Running a website requires a lot of work and attention from the webmaster. A lot of things can go wrong at any minute, and someone has to be there to fix them. From the software on the server and the scripts that power the site to the database and monetization methods – everything requires at least some kind of maintenance; otherwise it will not last long.
On the front end of the site, you need to constantly be aware of how the site is doing in terms of traffic, user retention, subscriptions and of course monetization, along with many other less important things. You always need to find ways to improve the number of people that visit your site, the number of first time visitors that like it and become permanent readers by subscribing to your RSS or email newsletter and the amount of money you make per click, view, lead or sale.
Without adequate traffic, no site will ever take off, no matter how good it is. Without regular readers, the site will always be at risk of failing, as you’ll strongly depend on search engines and other sites to send you traffic. And without income, a site will not be able to sustain itself – who wants a property which requires constant investments and doesn’t provide anything in return?
Taking care of all of the above things seems like hard work, especially for a single webmaster. Thankfully, nowadays there are a lot of advanced tools that can significantly improve the speed and quality with which you take care of this stuff, as well as automate the most mundane tasks that have to be performed regularly. Here are some of the best:
Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the go-to service for all of your web analytics needs. It is completely free and allows you to track probably the biggest amount of data and variables on your site. You can view almost anything you want – from the usual visitors and page views to downloads of certain files, clicks on ads and banners, time spent on various pages and other things.
Also, as the service is provided by Google, they have decided to let you track the ranking of your pages for any keywords you want, in real time, which is very impressive and very useful (for example, you can easily and quickly decide which keywords you want to focus on and rank on the first page next). The interface is very nice, and the graphs allow you to easily analyze large amounts of information that will help you decide what to do next.
DoubleClick for Publishers. Formerly called Google Ad Manager, this tool is invaluable for any website. Not many people know about it, and even fewer know that it is also completely free for small and medium sized web sites. What it allows you to do is automate the delivery display of various ads and banners on different pages based on a variety of factors.
You can use it for your advertising and monetization purposes in a lot of creative ways, from simple ad delivery and advertiser billing to managing hundreds of banners targeted by page views, geo location, user computer settings and other things. The tool is much like OpenX, which you may have heard of, but is not self-hosted and therefore, removes the need for maintenance and high server processing power.
CrazyEgg. Along with the 2 tools above, CrazyEgg completes the trio of “absolutely must have” tools for any self-respecting web site owner that wants to know what’s going on with his site and how he can improve it. This tool lets you see where exactly do visitors click the most, so that you can place whatever you want to be clicked more often there. You can use it to easily increase your banner and ad click through rates by orders of magnitude at times, increase the number of subscribers to your email list or do anything else that will benefit your site.
