Toolkit
I want to share with you a selection of resources from my toolkit – things that I use on projects from planning and research phases through to implementation, monitoring and optimising.
Design / UX / UI
A few of tools to make things look good!
1. Coolors
Coolors is a tool for creating and collecting colour palettes.
You can work with lots of colour spaces including RGB, CMYK, LAB, HSB and several popular colour libraries like Pantone®, Copic®, Prismacolor®, etc…
2. Adobe XD
Adobe XDÂ is a powerful, collaborative, easy-to-use platform that helps you and your team create designs for websites, mobile apps, voice interfaces, games and more.
Analytics / Tracking
Measure and analyse…
1. Google Analytics Add-On for Sheets
The Google Analytics add-on is an extension for Google Sheets that allows you to create custom reports within Sheets. The add-on uses Google’s Analytics API and Regular Expressions to filter the data you want to pull.
Extremely useful for deeper analysis, comparison and charts.
2. GA - Duplicate Transactions Custom Report
This Duplicate Transactions Custom Report is a template you can use to check your analytics account with.
There is a good chance that your ecommerce tracking afflicted with duplicate transaction hits being sent to Google Analytics. Especially if you are on one of the major eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce.Â
3. GA - Hours & Days Custom Report
Dan Barker has created a very insightful custom report for Google Analytics that shows which day of the week and at what time of the day your website receives the most traffic or most conversions if you use the ecommerce version. Make sure to analyse a suitably long enough time frame. This data can give excellent guidance for optimising paid campaigns and scheduling email marketing.
4. GA - Events Overview Custom Report
The Events Overview Custom Report gives a top level view of all custom tracked events and allows you to see across event category, action and label in a flat table.
Very useful when wanting to see everything that is tracked in the same view.
Data Visualisation
High impact visual tools to tell a data story…
1. Search Console Explorer Studio by Hannah Rampton
This template is designed for analysing Google Search Console data. It provides immense possibilities to mine for insights into your website’s organic search performance in Google, explore queries and opportunities and filter on branded vs. non-branded. Check out the Data Studio template here.
2. Shopping Behaviour Dashboard by Charles Farina
Currently Data Studio is lacking in its Enhanced Ecommerce data manipulation capabilities. Charles Farina has created an innovative solution to this with a set of templates for the Shopping Behavior Funnel.
Conversion Optimisation
Data collection, conversion research and hypothesis testing…
1. a/b Test Calculator
Calculate statistical significance and the Power of A/B-test results.
2. Hypothesis Statement
Every good test is based on a hypothesis. Whether a test wins or loses, we’re validating a hypothesis – hence testing is essentially validated learning. Learning leads to insight which leads to better hypotheses, and in turns into better results.
Here is a good format for writing hypothesis (credit to Craig Sullivan):
“We believe that doing [A] for people [B] will make outcome [C] happen. We’ll know this when we see data [D] and feedback [E].”
3. Google Optimize
Optimize is Googles solution for A/B testing and personalization. It allows you to test variants of web pages and see how they perform against a specified objective.
A key benefit is how it integrates with Google Analytics and how Goolge Analytics integrates with Optimize.
4. Convert
Convert.com is a leading optimisation tool that offers A/B testing, website split testing, multivariate and multipage testing, smart personalization, a secure API and clean, real time reports.
5. Hotjar
Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool that analyses website use, via heatmaps, session recordings, form funnels, and surveys.
Competiton Research
I use these to find out what is working for the competition.
1. SEM Rush
The Competitive Research Toolkit on SEMrush gives you the research to make data-driven marketing decisions based on the strategies of your competitors. You’ll find solutions to oversee the big picture of a competitor or potential partner’s performance. How each rival grew (or lost) its popularity over the observed time.
2. Similar Web
SimilarWeb is a SaaS website that provides web analytics services for businesses. I have used this to build competition research reports that detail clients’ and competitors’ traffic volumes, referral sources. Very useful!
3. ahrefs
Another ‘SEO Tool’ that is has grown into so much more. Ahrefs has a potent competition research element to it. With access to a huge database of information and its inteligent tools it should be in your primary arsenary.
Site Speed
Did you know site speed directly correlates to your conversion rate?
1. Google Pagespeed Insights
Analyse your pages with PageSpeed Insights. Get your PageSpeed score and use PageSpeed suggestions to make your web site faster.
2. Chrome Plugin - Lighthouse
Lighthouse is available as a Chrome Plugin. It is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more.
3. GA - Site Speed Custom Report
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4. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is another speed diagnostics and optimisation tool. Use it to see how your site performs and discover opportunities to increase load times and performance.
Email Marketing
The highest converting traffic source is almost always email.
1. SendGrid
If you are sending email campaigns at scale then you are already aware of the many pitfalls and hurdles that can destory your deliverability rates. SendGrid is a platform for transactional and marketing email that takes care of a lot of issues like IP throttling and warming up lists.
2. Zero Bounce
Scrubbing your email lists of threats to you IP reputation is a vital step in achieving high deliverability rates. Zero Bounce offers a validation service that will ensure you list has a high technical performance.