A Collection of Tools that Support Digital Marketer

Because of the nature of the job, digital marketers will have to interact with a variety of channels and perform a variety of tasks from planning, research, execution to reporting. We are also required to be active so that we can handle the work anytime and anywhere. This article aims to synthesize the tools and applications dedicated to Digital Marketers to make your work more flexible, easy and effective.

These tools can be an application or a service web, a browser extension, a software, or a mobile application (Android or iOS). Some widgets are free, some are FREE but features are limited unless paid  (FREEMIUM), some will be charged to use (PREMIUM), some need to be paid but allow TRIAL.

* The tools in this article are organized in accordance to their usage and feature, but that may not be every feature that these tools have. In addition to the main features, there may also have auxiliary features. To see their features in detail, you can look directly at the website of these tools.

Tools supporting market / opponents analysis, market research tools

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. ” – Sun Tzu

Competitor analysis and market research are some of the important tasks of a digital marketing person whether you work in client side or for an agency. The tools in this section not only help you analyze the opponent, but also can analyze the potential customers to better prepare in the process of meeting and contacting customers.

1. Tools for ranking and analyzing website traffic

Source: pinterest

These are the tools that allow users to see how a website is currently performing in terms of traffic, how many it is, and where it comes from. These tools are used when you need to research a competitor. It should be noted that not any service can provide you with accurate information about the traffic of a website so all of this information should be understood only for reference. Below are some of the website traffic ranking tools:

SimilarWeb FREEMIUM
1PageRank FREEMIUM
Alexa FREEMIUM
TrafficEstimate FREE

2. Paid Search Advertising Tools

These tools let you know in which search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) a brand is running ads on and what ad content they use, what are their landing pages and the efficiency of those ads and campaigns. However, most of these tools only support keywords for foreign markets (US, Europe) and not much information for small markets like Vietnam.

SpyFu FREEMIUM
iSpionage FREEMIUM
KeywordSpy FREEMIUM
Adgooroo PREMIUM
Keyword Competitor PREMIUM
The Search Monitor PREMIUM
SEMRush FREEMIUM

3. Display advertising analyzing tools

These tools let you know whether a brand is currently running ads on which display ad channel, or ad network channels, what images they use for advertising, where the ads appear on which websites, and how effective they are, how long they run those ads campaigns? Currently, according to the author, there is only one tool for the Vietnamese market in this segment: iTracker (however long time it see no updates), the rest is not much supportive:

iTracker.vn TRIAL
What Runs Where TRIAL
AdBeat PREMIUM
Moat FREEMIUM
MixRank TRIAL

4. Facebook Advertising Analyzing Tools

These tools tell you how brand is currently running ads on Facebook, what is the ads’ content, design and their engagement, metrics.

Social Ad Ninja PREMIUM
Social Bakers FREEMIUM
Data Rank PREMIUM

Tools supporting Social Marketing

Source: pinterest

Social network is no doubt an effective channel for advertising and interacting with customers, but with the emergence and development of many different social networks, it is not easy to manage all of them easily on both content and advertising, branding, PR. The tools in this section will assist digital marketers in manipulating the social network as a more effective channel.

Tasks

1. Social Network Management Tools

These tools are also known as social management platforms, which support Digital Marketers in managing multiple social network accounts simultaneously by allowing scheduling contents to be published, interacting with followers, and managing the content on a visually clear interface. Some of the best known tools are:

Hootsuite FREEMIUM
Buffer FREEMIUM
SproutSocial TRIAL

2. Social Network Monitoring Tool

These social monitoring tools allow digital marketers to know where their brands are referred to, by whom on social networks, forums, websites, blogs. A few tools also support tracking mentioning the brand on offline media such as newspapers. These tools also support language analysis to assess whether the referrals are positive or negative and provide deeper reports of user behaviors for the brand. There are many different social monitoring tool but below are some of the tools that are available in Vietnam or support Vietnamese:

YouNet PREMIUM
BuzzMetrics PREMIUM
iSentia PREMIUM
Boomerang PREMIUM
SocialOne PREMIUM
TracX PREMIUM
Google Alerts FREE

Tools for measurement, analysis and A / B testing

Source: pinterest

Measuring and analyzing the traffic to your website, researching the interaction of customers on the website, evaluating the effectiveness of the advertising campaign and based on that to make decisions to optimize your work are what digital marketer usually do. And to do this we need the best measurement and analysis tools as well as ones that support A / B testing. Here are some tools for this:

1. Measurement, analysis

Google Analytics FREEMIUM

Google Analytics is the most popular measurement and analytics tool today, and probably everyone knows about it. It has frequent updates, many features, and almost can meet all your daily analytical needs. This tool is free to use unless your website exceeds 10 million sessions a month, then you can consider upgrading to Premium package for $ 150,000 per year. If you have any reason for dissatisfaction with Google Analytics or want to analyze it from another angle and find another solution beside this tool, you can continue reading.

