While there are a number of tools available to help you improve your online business, one of the most important elements for success is understanding how many visitors your site receives, where they come from, whether they’re new or returning customers, and what actions they take on your website.
You’re the type of businessperson who wants actionable insights from your data. No fancy dashboards and no data visualizations. All you care about is real, actionable insights and advice on how to improve key metrics for your business.
Piwik
Piwik’s free software comes with a caveat: You’re required to download the program and host it on your own server. Piwik offers similar features to other popular analytics programs, including event tracking, visitor maps, and keyword search, but what sets it apart from its competitors is its mobile app and unlimited data storage.
The Piwik dashboard is rather involved, which can be either a pro or con depending on how much time you want to put in. The setup also requires some patience and the ability to install the necessary tags on your website. Once you get comfortable with Piwik, however, you can customize it to your liking, since the dashboard is full of widgets that can be arranged for most analytical needs.
The most distinct features include “row evolution,” which allows you to hover your mouse over any link or event, click on the graph icon, and view a detailed history of that data point. Additionally, you can sort rows and compare them to see how each performed on different platforms, such as browsers and mobile devices.
Piwik also offers the ability to set up automatic email reports so you can stay updated on your content’s performance and optimize accordingly.
Open Web Analytics
Open Web Analytics (OWA) is an open-source software, just like Piwik. Similarly, there is no limit on the amount of data you can store or the number of websites you can measure through the program.
OWA provides information much like the kind you’ll see on its competitors’ platforms, such as views, unique visits, referral sites, and visitor location. Additionally, OWA can measure the click-stream of each visitor, pinpointing exactly where they click on your page.
As Divi Fernando points out on the Woorank blog, OWA offers three distinct features that many analytics programs like Google’s do not. The first is heat maps, which track where visitors click on your site. The second is the ability to record mouse movements so you can see how visitors navigate your pages and officially become conversions. Third, the program provides Document Object Model (DOM) click tracking, which uses code snippets to report when visitors click on specified links, buttons, and images.
Clicky
More bloggers are starting to profess their love for Clicky, an analytics program that prides itself on offering up-to-the-minute results. For this reason, I think it’s necessary to include Clicky on this list despite the fact that for most it won’t be free. You won’t be required to pay for Clicky’s service if you have one website that receives fewer than 3,000 pageviews a day, but after that pricing can range from $9.99 to $79.99 per month.
At first glance, Clicky has something very attractive to offer—similar in-depth results to Google Analytics, but with a much cleaner interface. After all, what’s the use of mining data from your website performance if you can’t understand and interpret the information?
Clicky clearly lists every visitor, including when they visited, where they’re located, where they were referred from, how long they stayed on your page, and what actions they took. Clicky also provides heat maps in real time, not just for a collection of visitors, but for each individual. This is a feature normally offered only by analytics programs that specialize in heat map information, such as Crazy Egg, setting Clicky apart from its biggest competitors.
Clicky also offers an integration with Twitter that makes it easy to monitor Twitter mentions of your account, website, or any URL or keyword. As Clicky’s website points out, Twitter’s built-in search only goes back about a week, but Clicky can provide an almost unlimited history of tweets, including summary reports of activity by user, hashtags, links, and sentiment.
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.
Yahoo! Web Analytics
Yahoo! Web analytics is Yahoo!’s alternative to the dominant Google Analytics. It’s an enterprise-level, robust web-based third-party solution which makes accessing data easy especially for multiple-user groups. It’s got all the things you’d expect from a comprehensive Web analytics tool such as pretty graphs, custom-designed (and printable) reports, and real-time data tracking.
BBClone
Go to Live Demonstration of BBClone.
If you’re looking for a simple, server-side web application that doesn’t rely on third-party services to monitor your data, check out BBClone – a PHP-based server application that gives you a detailed overview of website traffic and visitor data. It supports language localization for 32 languages like English, Chinese, German, and Japanese. It easily integrates with popular publishing platforms like Drupal, WordPress, and Textpattern. Since it’s logfile-based, it doesn’t require you to use a server-side relational database.
Conclusion
The web analytics industry is constantly growing. There are new tools coming out every year, and it can be hard to know which ones are worth your time. Our team has researched and tested the best free web analytics tools on the market for you! We narrowed them down based on popularity, ease of use, and tools provided.