Choosing any of the web analytics tools can be challenging. There are many SaaS analytics packages out there, and it’s difficult to know which one is the right one for you. This article will take you through some of the best web analytics tools on the market so that you can make an informed choice as to which tool you should use with your website.
You open up your web analytics tool and see a list of numbers or data that you don’t initially understand — what do you do? Learn how to use all the cool features of your favorite analytics tool, that’s what! Whether it’s Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst or Piwik, we all need to understand the metrics these tools gather — even if we only use 10% of the features.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytic platforms across the Internet. For new bloggers and site owners, it’s a great way to understand how your readers are interacting with your content. In this post, we’ll review several web analytics tools to help you discover new insights, save time and learn how to track your online marketing efforts.
Web Analytics: Why You Need It
- Monitoring your website’s visitor interaction is the purpose of web analytics software. Under this heading, they engage in activities and behaviours. You will have access to a wealth of valuable information and data if you understand how users interact with your website, which will help you to improve the user experience, maximize conversions, and optimize content.
- Website owners likely have some clear objectives in mind. With visitor data, you can set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks for the site to make these goals measurable. If your website is meeting those standards, you can use your web analytics platform to track visitor activity.
- With an analytics platform, you can identify what is working and what needs improvement. Achieving your goals is easier this way.
- Analytic platforms such as Google Analytics are popular worldwide. There are, however, limitations. Analytic platforms from Google are heavily focused on SEO and Adwords. Nonetheless, this solution isn’t so strong when it comes to performing other types of analysis.
- Google Analytics’ free version samples your data by session. In other words, Google analyzes a subset of all data before drawing conclusions about the entire dataset. Sampling data may miss important information at the user and segment levels.
A web analytics platform should take many factors into account. Cross-referencing your business objectives with the feature set is particularly important. You should be able to analyse your metrics multiple ways with your analytics platform. You may need features such as heatmaps and virtual session recordings if you want to closely monitor the customer journey.
Google Analytics
Free plan
It’s no surprise that Google Analytics is the world’s most popular web analytics platform. Websites can use its free and paid tools to better understand their customers and their behavior. Any industry, whether travel, healthcare, retail, or any other, can use Google Analytics to see how customers interact with your content.
Small and medium enterprises can use Google Analytics free. There are tons of useful features in the free plan, including data analysis, reporting, data collection and management, integrations, and more. The Google Marketing Platform also offers a paid premium version called Google Analytics 360, perfect for larger enterprises.
With Google Analytics, users can benefit from sophisticated machine learning. By analyzing analytics data, you can measure conversions, examine user sessions, and transfer them into Smart Goals. Your website will benefit from Smart Goals when it comes to bids, ads, and conversions. As a result of artificial intelligence processing your data, you will know which users are most likely to convert.
You can also manipulate, monitor, and filter data using funnel analysis, segmentation, dashboard monitoring, and other methods to get the most out of it.
Key features
- Get a complete insight into your business’ performance, and get all your questions answered.
- Detailed reports on how customers interact with your site and apps.
- Access multiple data points and organize your data through filtering, manipulation, and segmenting tools.
- Easily import data from third-party sources and control user access with Google Analytics.
- Analytic tools provide valuable information that can be used to configure your website and apps.
- Integration with other Google solutions is easy.
Free Plan
- No charge
Google Analytics 360
- $150,000 per year
Chartbeat
The Chartbeat software suite analyzes publisher content. With over 60,000 media brands on board, it targets publishers and media companies.
The analytics dashboards on Chartbeat are focused on reader engagement as a publishing platform. By identifying their readership’s topics and content, media brands can improve their content.
With Chartbeat, you can test headlines, images, and on-page content after you write it. Visitors can become loyal readers by maximizing engagement.
There is no public pricing for Chartbeat. A Chartbeat demo is available on the company’s website.
Key features
- With Chartbeat’s real-time dashboard, businesses can track how users reach their content and how they interact with it.
- Historical dashboard — it provides a long-term view of your audience’s activity, such as page views and average engagement minutes.
- Reports are automated and emailed daily with breakdowns and visualizations.
- Real-time heads-up display – displays traffic and other information on your home page or landing page.
- The headline testing feature tests what kinds of headlines are most effective in getting people to click on and read online content.
Basic plan
- Price upon request
Plus plan
- Price upon request
Premium plan
- Price upon request
Clicky
With Clicky, website owners can monitor their traffic in real-time in real-time for more than 1,300,00 websites. By generating heatmaps for individual visitors rather than collections of users, Clicky differentiates itself from competing analytics platforms by being able to generate heatmaps for individual visitors. Typically, this level of functionality is only available in dedicated heatmap tools, rather than in broader analytics platforms that are equipped with heatmap functionality.
There is an emphasis on individual visitors in the Clicky dashboard, which displays information about everyone who visits your site, including their demographics and other key metrics. The information that you collect includes the location of your visitors, the referral source they came from, the amount of time they spent on each page, and the actions they took at your site.