Piwik FREE

Piwik is an easy-to-use, feature-rich, open source measurement tool and is being developed regularly. The difference is probably that Piwik will require you to have server, hosting and technical knowledge if you want to install this tool for the site rather than just install a code like other tools. But it’s not too complicated, or you can use the Cloud package provided by Piwik to skip the installation. Pros? The whole data you collect is yours.

Clicky TRIAL

Clicky is another measurement solution for website. Clicky’s significant advantage is that it provides real-time information, a handy heatmap tool, and the up time monitor feature to let you know when the site is down and measuring traffic for videos is an auxiliary gadgets.

KISSmetrics TRIAL

KISSmetrics is also a measurement and analysis tool, but unlike Google Analytics which is based on sessions, pageviews, the tool is based on events, ie the user interaction performed on the website and who performs it. This is an interesting direction as the fact is that sessions and pageviews do not give you much useful information to take action to improve performance and conversion rates. KISSmetrics is suitable for sales and service websites and is suitable for non-technical marketers thanks to its easy-to-use and user-friendly interface.

Mixpanel TRIAL

Mixpanel is quite similar to KISSmetrics, which is also an event-based measurement tool, but Mixpanel is heavily focused on mobile and to developers and marketers who are technically savvy enough to take full advantage of the tools including A / B testing, survey, push notification.

Appsflyer PREMIUM

Appsflyer is the most popular measurement tool for mobile applications, helping users read information about installs, segmentation for each channel, as well as user behavior within the app.

2. A / B testing tools

These tools allow digital marketer to easily perform A / B testing to improve the website conversion rates by conducting UI / UX experiments. Here are some good A / B testing tools you can try out:

Visual Web Optimization TRIAL
Optimizely FREEMIUM
UnBounce TRIAL
Google Content Experiments FREE

Website supporting tools

Source: pinterest

Website is about a lot of things, is the face of the business, is the gateway to welcome guests, showcase the products, is the portfolio, is your service, etc. A good website not only requires beautiful design, attractive content but also needs to be stable and provides users with comfortable experience. The following tools can help digital marketers find what to improve on the website to provide a better user experience.

Webpagetest.org FREE

Webpagetest.org will help analyze the website you want to track and record the load speed of each file, each element on the web so you can know what factors are slowing down your site load speed and give you a full report of all this information. The report also includes what you can adjust to improve website speed. You can also export this report and download it.

Google Pagespeed Insights FREE

This is Google’s web tool to help users measure and rate the load speed of a website on a scale from 0 to 100 (the higher the faster) based on a number of criteria. After analyzing, this tool will give you some suggestions on how to improve the speed of the web by optimizing the criteria used for the evaluation such as image size, JavaScript, etc. HTML Google Pagespeed Insight not only analyzes the desktop version of the website, but also the mobile version. With the mobile version, this tool will give more comments on the user experience based on criteria such as design, font size, button size, position between buttons, how to arrange the content, etc.

Google Mobile Friendly FREE

This is Google’s web tool to help users know if a website is compatible with mobile devices. This page also includes some information and tips from Google on how to make a mobile website more search-engine friendly. These guidelines are quite detailed and include the vast majority of popular CMS and shows how critical Google is to the importance of increasing the web user experience on mobile devices.

Structured Data Testing Tool FREE

Markup is a part of a website optimization process that helps search engines identify and categorize information on your website clearly and thereby index your website content more effectively. If the markup is done appropriately then sometimes the search engine will display more information for your website when appearing on the search results. This tool allows you to check if your website has any markup attached and if there are errors, it will inform you what is wrong for you to fix.

Validator FREE

The Validator will help you check a website and find all the errors in HTML / CSS, Javascript and then report to you with suggestions on what to do to resolve those errors. Adjusting and fixing all these errors will standardize your website code better and of course help the search engines crawl and index better.

Mobiletest.me FREEMIUM

This tool allows you to quickly check and see quickly how a website displays on different mobile devices. With the free version, you can watch it on some of the available devices. If you pay, you can view it on many different devices with different modes.

Google Tag Manager FREE

A website may have to be attached with various types of tags and code to various tasks such as tracking, analysis, advertising, and sometimes a website can have dozens of tags and code at the same time. Adding too many tags and code on a website without management can slow down the website, reduce the loading speed, affect the user experience, and may even affect security and information. Google Tag Manager is a tool developed by Google to manage all tags and code for a website on a single interface and to improve the stability, load speed and user experience on the web.

W3Techs.com FREE

This tool allows you to technically examine the  website to know what hosting the website is currently using, the specifications of the server, what is the framework, which CMS it is using, the plugin and code are currently running on the website.

