There are many different analytics tools that will help you analyze your website traffic. Some of these tools, like Google Analytics, are free while others charge a fee. Choosing the right web analytics tool is essential for understanding how your website is performing.
Here is a list of the top ten web analytics tools to consider using for your websites.
Adobe Analytics
What it is: traffic analytics and multichannel data collection tool from Adobe
What it’s used for: an enterprise alternative to Google Analytics
Price: on request
4% of experts surveyed use Adobe Analytics. As an enterprise alternative to Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics is a specialist analytics tool, offering multichannel data collection spanning web, voice, OTT (over-the-top), and IoT (Internet of Things). The focus is on machine learning and predictive algorithms for advanced insights.
Mixpanel
What it is: advanced product and business analytics platform
What it’s used for: tracking customer behavior and KPIs across websites and mobile apps
Price: from free for 1,000 monthly tracked users
Another 4% of the analytics experts we surveyed use Mixpanel. Unlike traffic analytics tools, Mixpanel is designed to help SaaS and website owners get real-time data insights into how people interact with a product.
Matomo
What it is: free and open-source traffic analytics
What it’s used for: measuring website traffic and user behavior
Price: from free for self-hosted users
Used by 2% of polled experts, Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) is a privacy-focused free analytics platform. You can self-host Matomo on your own server or WordPress installation, or pay for a cloud account.
Statcounter
What it is: web traffic analytics
What it’s used for: tracking website traffic, sessions, pageviews, and real-time visitors
Price: from free for 500 pageviews
2% of analytics professionals in our survey use Statcounter. Data-points on the latest 500 pageviews are available for free, or users can upgrade to a premium account for more features, including landing page analysis and paid traffic tracking.
Yandex Metrica
What it is: free all-in-one website analytics from Russian search engine Yandex
What it’s used for: traffic metrics and user behavior data
Price: free
Another 2% of polled experts use Yandex Metrica as their web analytics tool of choice. Unlike GA, Yandex Metrica offers unsampled data, even at high traffic volumes. Yandex Metrica also includes behavior analytics tools, including session replays, click maps, and scroll heatmaps.
Amplitude
What it is: product intelligence.
What it’s used for: tracking product usage, user behavior, and funnel conversions
Price: from free for up to 10 million actions per month
1% of our polled analytics users chose Amplitude. Unlike GA, Amplitude is focused on tracking user experience and offers advanced features like behavior cohorting, and persona and user profile data.
Baidu Analytics
What it is: traffic analytics from Chinese search engine Baidu
What it’s used for: recording website visitors, traffic sources, and conversions
Price: from free
Another 1% of our 2000+ analytics experts use Baidu Analytics (also known as Baidu Tongji). Baidu Analytics offers standard traffic analytics data, integrates with Baidu’s PPC platform (Baidu Tuiguang) to provide ad performance metrics, and shows organic search keyword data from Baidu’s search engine.
HubSpot
What it is: marketing platform and sales analytics software
What it’s used for: measuring traffic, managing leads, email automation, and conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Price: from $40/month
Used by 1% of polled analytics professionals, Hubspot is an all-in-one customer lifecycle analytics tool. Hubspot has a lot of functionality, from landing page creation to social media mention tracking, email performance measurement, and lead nurturing.
Google Analytics
What it is: traffic analytics tool from Google
What it’s used for: analyzing website traffic, users, bounce rates, goal conversions, and real-time visitor count
Price: free
74% of the 2000+ analytics professionals we surveyed use Google Analytics (GA). This didn’t surprise us, since GA is by far the market leader in the web analytics space, used on at least 30 million websites according to BuiltWith. GA is free for everyone, but data sampling will occur at high volumes unless you pay for Google 360.
Yahoo Web Analytics (web.analytics.yahoo.com) – Free
Once you’ve mastered Google Analytics, Yahoo’s similar offering gives you a little more depth in your surveying. It offers better access control options and a simpler approach to multi-site analytics, raw and real time data collection (unlike Google, you can import cost of goods data), visitor behavior and demographics reports and customized options as well. Yahoo Analytics is a bit of a step up from Google in terms of profiling, filtering and customization, so for those looking to dig a little deeper, it’s a great option.