It is free to use Clicky for up to 3,000 page views on a single website. You can also choose from a number of paid plans if you want to monitor multiple websites, or if your website receives a large number of page views on a regular basis.
Key features
- Using an API – the analytics API allows for the easy extraction, analysis, and storage of website data in a variety of formats.
- The bounce rate is one of the most helpful metrics for website owners because it carries out a detailed analysis of how much time your visitors spent on your website.
- It is possible to receive detailed reports about the most active pages on the site, as well as the downloads from the page, as well as video and audio activity from each page.
- You can use heatmaps to see where your users are clicking as they navigate through your site.
- Using Twitter analytics, you will be able to monitor all mentions of your account, your website, or anything else that is mentioned on Twitter related to you.
Free plan
- No charge
Pro plan
- $9.99/month
- $119.99/year
Pro Plus
- $14.99/month
- $119.99/year
Pro Platinum
- $19.99/month
- $159.99/year
Custom plan
- Pricing tailored to your needs
Hotjar
Over 550k websites rely on Hotjar to analyze their visitors’ behavior as well as to optimize their conversion rates. Moreover, it provides heatmap analysis, conversion funnel analytics, and the ability to record virtual sessions for the purpose of improving the website’s user experience.
There are several benefits that can be derived from recording these sessions, and one of them is that you can gain an understanding of why visitors perform certain actions on your website. By using this information, digital marketers, UX designers, and web developers will be able to optimize your conversion rate, as well as improve the overall user experience of your website.
A major advantage of Hotjar is that it is designed specifically to be used alongside Google Analytics, unlike other analytics platforms. If a landing page is not converting, for example, you can use Google Analytics to identify whether it’s underperforming, such as driving a very low level of conversions to the page. It is possible to use Hotjar to capture session recordings that give an overview of the actions visitors are taking on a particular landing page by using Hotjar. In this way, you will be able to find out why this page is underperforming and take steps to rectify it in the future. The tool can also be used to view the experiments that have been done through Google Optimize
As long as you visit 2,000 pages a day, Hotjar is free to use. It is also possible to subscribe to a paid plan that starts at $39 a month.
Key features
- Use heatmaps to see how visitors navigate your site, where they click, and how far they scroll.
- Real-time visitor recordings let you see the site from a user’s point of view, so you can improve it based on their experience.
- Visitors leave your site at various points in the conversion funnel.
- Visitors can respond to feedback polls so you can improve their experience on your site.
- Visitor feedback – incoming feedback allows visitors to give site feedback.
Free plan
- No charge
Plus plan
- $39 per/month
Business plan
- Starting from $99/month
Agency plan
- Individual prices are set
Open Web Analytics
The Open Web Analytics (OWA) platform tracks all of the usual metrics you’d expect from an analytics platform for web traffic. This includes the number of referral sites, the number of page views, and the number of unique visitors. Additionally, OWA can provide heatmaps for each visitor, so that they may be able to monitor their click-stream.
It is possible to gain a deep understanding of how visitors interact with your pages by using information such as these details provided by OWA. In particular, you can use this tool to map out the paths and actions that visitors perform before officially becoming conversions. You can then use this information to boost your conversion rates.
OWA also offers ecommerce tracking. This makes it a good choice for online store owners who are looking for a free, open-source analytics platform. Plus, if you’re concerned about privacy, you can use OWA while retaining full control over your data, since this analytics platform doesn’t share any of its information with third parties.
Crazy Egg
With Crazy Egg you can monitor and analyze your conversion rates for your website. Crazy Egg is a tool that can help you optimize your website. By using this tool, you will be able to see how your visitors are interacting with your content, including tracking their cursor movements and recording the areas where they click on.
There is a lot of value in being able to understand the content that is driving interaction and the content that is holding back visitor engagement. It is possible to then use this information in order to optimize your web pages in order to be able to engage your visitors as much as possible.
A/B testing and funnel analysis are also included in Crazy Egg. The information in this document can be helpful to marketers and web designers who are looking to improve the user experience and boost the conversion rate of their websites.
Prices for Crazy Egg start at $24 per month, which is a very reasonable price. Each plan is billed on an annual basis, so please take note of that.
Key features
- Through heatmaps and scroll maps, clients can track user activity on a page, their clicks, how far they scroll, how they view the CTA, and other information.
- You can gain a better understanding of user behavior by capturing digital snapshots of heatmaps and scrollmaps.
- Users’ entire sessions recorded for better understanding.
- Test heatmaps and session recordings using A/B testing.
- Demo dashboard – potential clients can see a demo version of the Crazyegg dashboard.
Basic plan
- $24/month
Standard plan
- $49/month
Plus plan
- $99/month
Pro plan
- $249/month
Custom plan
- Depending on your requirements, we can offer you a price
Matomo
Using the Matomo tool, you can measure website traffic as well as user behavior on the website. As this is an open source application, you can host it on your own server or install it on your own WordPress installation. There is no limit to how much flexibility you can achieve this way.
