3 Web Tools To Improve Your Online Customer Experience

There are two main (and one upcom­ing one) tools we use at Mar­ble­head to verify and adjust our web­site designs. These tools help val­i­date designs, iden­tify where the user is con­fused, or is acting dif­fer­ent than originally planned. They have helped tremen­dously on our own site changes as well as for our clients.

1. Google Analytics

First is the known stan­dard, Google Ana­lyt­ics. It’s a pretty robust tool for slic­ing up web traf­fic data, was a huge upgrade over their pre­vi­ous ver­sion, and in accor­dance with Google phi­los­o­phy, is free.

2. Crazy Egg

Second is a lesser known tool called Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg tracks where the users click on a web­site. It’s great for val­i­dat­ing place­ment of ads and deter­min­ing whether designs con­fuse or clar­ify infor­ma­tion for the user. A Crazy Egg report for our client The Van­Zant Group home­page looks like this:

Which shows that the main place people go is the About Us page. Pretty typ­i­cal for a relationship-​based con­sult­ing firm. We are using this design to influ­ence the 2.0 ver­sion of the site. Cus­tomers are telling us what works and what doesn’t.

3. Yahoo Web Analytics

The newest tool will be Yahoo Web Ana­lyt­ics. Why should you care about Yahoo’s tool? Is it the same as Google? Nope. And you should care if you need some­thing sooner than day old data. Yahoo will be a great option for clients when you need real-​time data. You can see how ads and designs per­form as cus­tomers inter­act with the site. Yahoo will also allow cre­at­ing cus­tomized reports since the raw data is avail­able to slice (as opposed to Google’s aggre­gated data. You can’t break it down dif­fer­ently than they already have). Will Yahoo’s power appeal to every­one? No, but it cer­tainly pro­vides a way to get faster feed­back on higher traf­fic sites. It’s coming soon…

Thanks to egghead Eric T. Peter­son for demys­ti­fy­ing the math. It’s not all BS like my friend Bob Hoff­man thinks!