These days, you can’t just throw up a website or launch a campaign and just assume it’s going to perform well. As designers we need to know what makes a design successful. Today there are many paid and free tools that we can take advantage to figure out what we’re doing right and wrong. These tools can help us identify and correct problems.

Here is a brief overview of five tools I think every website designer (or anybody in the online marketing industry) should know about:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you find out more about the people that are surfing you website. It tracks everything like what operating system they are running, which web browser they are using, what their screen resolution is, what website they came from, etc. The most useful part is how Google Analytics tells you what pages get the most views from your users. That helps you conclude if people are finding information easily on your site. Smashing Magazine has put together a very thorough guide to Google Analytics, complete with video demonstrations. Check it out, it’s great!

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg? Yes I know, the name is strange… but believe me, it’s not crazy at all! “Crazy Egg will help you improve the design of your site by showing you where people are clicking and where they are not.” Crazy Egg IS really cool. It will actually create an image of your site’s page and overlay it with what is called a “heat map”. It kind of looks like you are looking at your site with Heat Vision Goggles, and you can actually see were people have touched. It does this by tracking the movements of the user’s mouse. You can simply add Crazy Egg by uploading a small script to your site. If you’ve ever wondered why people aren’t clicking on this or that… Crazy Egg can help you determine what visual elements are attracting or distracting your user.

Google Website Optimizer

Is a simple tool that people can use to set up A/B Split Tests and Multivariate Tests on smaller websites. It’s very easy to set up. You can test different website designs to see if your users respond better to them. Sometimes, a new site design can help a website or ad campaign’s conversion rate… but the only way to know for sure is by testing the new design versus the old design. The modifications you make to your website affect the amount of revenue it generates. You need to know if you are making a website better, or worse! Google Website Optimizer provides you with this information. If you’re already using Google Website Optimizer and would like to learn how to use it better, check The Google Website Optimizer Blog.

Omniture

What if you want to do some optimization BEFORE the landing page? Google doesn’t have a service for email campaign optimization just yet. Here comes Omniture. They have a bunch of products and services that can optimize your entire campaign from clicking on the email to A/B Split tests. Which is great, but the only draw back is that you have to pay for their services. I read in their case studies, that Stub Hub used their recommendation engine in one of their emails to their customers and increased the performance of their website by 600%! Wow! That’s a lot of money!

SiteSpect

Have you ever tried to optimize a client or affiliate’s website, but received little if not any help from their Web Development team? There was no hope for you until now… along comes SiteSpect. With SiteSpect, you don’t need their lazy Web Dev team! SiteSpect uses a proxy server that sits inbetween the DNS and your website. Instead of pointing your URL at your server, point it at SiteSpect. Now you can make changes to the site – on the site in real time. You can design an optimization experiment quickly without waiting for someone to upload your code. That will definitely save you time and money!

Remember, Optimization is ongoing. Always try to be optimizing your websites. If you try one tool, and it doesn’t work for you, try another. The only way you will find a tool that benefits you the most, is if you try them all. So, what are you waiting for? Get Started