The most notable features of this application are the goal conversion tracking, the event tracking, and the A/B testing. As a side note, it’s important to note that Matomo doesn’t employ data sampling in order to analyze data. As a result, it is able to provide high levels of accuracy for your data regardless of the amount of traffic your website receives.
Even Matomo comes with dedicated ecommerce reporting features which allow you to pinpoint exactly what actions and traffic sources lead to successful sales and identify the specific actions that result in those sales. It is for this reason that online store owners find it to be a very popular choice.
It is not possible to find out Matomo’s pricing on their website. A free 21-day trial is also available, so you can sign up for a free trial to get more information directly from the company.
Key features
- This feature allows users to see the entire history of actions taken by visitors to your site, such as their locations, devices, browsers, time on the site, entry and exit patterns, and more.
- The session recording allows website owners to see how their website appears to visitors, and to view how many clicks it takes to navigate to certain sections.
- Marketing channel attribution models estimate success.
- Import historical Google Analytics data into Matomo.
- In roll-up reporting, data from multiple sites and apps is aggregated.
- Keywords for SEO – maximization of SEO efforts.
- View visitor scrolling patterns, click locations, and more with heatmaps.
Cloud hosting Essential plan
- $19/month
Cloud hosting Business plan
- $29/month
Cloud hosting Enterprise plan
- Price upon request
Matomo on-premise
- Free download
Matomo for WordPress
- No charge
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics allows you to see and analyze your website’s traffic in real-time, as a result of which you will gain valuable insight into the traffic on your site. There are various sources of data that can be collected with this powerful multichannel analytics tool, including the web, voice, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
It is possible to segment your visitors into different groups based on the behavior they are demonstrating on your website once you have collected this data using Adobe Analytics. Additionally, Adobe uses machine learning and predictive algorithms to deliver even more sophisticated insights to its customers. Identifying trends that lead to successful conversions can help you identify what makes your conversions successful. The ability to combine web analytics capabilities with digital marketing capabilities makes Adobe Analytics one of the most popular choices among marketers today.
There is no price information published by Adobe regarding its products. On the website, you can request a free demo of Adobe Analytics if you would like to learn more about it.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a software platform that provides detailed behavioral analytics that make it possible to automate customer engagement. In this context, we have real-time analytics, conversion tracking, customer journey analysis, visualization of data, and segmentation of data.
In terms of its applicability to the world of e-commerce, Kissmetrics is particularly suited. The Kissmetrics insights can be used by any online store owner to optimize their sales funnels, and convert casual visitors into loyal customers by implementing Kissmetrics’ metrics.
Kissmetric is not only a platform that provides analytics, but it is also a platform for automating email campaigns. In other words, you can use the insights provided by the tool to create targeted email campaigns. The purpose of this is to help you sell more to your existing customers, thus increasing the Customer Lifetime Value of your customers.
There is also an analysis of Return on Investment (ROI) provided by Kissmetrics. In the case of ecommerce stores, this can be a useful tool in identifying the best customers. Once you have identified those big spenders, you can then create email campaigns that are targeted specifically at them.
A Kissmetrics license costs between $299 and $499 per month, depending on what package you choose. As well as this, it offers separate plans for Software as a Service (SaaS) and e-commerce customers.
SEMrush
A web analytics tool such as SEMrush places a strong focus on SEO in its analyses of user traffic on pages. Using its tools, you will be able to assess and improve the on-page, off-page, and technical SEO of your website with the help of its wide range of features.
Furthermore, SEMrush also comes with everything you could possibly need in order to identify relevant and high-traffic keywords that you can then use to improve your search engine rankings by focusing on them. You will be happy to discover that SEMrush’s analytics aren’t only restricted to your own website when you use it. Using the tools contained on the SEMrush dashboard, you will be able to spy on your rivals in real time.
This tool can be really useful for you if you are looking for information on what keywords your competitors are using in their advertisements, organic or paid searches, and linking strategies. It is for this reason that SEMrush is considered to be a powerful SEO and marketing solution by most agencies.
A monthly subscription to SEMrush ranges between $119.95 and $449.95, according to the company’s website. The software is also available for a seven-day free trial period.
Summary
Among the top platforms for web analytics, Google Analytics is one of the biggest, and it has a great deal of features to offer that make it one of the most useful. It is easy to get a detailed analysis of all your data and reports by using Google Analytics, as well as tracking your social media sites and applications, as well as learning what your visitors are doing at all times while on your site, just to name a few things. It is absolutely free of charge for all of this to be provided to you.
In conclusion, If you’re serious about growing your site, you can’t ignore web analytics. At the same time, you don’t want to be spending all of your time analysing data and manually manipulating it. That’s why we recommend the Google Analytics dashboard and Content Experiments. With just a few clicks per day, these tools will give you more valuable insights into how your users engage with your site than you can imagine, and they’ll help you take action based on those insights.