Web analytics is a powerful software that have the ability to give you insights about your website’s traffic, behavior and engagement. It is also a bundle of various web statistics tools in one package. Web analytics tools is a best practice for businesses looking to increase conversions, leads and sales. WAT can discover user behavior so you can customize your offerings in line with the preferences of your target audience. With the right set of data in hand, you will also be able to prioritize which features to add or improve on your CMS platform.
In this post I’ve put together a list of best web analytics software from all types available from simple free tools to paid enterprise solutions. Just install any of these top web analytics software free and get started.
Wix Analytics
Wix Analytics is a great option for people looking for general website performance metrics as well as those looking for in-depth insights. It provides information on traffic trends and enables you to drill down using a myriad of metrics with its comprehensive reports. Wix Analytics gives you the wherewithal to understand where your website visitors come from, how they get to your site, which site pages they dwell on and more. You can also get insights on your top customers, analyze your revenue, and understand traffic trends which can help you optimize your strategy and ultimately grow your business.
The highlight of this tool is it’s ease of use and natural site integration. First, it’s free and automatically available on all Wix user’s dashboards. Also, users can quickly view their key metrics using the Analytics widget that is embedded directly on their dashboard overview and can get alerts sent to them when there are important changes in website trends.
Perhaps most importantly, since Wix Analytics is connected with the Wix website builder, it can provide a complete picture of your website and point to specific areas for improvement. Backed with the knowledge of the ins and outs of websites and online businesses, this tool is able to provide important figures like in depth sales data, site interactions and blog engagement that can all be accessed in pre-made reports. It is therefore the recommended tool for those looking to truly boost their business.
Pricing: Free | Customizable reports: $35/ month
Good for: Wix website owners that are looking for a free and comprehensive analytics tool with an easy-to-use interface.
Crazy Egg (crazyegg.com) – $9-$99/month
In short, Crazy Egg allows you to build heat maps and track your visitors every click based on where they are specifically clicking within your website which is a long way of saying that you’re exploring your website’s usability. It allows you to really see what parts of your site users are finding most interesting and clicking on the most. It can help you to improve your website design and in essence conversion. Setup is quite simple as well, and their 30-day money back guarantee on all accounts is a nice touch.
Compete (compete.com) – Prices vary
Perhaps best known for publishing the approximate number of global visitors to the web’s top one million websites, Compete is a great complimentary tool to clickstream analytics offerings. Compete gives you creative intelligence on what your competitors are doing or how your users ended up on your website in the first place (what their clicks were both before and after). There is a free offering that includes traffic volume data. But where Compete is different is in their search analytics, a paid service that lets you track what keywords are sending users both to your website and to your competitors.
“The deeper digital insights you have, the better understanding you have of your customer,” says Aaron Smolick, senior director of marketing at Compete. “By using Compete products, you will have all of the information that you need to make educated decisions to optimize your online campaign, increase market share and dominate the competition.
GRAPE WEB STATISTICS
If you’ve got some programming experience, Grape Web Statistics is an open source analytics tool that was designed primarily for web developers. The simple interface takes into consideration how overwhelming Google Analytics can be and offers the basic statistics with a high level of accuracy. This does mean Grape Web Statistics misses some of the more advanced features found in the other tools we’ve mentioned.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t use them. If you have experience with developing in PHP or are at least adept with HTML, you can customize Grape Web Statistics to make the software meet all your needs. And therein lies the tool’s charm. If you’re happy with the basics, you won’t get distracted by the more advanced options. On the other hand, if you want some of the advanced features but not certain others, you can add those you need. Because Grape Web Statistics is open source rather than merely another free-to-use tool, you can use it as a foundation on which to build the web analytics tool you want and need. The essential features that are already present include tracking unique and total visits.
Theoretically, Grape Web Statistics works on any operating system (OS) but has only been officially tested on Windows and Linux. It does require that JavaScript is enabled on your OS and that you use PHP 4.3 or higher (anything below 5.6 is obsolete in any case) and MySQL 4 or greater. The main reason cited for JavaScript being a requirement is to prevent bots from wreaking havoc with Grape Web Statistics’ analysis.
HEAP ANALYTICS
Heap Analytics is a tool with a focus on user friendliness. You’ll be able to set it up with ease, allowing you to track important activity on your site without requiring any technical experience. Other than installing the tracking code onto your site, Heap works entirely on a point-and-click interface rather than using menus and settings tabs. If you want to create custom events, you can just click directly on the buttons and forms on your site and tell Heap what it is you want the tool to track for those elements.
Heap also automatically tracks monitors activity on your website (or websites if you have more than one!), analyzing it and generating a list of the most frequent events. This flexibility allows you to label and classify the activity as you wish. Heap will even do so retroactively—so if you decide to start tracking a new event, the tool will also give you statistics for that type of activity dating back to the moment the tracking code was installed.
The web analytics tool is remarkably easy to setup and use, no matter your level of expertise. It’s the exact opposite of Google Analytics regarding usability, cutting out the overwhelming stream of endless statistics and multiple screens. Heap has been designed in such a way as to actively encourage you to set up tracking and reports that will be genuinely useful based on your requirements. The Basic package is free to use and is an excellent way to start off if your site is still small and you want to test to the tool. For larger sites (or when your small site grows), you can upgrade to the Premium package. Pricing is customized according to your specific needs. The Premium package also comes with a 14-day free trial.
PaveAI
If you’ve used Google Analytics at any length, you’ve probably seen line after line of referrer spam showing up in your reports.
Many people aren’t even aware that spammers and their evil bots are visiting their websites and falsely driving up page views by hiding in the traffic reports.
PaveAI removes this “fake web traffic” from your analytic reports, thereby giving you a clear view of your traffic levels.
It works in conjunction with Google Analytics and uses the Management API to continually add new filters once referrer spam is detected.
Cost: Free
Conclusion:
Web analytics can often be a confusing subject for many business owners, but they shouldn’t be. The truth is there are a lot of free and low-cost solutions out there to help you optimize your website and online presence. Since the beginning of the Internet, statistics have been an important tool for online marketers. The problem is that at first, analytics tracking was too difficult for beginners. Nowadays it’s much easier to use web analytics software. All you need to do is find the perfect analytics tool for your business.