As technology continues to evolve, it’s necessary for companies to update and create new innovative user acquisition strategies. Growth engineering requires equal parts marketing, technology, and creativity, which is why the best toolboxes are diverse and always changing.
Although a growth engineer’s toolbox is never complete, the following nine tools are a great starting place:
1. FullContact
As a cloud-based contact management solution, FullContact’s People API pulls data including location, gender, job title, and social profiles—from over 100 sources. With just an email address, you can gain comprehensive contact information and insight into your users’ demographics.
2. Facebook Custom Audiences
Because you can target ads based on users’ email addresses and phone numbers, Custom Audiences are particularly useful in connecting with users whose contact information you’ve already acquired elsewhere (especially offline). This approach can be helpful not just for converting new customers, but also energizing those who haven’t engaged with you in a while.
3. Moz
Using Moz’s free tools, anyone can access SEO metrics and track social media performance. Pro members have access to advanced research tools like Fresh Web Explorer, Rank Tracker, On-page Grader, Keyword Difficulty & SERP Analysis, and Crawl Test. These will ensure that you’re delivering the most relevant content in the most effective way and increasing your presence in search engines.
4. Similarweb
Similarweb, a freemium web ranking and competitive analysis tool, provides performance statistics about your competitors, including website ranking, analysis of traffic sources, leading referring sites, top keywords, and geographic breakdown. After you’ve studied your competitors, you can improve and update your strategy to help you make smarter ad investments.
5. Whatrunswhere
This is another tool that leverages your competitors’ data, Whatrunswhere tells you which ad placements have been successful. You’ll be able to spend your ad dollars wisely once you’ve observed what has worked for others.
6. Clicktale, Crazyegg, & Inspectlet
While analytics provide invaluable data, visual maps of user behavior from Clicktale, Crazyegg, and Inspectlet can be instrumental in making sense of those numbers. Observe your users’ behavior through video playback and heat mapping—including scroll maps, eye tracking, click tracking, and mouse tracking. Some packages even offer analytics integration and segmentation based on traffic source, device type, and so on.
7. Segment.io
Segment.io, an API that controls other analytics tools, collects the data from your various websites and apps and passes it on to your analytics services. This will allow you to store, process, and query the raw logs of all your data in one place. This is a quick and painless way to switch between services without changing a line of code.
8. Geckoboard
Geckoboard is another great option to streamline data from multiple services. This service aggregates, teases out important numbers, and displays them in simple status boards that are easy to read in a quick glance.
9. RJMetrics
Like Geckoboard, RJMetrics pulls data from various sources in a simple, easy-to-understand dashboard. In addition to summarizing, RJMetrics offers advanced analysis—including customer lifetime value, cohort analysis, and segmentation. With all of this information, you can build updated charts based on any variable and create dashboards for team members, investors, or anyone else.
Because of the wide scope of growth engineering, this short, but essential list can help you collect, analyze, and act on all the data that are crucial to growing your business. Which tools do you consider essential to your growth engineering tool box?