Daily Work Support Tools

Source: pinterest

Pablo – Buffer FREE

Pablo allows users to create beautiful and engaging images with a free choice of text content like a designer does in less than a minute. If you ever need to post content to Facebook, but the designer is not available, then you should try Pablo.

Uplevo FREEMIUM

Similar to Buffer, Uplevo is a tool that allows you to quickly and easily create banners to post to Facebook without having to know Photoshop. Uplevo’s features are much more diverse with a variety of templates and images for users to choose from and not just with banner designs for Facebook, but also things like logo, standee, website banner, etc. Uplevo is a product made by a Vietnamese team, so if you like home-made products, try Uplevo.

Bitly FREE

Bitly is a link shortener, which can curtail long links into short, relevant links suitable for being shared on social networks, for branding purposes (or custom URLs), or for advertisements where content length is limited such as SMS, OTT. This tool not only shorten the link but can also track the number of clicks. In addition to Bitly, there is Goo.gl, which is more simple to use, but the tracking ability is not that good.

URL Builder FREE

This is a tool that help you quickly create tracking code for your link. It is often used when you need to generate tracking code to measure the traffic of links through Google Analytics when running ads on different channels.

Ghostery FREE

Ghostery is a browser extension that allows users to see how many tracking codes are currently installed on their website, and what the tracking code is. Users also have the rights to customize for which tracking code is allowed to get access or not.

Web Archive FREE

This tool allows you to review the existence history of any website even if the website has now ceased to exist. It is useful if you want to see the history of a domain or website before deciding to buy it or to dig up information that can not be found in the normal way.

Codeacademy FREE

Codeacademy is a free service that allows users to learn programming languages for free ​​such as HTML / CSS, Javascript, jQuery, PHP, Python, Ruby. The content of the lessons is designed very simply and step by step from basic to help new beginners can still learn by themselves. Codeacademy also automatically saves your entire learning and completion so you can study at any time or pause when needed and resume later when you have time. Codeacademy also offers courses on developing regular website, interactive websites, Command Line as well as third-party API courses and of course they are all free.

NerdyData FREEMIUM

NerdyData Code Search, as its name suggests, is a search engine for code, meaning that instead of indexing and allowing users to search the content of a web page, NerdyData indexes the page’s code and allows the user to see if a specific code exists on a specific page on a website. For example, if you copy and paste the Adsense publisher ID code or the Google Analytics ID code into the search box, then it will show the results of all the existing webpages that contain this code. This tool is quite useful in many cases, mainly for research and analytics:

– You want to find sites that have a common owner or belong to a certain system.

– You are the owner of an affiliate system and you want to know what websites are posting your banner.

– You are looking to find out what websites are using ads technology, which tracking tools, CMS use, etc.

– You do SEO and want to know which website contains link to your website.

… and many other applications.

Mobile applications

Source: pinterest

As a digital marketer, we need to have quick access to information and be able to react quickly and at all times to any kind of work. With the development of smartphones, today almost everyone is carrying on a miniature computer: a cell phone. The following mobile applications can be helpful for you even when you are away from your computer:

Google Analytics (Android) FREE / Google Analytics (iOS) FREE

The Google Analytics mobile version lets you view traffic information and status on your website whenever you want quickly. The mobile app will only aggregate and display basic information, not the filter dimension, to help you see more details. However the information is basically complete if you just want to check it fast. The point is that the interface of this application is not very good.

gAnalytics (Android) FREE / Quicklytics (iOS) FREE

If you do not like the interface of the Google Analytics app by Google, then gAnalytics (Android) or Quicklytics (iOS) is your extra choice.

Facebook Pages Manager (Android) FREE / Facebook Pages Manager (iOS) FREE

With Facebook Pages Manager you can now manage all of your fan pages right on your phone. You can post content or images, respond to messages, view user reports, and receive notifications of new activity on fan pages.

Adwords (Android) FREE

This Adwords app lets you manage your AdWords advertising campaigns by viewing parameters, adjusting the bid prices, turning off campaigns and keyword research right on your phone. If you’re managing AdWords campaigns with large budgets and need frequent monitoring, this is the one you always need on your phone.

Hootsuite (Android) FREEMIUM / Hootsuite (iOS) FREEMIUM

As with its web version, with Hootsuite you can manage many different social network accounts, post content or schedule them to be posted automatically. Similar tools like Buffer and Sproutsocial also have mobile application versions.

Hopefully the tools listed in this article will be useful and help digital marketers better do their day-to-day tasks. Read more for what you need when stepping into the digital marketing. This is the first in a series on the tools and knowledge of the Conversion.vn blog. If you know any interesting and interesting tools, please contribute in the comment section below. The article will also regularly be updated with the latest tools.