Google Analytics is great at collecting quantitative data and displaying it in graphs, histograms, tables and charts. While Google Analytics is very efficient at collecting this information, you might still be missing the contextual detail that Qualitative data gives you.

I have found three key tools that will help you better understand your audience. They mix both quantitative and qualitative data to give you a much more in-depth view of your online visitors.

1. Social Media Monitoring: Social Mention

Social Media Monitoring allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, and your products across social media sites, web-wide. It can help brands with quality control or customer care problems that may have gone unnoticed.

With Social Mention you can see your top social media keywords (useful for SEO and PPC, the latest comments about you or your business, and identify any negative feelings towards you or your brand.

For example, you might have noticed that you are getting less traffic to your site from your brand terms. Social Mention could show you if you’ve had a negative message on a social media site or blog, which you could then attribute that drop in traffic to.

2. Feedback Tool: Kampyle

Kampyle is a fantastic tool that gives you invaluable insights into your online customers. It allows your online visitors to give you feedback on your business, and can even be integrated with Google Analytics.

The Israeli start-up claims that small sites average one to five feedback messages per day, medium sites average 20-30, and large sites average upwards of 50. Kampyle presents the most value to the large sites, which must manage their feedback effectively or lose out to their competitors who are doing this better.

A clever Greasemonkey script even allows you to merge your Kampyle feedback with your Google Analytics data. This gives you invaluable context and often leads to the discovery of problems with web page design.

3. Heat Maps: ClickTale

ClickTale is probably best described as visual Analytics. ClickTale heatmaps allow you to see where your users not only clicked, but also where their mouse went. Even cleverer is the ability to record an individual’s user journey. You can even see how much attention a specific area of a web page gets from your visitors.

ClickTale can be most valuable when you want to see how individual users actually use your website. If you are doing any kind of website testing, my advice would be to try ClickTale first – it will give you an invaluable insight into what is and isn’t currently working.

Using these tools together with Google Analytics will give you a much better, deeper understanding of your customers: Social Mention gives you access to the conversations going on outside of your website, Kampyle allows you to gain insights into what your customers actually think through feedback, and ClickTale can actually show you what your visitors are doing on your website.

Have you got any favourite insights tools that you use with in conjunction with Google Analytics? Share them with us…