Best Online Tracking Tools

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Welcome to my world! Or more specifically, welcome to this article on Best Online Tracking Tools. If you’re anything like me, then you love tracking things. I mean who doesn’t? Give me real time stats on my website, social media account or the weather and I’m your kid. Everyone loves having real time stats. Well … except my kids… they don’t love it. They really hate having their iPads taken away from them when they are watching YouTube Kids and Netflix. But anyhow!

You can’t fix what you can’t see. The internet is filled with marketing information that is difficult to track. When it comes to picking the right online tracking tool, it can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. In this article, I’ve listed the top 8 online tracking tools on the market today. Each tool has innovative online tracking features that marketers need. Whether you need to know how many leads you generate or want to keep tabs on what’s trending online, these online tools have got you covered.

The Benefits of Live Website Visitor Tracking

Live website visitor tracking (a sub-set of web analytics), gives you a way to instantly see what people are doing on your site in real-time.

Depending on the tool you use, some of the benefits include:

  • Knowing if your new content is immediately popular.
  • Information about which social media posts/networks are driving visitors.
  • Insight into how a visitor travels through your site.
  • See which products and sales deals are garnering the most attention.
  • Real-time notifications if a particular person/company visits your site.
  • Learn which pages generate the most sales leads.

Visitor Tracking on Other Sites

Before we dive into the tools, a quick note about website visitor tracking on sites you don’t own.

Any tool which claims to be able to show you live data on third-party sites is not being truthful. Sites like Alexa can give you a few clues about the headline visitor numbers, but no external tool can see a site’s real-time visitors without the owner’s consent.

17 best website tracking tools to measure traffic, user behavior, and performance

Website traffic tracking tools

Traffic is usually the first thing that gets tracked on a website or app, by using web analytics tools. Traffic metrics can tell you how many site visitors you have, how they found you, how long they spend browsing different pages, and how frequently they’re converting into customers.

What traffic metrics can you track?

5 top website traffic tracking tools

1. Google Analytics

What it is: Google Analytics is a popular website analytics tool; the latest version is called GA4.

What you can track: new and returning users, engagement, revenue, retention, demographics, conversions, and events.

Price: free (with limits); upgrade to the paid version (Google 360) for more features and unlimited traffic.

💡 Using WordPress? Google has an official plugin called Site Kit by Google that helps you set up and monitor Google Analytics from your WordPress dashboard.

2. Adobe Analytics

What it is: Adobe Analytics is a traffic analytics and multichannel data collection tool, designed for advanced users and enterprise companies.

What you can track: business intelligence (BI) and traffic data from websites, emails, and apps, including pageviews, unique visitors, purchases, order attribution, segmentation, and customer journey analytics.

Price: on request.

3. Matomo (formerly Piwik)

What it is: Matomo is an open-source web traffic analytics application.

What you can track: unsampled traffic metrics, ecommerce and event tracking, custom dimensions, goals, and segments.

Price: free (self-hosted).

4. Clicky

What it is: Clicky is a real-time website traffic analytics tool.

What you can track: real-time data, including visitors, pageviews, and events.

Price: from free for 3,000 pageviews/day.

5. Fathom

What it is: Fathom is a simple, privacy-focused analytics tool.

What you can track: site views, unique views, average time on site, bounce rate, goal completions, referrers, country, user device, and browser type.

Price: from $14/month for 100,000 pageviews.

💡 Pro tip: website tracking isn’t limited to websites you own; you can also track traffic on competitor websites with tools like SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and Semrush. The data isn’t 100% accurate but should give you a relative understanding of how your website traffic compares to other sites.

Website behavior tracking tools

By tracking traffic, you’ll get a good idea of what’s going on on your website—the most popular pages, where people leave from, and where they spend time browsing. Now, you’re ready to track how people interact with your pages.

What is behavior tracking?

Behavior tracking shows you where your users click and how they scroll or navigate between pages. The main goal behind user behavior tracking is to measure user experience, find opportunities to improve UX and, as a result, increase conversions and revenue.

What tools can you use to track user behavior?

  • Heatmaps: see an overview of where visitors click, tap, and scroll on a page.
  • Session recordings: view how each user browses across multiple pages.
  • A/B testing: create page design variations and test which performs better.
  • Surveys: get direct feedback from users and track sentiment and satisfaction over time.
  • User testing: interview users as they navigate your site.

5 user behavior tracking tools to improve your website

1. Hotjar

What it is: Hotjar (that’s us, hi there! 👋) is behavior analytics and user feedback software that helps you understand why visitors do (and don’t) take certain actions on your site, and get voice of the customer (VoC) feedback from them.

What you can track: product experience insights like aggregated visitor clicks, scrolls, and mouse movement with heatmaps; individual user browsing behavior with session recordings; and user feedback with on-site surveys and an Incoming Feedback widget.

