One of the most effective ways for a business to gather data nowadays is through its website. They have become an essential part of the customer journey, so much so that if you don’t have a website there is a chance a customer may perceive you as sketchy or not worth their time.

So, since it’s one of the first things most people check out, a website is one of the best places to collect data! Here are three essential data gathering tools you can use to gather valuable insight on your company for its marketing strategy:

Google Analytics takes a couple seconds to set up, but once you do, you can start tracking every visitor that comes to your site, their location, and what they are using to access it. Using this information, you can measure times of increased activity to your site and determine if a campaign was effective. Knowing where users are coming from (whether it be from a search engine, social media, or a partners’ site) can tell you if you need to improve efforts in any of those areas. Google Analytics even lets you know what device is being used to access your site the most, helping you view the site through the lens of your users.

If your website is set up with Google Analytics then the good news is it’s super easy to set up Google Search Console. It records information using the same tag on your site, so all you need to do is link a Google keywords account to a Google analytics account and voilà, you have keyword data! That’s right: Google keywords tracks what people are typing into Google to access your site. This is invaluable if you want to focus on search engine optimization (SEO) on your site. You can play with what keywords bring in the most visitors, see what works and what you might have to change.

Get ready; this is a fun one. Google Trends monitors the popularity of certain topics and keywords around the world. So, you can see what topics are trending, but also search industry terms and keywords people are using and apply that to your own website! See a term that is popping up quite a bit in Google keywords? Compare it to other terms in Google trends and figure out what is the most popular. You can even search by region, so if you target only people in a certain state, then you can see what industry keywords are most popular in that state and compare that to what you currently use. See what areas search for your product or service to get a good idea of where to target, and compare yourself to your competition.

Meagan McCall, one of Imagine’s illustrious graphic designers, loves finding ways to help clients improve their websites. Interested in a website review? Contact us!