Time-on-site, bounce rate, page views. You've probably grappled trying to boost these metrics for a while, and it can be difficult to make big improvements. Getting the right tools can make a massive difference and really help to generate that all important engagement which lets you boost these key metrics and thus helps you rise in the SERPs and sell more products. So we took at look at 5 of the best page engagement tools so you can see which ones are right for you and give them a try.
These tools help assess and improve the effectiveness of website design including different page template types such as home page, landing and campaign pages.
These tools can help digital marketers improve conversion and goal completion rates, while reducing the need for IT support and ensuring brand stakeholders are kept happy with the consistent design (look and feel) of the pages built. They may also help reduce the amount of design input required once a template is agreed.
Scale. Understand how much time your team are spending on managing and creating landing and campaign pages. Are you operating at a scale to benefit from these tools?
Are there other benefits you can leverage? For example, developing custom PPC landing pages testing different copy, images and call to actions.
Be clear on the levels of reporting and customisation you require to deliver your objectives. These are two areas which differ significantly between the tools in this category.
Finally, when testing and optimising bear in mind that you’ll need enough traffic to ensure the tools can run the experiments. The greater the volume of traffic, the quicker you’ll have results.
A free Chrome extension that integrates with Google Analytics . Also available as a report within Google Analytics (Behaviour menu).
The Page Analytics Chrome Extension allows you to see how customers interact with your web pages, including what they click and don’t click. Use these insights to optimize your website layout, improve user experience, and increase conversions.
It’s useful to have a visual assessment of how users interact with key web pages so you can understand whether call-to-actions are effective.
We highly recommend this tool. It offers many of the features of paid services, but is totally free. Fantastic value!
Hotjar is an all-in-one analytics and feedback tool helping you to truly understand your web and mobile site visitors.
You can get a free trail and a free 'basic' version which has limits of sample size and number of page views.
Other tools in the category don’t all provide insights from prompting visitors with polls. Heat maps can only show you so much, asking people provides a whole nother level of insight.
This is a relatively new tool, but we prefer it to some of the existing services since it also enables questions to be asked on some pages for qualitative feedback. We subscribe to this service for this reason.
Clicktale shows customer behavior and intent across key touchpoints: web, mobile and apps. Clicktale’s deep drill-downs get to the heart of the “how” and “why” behind customer behavior. You have to pay to use the service, but there is a free trail available.
A good ‘all-in-one’ contender with heatmaps, session replays and form analytics.
Described by its vendors as ‘The world’s #1 enterprise-class experience management platform’, it is aimed at larger organisations, so is more expensive to subscribe to than some platforms. It is a well-established service with the benefit over some other surface in that it combines session replays with heatmaps.
Crazyegg is a tool for generating and reviewing heatmaps, scrollmaps and overlays of when people click on your site. You have to pay to use it, but it does offer a 30 day free trail.
It's a simple service with good usability and visualisation for different forms of heatmaps.
We’re not convinced of the value of paying for a service when Google’s InPage Analytics provides similar functionality. However, you may want to subscribe during redesign projects.
Tealeaf is a tool to highlight points in the customer journey on a desktop or mobile site where visitors are abandoning a process - typically in a checkout or cart. It's an IBM product and has a heftier price tag than other products listed here. You can get demos on request, but there is no free trail.
Highlights potential problems which lead to revenue loss, so can be used to increase conversion and average order value.
A different type of service to the others in this category which is described as highlighting ‘Customer Struggle’. The insights it generates can yield significant savings on abandoned transactions and application errors so it is a widely deployed tool in large, transactional businesses.
If you're interested in learning more about marketing tools, you can download our full guide to essential marketing tools, featuring 150 different tools and advice on what to use them for.
Download resource – Essential Digital Marketing Tools
This free 100+ page guide explains why we have chosen the 5 tools in each category and gives links to all the tools.
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By Robert Allen
Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.
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