Price: from free for 35 sessions/day.

Tracking user behavior in 4 simple steps

Hotjar isn’t technically a single website tracking tool, it’s four tools in one: heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and user feedback.

1. Heatmaps

What is it: Hotjar Heatmaps measure aggregated clicks, taps, scrolls, and mouse movement on any page (from a website or single-page application).

When to use it: use heatmaps to track user behavior and get a visual overview of what content is getting seen and what’s being ignored. Use this insight to make changes to your pages and improve UX.

2. Session Recordings

What is it: Hotjar Recordings are renderings of browsing behavior from individual visitors across one or multiple pages.

When to use it: use session recordings to track how users really experience your site, and see what led to a conversion or exit.

3. Surveys

What is it: Hotjar Surveys are targeted pop-up surveys that give you insight direct from the best source of data: your users.

When to use it: use surveys to track customer satisfaction (CSAT surveys), customer effort (CES surveys), and how likely they are to recommend your products or brand (NPS surveys) over time.

4. Incoming Feedback

What is it: Incoming Feedback allows users to tag and comment on any part of a page.

When to use it: use Incoming Feedback to get user insight on any page without setting up a survey, so you can track what people love and hate, identify issues, and find opportunities for improvement.

2. Google Optimize

What it is: Google Optimize is a website experiment platform that integrates with Google Analytics.

What you can track: using A/B testing, split testing, and multivariate testing (MVT), you can test variations of different web pages and measure how they perform.

Price: free (with limits), upgrade to the paid version (Optimize 360) for more features.

Hotjar + Google Optimize = 🔥

Hotjar automatically integrates with Google Optimize so you can filter Hotjar Session Recordings by Optimize experiment ID and see exactly how visitors browse, click, and scroll on each test page.

3. Crazy Egg

What it is: Crazy Egg is a website optimization, heatmap, and A/B testing tool (see how Hotjar and Crazy Egg compare).

What you can track: A/B test variations of different web pages and measure how they perform with heatmaps and website recordings.

Price: from $288/year.

4. Optimizely

What it is: Optimizely is a website optimization tool that allows you to run website experiments.

What you can track: A/B, MVT, and split testing results to test variations of different landing pages and optimize performance.

Price: on request.

💡 Get more from Optimizely: Hotjar integrates with Optimizely so you can filter Session Recordings and trigger Surveys by page variant, giving you more data to understand why some pages outperform others.

5. UserTesting

What it is: UserTesting is a usability testing platform that recruits people to test your website.

What you can track: measure qualitative user experience by watching test participants use your app, product, or website and answer questions.

Price: on request.

How to use Hotjar to find user testers on your website

Instead of using a third-party user testing platform, you can recruit usability testing participants directly from your website with a simple on-site survey. An incentive such as a gift card can encourage users to get involved, and follow-up questions will help you collect the contact details (i.e. name and email) of interested users so you can invite them to a moderated usability testing session.

Website performance tracking tools

Once you’re tracking website traffic and user behavior, the only thing left is to measure how your website is performing in relation to your business goals.

Tracking website performance is about measuring the metrics that matter most to your business. For an SEO team, that might be website speed or keyword rankings; for a product team, it’s likely customer churn or retention.

Whatever metrics matter to your business, there’s a tool to track them.

What performance metrics can you track?

  • Churn
  • Retention
  • Page speed
  • Keyword rankings
  • Ecommerce sales
  • Backlinks
  • Social media shares

6 website and product performance tracking tools

1. Mixpanel

What it is: Mixpanel is a product analytics tool that tracks performance on mobile and web applications.

What you can track: product metrics like activation, retention, and churn.

Price: free for up to 100k monthly users.

2. Google Search Console

What it is: Search Console is a free search optimization tool from Google.

What you can track: measure SEO performance, view keyword impressions and clicks, see your backlinks, and check for crawling and speed errors.

Price: free.

3. ChartMogul

What it is: ChartMogul is subscription and revenue tracking software designed for SaaS companies.

What you can track: MRR, ARR, CLV, churn, revenue, sales, and subscriber numbers.

Price: from free for up to $10k MRR.

4. Ahrefs

What it is: Ahrefs is a suite of SEO tools to monitor and grow website traffic from search engines. (We’re big fans of Ahrefs, ourselves!)

What you can track: keyword rankings, backlinks, website speed, and broken links for your own and competitor websites.

Price: from $99/month.

5. Kissmetrics

What it is: Kissmetrics is product and marketing analytics software for SaaS and ecommerce websites.

What you can track: product metrics like sign-ups, churn, and MRR; ecommerce metrics like sales, revenue, and cart-to-purchase conversion rate.

Price: from $299/month.

6. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

What it is: Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an enterprise-level CRM (customer relationship management) analytics platform for marketers with several add-on tools, including Customer 360 Audiences, Loyalty Management, Social Studio, and Advertising Studio.

What you can track: email and ad campaign performance, customer journeys, and website engagement.

Price: on request.

The 7 Best Free Live Website Traffic Tracking Tools

Okay, let’s have a look at some web visitor tracking tools.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most well-known website visitor tracking tool. The app has many different features, but for the sake of today’s rundown, we’re only interested in Real-Time.

If you use Real-Time, you will be able to use event tracking to monitor the usage of your site’s mobile app, watch the performance of any promotions you’re running, and monitor your goals in line with site changes.

Google Analytics is entirely free to use. To get set up, you need to add a tracking code to your site. You can manually place the code after the <head> tag on each page you want to track. Some backends such as WordPress offer plugins that’ll add the code automatically.

Check out our Google Analytics guide if you are a complete beginner and not sure where to start.

2. Live Traffic Feed

You might not need the complexity that Google Analytics offers. Although anyone can use it, it may be overkill if your site doesn’t have huge amounts of traffic.

For a more straightforward way to check how many visitors are on your website right now, you could consider using the free Live Traffic Feed tool. It provides a live feed of people who visit your site. The data includes the visitor’s location and the page they viewed.

To use Live Traffic Feed, you can either grab the HTML code and paste it into your site manually or download the WordPress plugin. There are several customization options, including color, time zone, counters, size, and more.

For the tool to work correctly, you need to make sure it is in the top 30 percent of your site’s page. If it is below the 30 percent line, it will only update in real-time for three minutes. You will need to refresh the page to reactivate it.

Note: Anyone who visits your site will be able to see the live feed. Don’t use the tool if that makes you uncomfortable.

3. Hitsteps

Hitsteps specializes in real-time website visitor tracking.

From the main dashboard, you can see which country the visitor is in, how they found you, what page they are looking at, which browser they are using, which operating system they are using, and a whole lot more.

And if a visitor fills out a form on your site (like a newsletter subscription, a comment, or a contact form), Hitsteps can automatically connect the visitor’s identity to the person’s form details. It allows you to build up a more complete picture of who is visiting your site.

Other Hitsteps features include keyword analytics, cross-device tracking, website heatmaps, a page speed analysis, and real-time ad blocker detection.

The free version of Hitsteps is available to sites with fewer than 2,000 monthly visitors. For 10,000 per month, it costs $4.99. The top plan costs $49.99 and supports up to one million visitors.

4. Whos.Amung.Us

Whos.Amung.Us is one of the best free website visitor tracking tools. Even though it’s free, the tool will be enough for most users. It supports unlimited page views, unlimited visitors, and an infinite number of websites.

Different widgets are available. You can add a live map to your site or choose from a selection of visitor counters widgets. To install the widget on your site, you need to copy and paste the HTML code from the Whos.Amung.Us website.

You need to insert it onto every site that you want to track; it is not enough to only run it on your homepage. As an added bonus, the tool isad-supported.

5. Watch Them Live

Watch Them Live is a real-time analysis and user behavior tracking tool. You get access to the basics, such as visitors, page views, sessions, referrers, and user segmentation, but can also enjoy some more powerful features that help the app stand out.

These features include session replays (so you can see a re-run of every action visitors performed on your site and their journey through your content) and heat mapping (giving you insight on which areas of your site are receiving the most clicks).

The free plan covers 5,000 page views per month, plus 5,000 visitor events tracking and 5,000 video replays. Paid plans start at $9/month.

6. Clicky

Clicky lets you track website visitors in real-time. You can use it to track individual visitors and their per-session actions, view visitor locations on a map and see other data such as operating system, browser, ISP, language, and even the visitor’s screen resolution.

There are also some non-live features such as Google Search ranking data, HTTPS tracking, website heatmaps, and an uptime monitor.

Clicky’s free plan lets you track one site with a maximum of 3,000 daily page views. The pro plan increases the limit to one million views.

7. Web-Stat

The Web-Stat homepage doesn’t look too impressive, but don’t let that put you off. The tool can record all the visitors to your website—not just the ones who have JavaScript enabled.

In addition to the real-time stats, Web-Stat can show details of individual visitors, precisely measure the duration of visits (rather than extrapolating the data from a sample), see visitors click-paths and conversions, and measure your referrals.

Web-Stat is also worth considering if you are a privacy fanatic. Unlike services like Google Analytics—which shares your data with third parties and uses it for targeted advertising, Web-Stat does not sell or release any of your data.

Other Ways to Monitor Your Website

The seven tools we have discussed will all help you to gain a deeper understanding of how your website is performing and how your visitors interact with the content.

But these tools are just one part of the puzzle. If you would like to learn about some other options, remember you can also increase engagement with Facebook widgets and other similar tools.

CONCLUSION

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