5 Tools to Analyze and Optimize Live Digital Campaigns

There are lots of useful technologies that digital marketers can use to tweak and optimize campaigns on the fly. Here's what we recommend.

Why wait until the end of a campaign to analyze how it went and what could be improved for next time? There are lots of useful technologies that digital marketers can use to tweak and optimize digital campaigns on the fly.

Here’s a list of some of our favorites:

1. Optimizely

What it does: Optimizely is probably the Rolls-Royce of A/B optimization services. Aside from passively reporting on the success of different aspects of your site, Optimzely lets you actively manipulate your site or product. You can set up different experiments to determine which changes have the greatest impact on conversion rates.

Pros: All of the optimization and experimentation you could need in one package. Also, their customer support is fantastic.

Cons: The price. It’s not cheap (but neither is a Rolls-Royce).

2. Mixpanel

What it does: Mixpanel is hands down the most complete, full-featured tool for analyzing not only what happens on your site, but for understanding who exhibits the behaviors that drives revenue (and why).

Mixpanel’s messaging tools also allow you to create your own customized contact strategy around the customer segments you identify as the being most valuable to your business.

Pros: A robust full-featured platform that can help you answer almost any question about how people are using your site.

Cons: The cost is reasonably high compared to similar platforms, and the learning curve is steep. To counter this, Mixpanel University is there to help you get up and running.

3. Inspectlet

What it does: Inspectlet is a digital marketer’s Swiss army knife. Combining click and eye-tracking heat maps and in-depth form completion analytics, it’s the digital equivalent of standing behind your customers as they use your site. Its value becomes even greater when used in conjunction with tools such as mixpanel.

Pros: Its usefulness of inspectlet as a qualitative data-gathering tool, with insights coming thick and fast. It’s priced very competitively, and you can use the built-in session tags to mimic elements of mixpanel’s functionality – giving you the option of creating a similar service for significantly less.

Cons: While it’s great at uncovering around 80 percent of opportunities to improve a site or digital product, you should consider pairing it with other tools to really get the most out of it.

4. Leve.rs

What it does: Levers turns Google Analytics into a powerful forecasting tool. By integrating existing data from your analytics account, it identifies trends and patterns for future usage of your site. You have the option of setting up experiments that let you manipulate the variables affecting conversion so that you can find the optimum strategy before spending money.

Pros: Levers is one of the few tools that helps you figure out the most effective strategy before spending money (instead of committing to a strategy and optimizing flawed assumptions).

Cons: It’s best for well-established sites with a reasonable data set to pull from. Without solid historical data it’s hard to uncover insights and accurately identify trends that you can capitalize on.

5. Geckoboard

What it does: Most analytics tools are built on the assumption that they are all you will ever need to uanalse (which is rarely thecase). Geckoboard is a custom dashboard-building tool that lets you combine and aggregate data from different services around the Web. The main benefit is that it helps you get a “big-picture” view of what’s happening with your product or site.

Pros: The cost is quite competitive, and once subscribed you can create as many customized dashboards as you like.

Cons: While fairly comprehensive in the services it integrates with, you may need the help of a programmer to integrate with some of the more specialized services and widgets.

Read the companion article to this piece: “5 Digital Tools to Validate Ideas and Test Assumptions

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