Metrics. I love them! I was a math geek in school, so go figure. You can imagine how excited I was to work with KPI (Key Performance Indicators) at one of my corporate gigs. Once I started working with KPI, I wondered why I hadn’t had exposure to them at other jobs. Maybe it was something only discussed among managers, but I fear a worse reality….lack of KPI.

Of course, I’ll never know, but I don’t believe either is good business practice. If you don’t have metrics, how do you know if you are growing and improving in the right ways? And if you don’t communicate your key metrics to staff, how can they get on board to help you achieve desired results?

Alright, enough with the questions and trip down memory lane. Here’s the good stuff: a list of my 4 favourite online tools to measure website metrics, KPI and a few other things that are just good practice if you have a business website (which you should if you have a business, but that’s a whole other rant!)

BDC Website Assessment

I just discovered the Free Website Assessment by BDC today, but I’ve already bookmarked it and added it to my toolkit. Again, you key in your website address and out spits a lengthy, but easy to understand, report about various aspects of your website. Categories it assesses include accessibility for various users, user experience, marketing, popularity, and how well designed and built the site is. They offer up a bit of info on why they assess each item and what might be causing a lower score.

Google Analytics

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Google products, and Analytics is certainly no exception. You do have to set up an account and connect it to your website, but once that’s done, look out! You’ll have so much information about the people visiting your site and how their usage patterns, you won’t know what to do with it all at first! Information ranges from the simplest statistics, like how many people visited my site, to more complex metrics like conversion rates. There certainly are other analytic sites available, and if Google isn’t your thing, then by all means check them out. But it’s pretty much an Internet sin for a website not to be using some form of analytics.

Marketing Grader

Marketing Grader helps you measure and improve your online marketing strategy. All you have to do is punch your website address and you get this wonderfully detailed report. It analyzes some internal website stuff, like your titles, alt tags and other geeky stuff that matters to search engines. And it looks at a whole lot of factors related to social media. If you don’t have a blog, or social media accounts, you will definitely have some holes in your report, but it also offers up links to articles they have written on how to get your score up in any particular area. Caution: this one can get a bit techy.

Sucuri Website Scan

I cannot say enough about Sucuri, but it speaks for itself. Sucuri offers a security check on your website. Find out if your site has been hacked or black-listed, just by typing in the address. If there is a security breach, they have reasonable plans to help you clean up the mess (note: I am not affiliated with them in any way, and don’t benefit from telling you this).

There you have it. Four tools you should check out immediately, if you haven’t already. Oh, and did I mention they are all free? If I missed a metrics monitoring site that you can’t live without, please feel free to mention in below.