Your site is bursting with mouth-watering content.
Customers are lining up like it’s midnight at a Harry Potter premiere.
And every once in awhile, one of your social media posts goes totally viral.
But suddenly — things aren’t all sunshine and roses anymore.
Your social media account gets shut down, your website gets hacked, or (on the brighter side) you confidently decide it’s time to start ANOTHER online business to duplicate your successes.
You’ve done it all before, so you’ve got it in the bag, right?
Wrong.
If you’re not 100% clear on EXACTLY where your customers are coming from, down to the very click… your hopes of ever reproducing the results you may have seen once or twice in the past will remain completely and utterly futile.
Because the truth is: if you don’t know what works and what doesn’t at a detailed, granular level, you’ll never be able to reproduce the stellar results you’ve gotten when tragedy strikes (or better yet, when it’s time to expand into a new business!)
For these reasons and more, it is absolutely CRUCIAL that you know exactly where your traffic, leads, and paying customers are coming from.
Here are 3 free tools to give you the insights you NEED when it comes to tracking your success online.
- Bitly
Bitly is a free tool that allows you to instantly shorten, share, manage, and analyze any link you want with a detailed dashboard of useful analytics.
Once you sign up for a free account, all you have to do is hit “Create Bitlink” and paste in the URL you want to shorten. You can customize and share your links in your social media posts, emails, and even on print!
And the power of Bitly is you can easily create as many “Bitlinks” as you need, so if you use a specific link only in one place (even if you have multiple links on that page), you’ll know exactly which link was clicked!
Bingo!
- Google Analytics
EVERY online business owner needs Google Analytics, no matter what.
If you’re not using it already, Google Analytics it’s a free tool that reports back on important statistics and site metrics you need to know to optimize your website and reach your marketing goals.
The platform lets you see valuable details like how many visitors your site gets, how much time they spend on your site, how many pages they visit per session, and more.
If you’re not already using it, click here to get Google Analytics.
- SumoMe
A free plugin that does much more than meets the eye, SumoMe is a full suite of website tools to help you collect more emails, increase your social shares, and grow your site traffic, all in one simple platform.
When it comes to tracking, SumoMe includes 3 totally awesome features:
- Heat Maps show you where on your site people are clicking. With this information, you can improve your pages to show your visitors more of what they want to see (and less of what they don’t).
- Content Analytics lets you see exactly where on the page your visitors stop reading, so you can include important in places that get seen!
- Share makes it easy-peasy for your visitors to share your content to their friends, family, and others, PLUS a shortened tracking link (much like Bitly) is included in the share automatically, so you can analyze the clicks that post gets!
Now that you’re a link-tracking expert, download our FREE inbound checklist to complete the rest of your inbound marketing strategy.