-Recommended by Whitmore, Bustos, Eisenberg
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.
-Recommended by Whitmore and Dershewitz
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.
-Recommended by Dershewitz, Eisenberg and Levy
Optimizely (optimizely.com) – $19-$399/month
A relatively new service (launched in June 2010), Optimizely is simple to use but its results can be quite powerful. In essence, it’s an easy way to measure and improve your website through A/B testing. As a business, you can create experiments with the site’s very easy-to-use visual interface. The beautiful thing about this service is that you need absolutely zero coding or programming background, as the tools are easy for anyone to use.
-Recommended by Whitmore and Eisenberg
Spring Metrics.
Spring Metrics has taken the analytics tool and made it simpler. You don’t have to be a professional data-miner to get the answers to your questions. You get real-time conversion analytics, top converting sources, keyword analytics, landing-page analysis, e-mail performance reports and simple point-and-click configuration. Unlike Google Analytics, Spring Metrics tracks a visitor’s path through your website from the time he landed to the time he left. All of this is included in Spring Metrics’ Standard Plan for $49 a month. When you first sign up, you get to try it free for 14 days. The simplicity of this tool has a lot of website owners switching over from Google Analytics.
Woopra.
Woopra is another tool that offers real-time analytics tracking, whereas Google Analytics can take hours to update. It is a desktop application that feeds you live visitor stats, including where they live, what pages they are on now, where they’ve been on your site and their Web browser. You also have the ability to chat live with individual site visitors. This can be a great feature for your e-commerce site to interact with customers. Woopra offers a limited freebie plan as well as several paid options.Sign up to stay ahead with our once-a-week Newsletter, Business Class: The Brief. Expect handpicked insights and inspiration for small businesses – straight to your inbox.SubscribeBy providing your e-mail address, you agree to receive the Business Class: The Brief Newsletter from American Express. For more information about how we protect your privacy, please read our Privacy Statement.
Clicky
Clicky also offers a free service if you have only one website and a Pro account for a monthly fee. You get real-time analytics, including Spy View, which lets you observe what current visitors are doing on your site. Clicky’s dashboard is simple to use and presents all the information you want to see clearly. They also have a mobile version that makes it easy for you to check your stats anywhere.
Mint
Mint is an analytics tool that is self-hosted and costs $30 per website. You get the benefit of real-time stats, which you don’t get with the free Google Analytics. You can track site visitors, where they are coming from and what pages they are viewing. And Peppermill, a part of Mint, lets you make any adjustments to make it more compatible for your use with tons of free add-ons.
Chartbeat
Chartbeat lets users get the most from their data with instant information. They keep constant watch on your visitors and what they are doing on your website. This gives you the information you need in order to make the adjustments necessary to your content or design. You get a free month when you sign up and after that plans start at $9.95 per month.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is another analytics tool that allows clients to track the movements of individual visitors throughout their websites. You can see how behaviors change over time, identify patterns and see the most typical and recent referrers, among other stats. It offers a “Timeline View” of visitor activity in an easy-to-understand visual format. You can try this service free for 30 days. Plans start at $149 a month, depending on how many events are tracked.
UserTesting
UserTesting.com is a unique way to gather information about site users. You are paying for a group of participants of your choosing to perform a set of tasks on your site. The user and his activity will be recorded on video. In about an hour, you will have your feedback. You get to hear the actual thoughts of users in your target demographic. The cost is $39 per participant you choose. You may choose anywhere from 1 to 100 testers.
Conclusion
Web analytics tools are an excellent way to find out about your website’s performance. It is important to use web analytics to track all of the traffic on your website. Analytics allow you to see which of your web pages are performing well and which ones are not. You can then decide if you need to make any changes or improvements.