Many business owners believe that SEO strategies, content updates, and social media management are ephemeral concerns, especially if they’re not used for online audience interactions. It can be difficult to understand the big picture and see the impact such marketing efforts have on the bottom line.

This is where analytics tools come in. These solutions should be powerful enough to pull details from all aspects of your company’s online presence, then present the data as a meaningful story. Businesses that rely on marketing analytics have a better sense of their audience and the campaigns that will work.

For example, social media analytics can help you identify the best posting times for your fans and followers. These are the peak times that ensure customer engagement, when viewers decide to hit the share or retweet buttons.

You can leverage the power of marketing metrics by exploring the four types of analytics tools below.

1. Website traffic and engagement

This is the bread and butter of online metrics: How many people are visiting your website, are they engaging with your content, and how long are they staying?

Google Analytics is the most popular tool that companies use to keep tabs on website traffic and engagement. While Google’s free service is great for initial data-gathering efforts, you also need to examine usability and interaction.

Heat-map software can help you identify key areas of your website that customers are attracted to or avoiding. Heat-map tools like Crazy Egg can give you a visual representation of the areas people click the most often, the glitches that waste time, and the content that snags audience attention.

2. Social media tracking

Your small business might be posting on social media multiple times a day, but how do you know when it’s effective? What if you could identify the most successful types of posts, engagement times, and network influencers within a single report?

If you could, you would be in a position to replicate successful post types and abandon the kinds of content that aren’t helping you.

Several social media platforms have their own built-in features or apps that are designed to give you analytics feedback. Take Facebook Insights, for example: This mobile app was designed specifically with marketers in mind.

Free tools like Social Mention and the HootSuite trial will enable you to fine-tune your content strategies, by showing you what’s trending and displaying limited metrics.

3. Click metrics

Clicks are among the most concrete indicators of engagement and conversion. If you can identify how many people clicked on the links in an advertisement, you can gain valuable knowledge about the success of the campaign.

These clicks can then be traced back to actual revenue, so you can calculate the ROI of your efforts.

Click metrics tend to be spread out over various systems. For example, your email campaign management software might have a click analytics tool that shows how many people have actually opened your company newsletter, and how many clicked through to your webpage.

Your social media metrics software probably measures the same thing for your social network posts.

Free tools like bit.ly can help you track metrics for custom campaigns during marketing tests. Additionally, bit.ly shortens URLs that take up valuable space in social media posts.

Let’s say you want to test the effectiveness of two different social media campaigns. You can paste one unique Bit.ly URL into ads for Test A, then paste a different Bit.ly URL into the ads for Test B.

Once the campaigns are finished, log onto your Bit.ly account to see which test gained the most clicks!

4. Customer feedback

So you’ve got a firm grasp on your website content, engagement rates, social media analytics, and click rates. But you’re still not sure how customers actually feel about your website, your products, and services.

What if there’s a feature that irritates a majority of your users, but no one has brought it to your attention? You can track usability issues and customer service concerns by employing helpdesk services to collect customer feedback data.

Brief surveys and customer service calls can reveal major opportunities for growth and improvement. Providing these channels can give your customers a way to connect directly with your company, which will reduce the amount of unregulated feedback that pops up on third-party review sites when people search for your company.

There’s no doubt that metrics are driving current online business decisions and efforts. Don’t get left in the dust; work with your marketing team to invest in sound website, social media, and customer feedback analytic tools.

They will help you become more mindful of your audience and its needs.