, you can join to get all the full lessons or just get the gist of it below. 👇🏻

6 basic strategies to get more sales and eyes on your website (Part 5)

4 free tools to help you monitor engagement on your website

Squarespace Analytics

While not technically free, because you do have to pay for Squarespace to have access, …obviously. It’s not an add-on & doesn’t cost extra. Basic analytics comes with every plan on Squarespace, the ‘extras’ within Analytics are plan-dependent. For example, if you want to see ‘abandoned cart’ stats, you will have to be on a commerce plan.

So these are built right into the platform, and they’re actually fairly decent! I won’t say it beats other options out there, but for a beginner, it’ll give ya plenty of great information in an easy-to-digest, simplistic view which is more than enough for you in that stage.

It monitors basic information like your website’s:

• page views

• unique visitors

• popular pages

• traffic sources

• referral sources

• button & form conversions

• your site’s search bar results

• Google search terms

• and more

If you want to learn more about what this area includes and what these terms mean, read more about understanding your Squarespace Analytics area in pain English, so to speak.

Google Search Console

Now that you know Squarespace Analytics is built-in, you’ll be thrilled to find out that forming a connection between your Squarespace website & Google –is also easy peazy.

Google Search Console –GSC from now on– isn’t built into your website, but the connection with Squarespace is made to be super easy. Like, almost one-click easy.

GSC basically helps you create a property that you tell Google is assigned to your Google account for ownership, then you can log in any time & check on its metrics for various things like general traffic, page views & unique views.

But GSC has an advantage over Squarespace’s analytics monitoring because it can do more, such as compare web-based search results to video-based search results & see the two sets of information side-by-side, which means you can generally see more granular information here.

You can also check errors Google finds on your site, among other things. The basics are easy to pick up and the rest you’ll learn over time as you realize what to pay attention to for your specific business & audience.

Google Analytics

Not to be confused with GSC, as they are two completely separate websites & tools.

Google Analytics is like a beefed-up version of Squarespace Analytics, and as you might’ve guessed it can do a lot more including goal-tracking for things like sales pages, lead pages, ad tracking, and more.

Because of how beefy Google Analytics (GA) is though, it’ll be sorta like being dropped into a foreign country that speaks a language close to yours, but different enough that you’ll be looking up the terms.

So what I always recommend is to go ahead & connect it early, because it can only collect data AFTER it’s connected to your website, and then you’ll have access to a history of information that will be helpful later when you’re ready to get into the nitty-gritty of tracking.

If you don’t want to connect it quite yet, that’s up to you; just know that for however long it’s not connected there will be no data to look back on for that time, should you need it.

Lucky Orange

This is an altogether different kind of resource, akin to Hotjar if you’ve ever heard of that, and a goldmine of information that can help you tweak your website based on how people actually use it.

Hotjar seems to be the industry standard, and I’ve used it myself for years on & off when I needed to, both for clients & on my own website. However, I’ve never found it to be simple to use and clients always struggle with where to find what. Recently they’ve been acquired by another company and their plan’s pricing & features have moved around a little with less being included on the free plan, which is what most people want to start with and that triggered my search to find a good alternative.

So, what do these tools do?

Both of them offer tools like

• 1 or 2 question popup surveys to find out what people are hoping to do/find on your site & whether or not they actually find it

• live chat with website visitors and chat invitations

• heatmaps, clickmaps, scroll information, and even screen recordings (with any typed/entered information blocked for privacy)

• funnel analytics, specific event tracking, and even form field analytics where you can see the dropoff rate (but not the entered data)

This basically means, that not only can you install a live chat widget on your site & use it to engage with people if they reach out for help, but you can also see how your site visitors use your website so you can see where they pause to read, click & change pages, or maybe even get confused and scroll back and forth on a single page trying to find something.

The recordings are not person-specific, and if the user happens to fill out a form of any kind (anything from a search bar to newsletter signups or inquiry forms) the information typed in will be hidden for privacy, showing only asterisks as digit/letter placeholders. After all, that’s not the information that’s helpful from a user standpoint. I don’t want names & email addresses, I just want to see how I can continue to make my website more helpful for the people who come to it.

Lucky Orange is unusual though; I’ve looked at a lot of other companies like it, and for now at least, Lucky Orange has the lowest barrier to entry with a great free plan which means it’s totally free to get started and use most of the features and when it’s time to upgrade to a paid plan, at least as of mid-2022, the paid plans start at about 1/3 the cost of Hotjar.

One thing to note is that Lucky Orange can likely get away with this lower pricing model & awesome free plan because it doesn’t hang onto information for us. On the free plan for example you get an allotment of page views per month and then everything resets, so the previous month’s data isn’t available unless you pay to be able to access it longer, which you can certainly do if you’d like.

It’s also very easy to connect to your website, Squarespace or not, with one simple line of cut/paste code, and the interface of their web app is very easy & simplistic, so you’ll be set up in no time at all!

Want more details & examples?

Get tutorials on how to connect & use tools like these in my 6-part mini-course.

Get the full lesson inside the mini-course!