Web analytics are no longer a luxury for online marketers. They are an absolute necessity. Which web analytics tools are the best? Are you looking for an easy to use or an enterprise level tool? Are you looking for free or paid tools? We did the work of looking at more than 25 top-rated web analytics tools available.
The emergence of the internet has become a vital part of our lives. Every day businesses use the web to promote their business. Successful internet marketing depends on the level of analytical information you can collect about your website. There are certain tools that help in gathering data, reporting and analyzing it. Web analytics tools are now available at your fingertips. These free web analytics tools 2022 can help you stay updated about what is happening around your company on the Web.
Google Analytics (google.com/analytics) – Free
A completely free service that generates detailed statistics about visitors to your website, Google Analytics is the simplest and most robust web analytics offering. Currently used by over 50% of the top 10,000 websites in the world, according to the site’s usage statistics, you can find out where your visitors are coming from, what they’re doing while on your site and how often they come back, among many other things. As you get more involved in the site’s analytics, you can receive more detailed reports, but it’s that ease of use that makes it one of the most popular services.
“There’s really only one tool for small businesses need and that’s Google Analytics,” notes Penn. “It’s so incredibly robust in terms of what it offers and if someone tells you that Google Analytics isn’t enough for a small business, then frankly they have no idea how to use it properly.”
Google Analytics was the unanimous favorite of all the web analytics experts we talked to.
SimilarWeb — SimilarWeb measures the digital world
SimilarWeb utilizes multiple methodologies in its approach to data analysis and collection to provide users with a better understanding of their customers.
SimilarWeb is a unique platform for data analysis that gathers information about the performance, traffic, and other aspects of a website from hundreds of different sources and combines it into a single data set.
With that business-specific data set, customers can get unprecedented levels of insight into the behavior of potential clients and website visitors and the most comprehensive analysis of the performance of their app or website.
SimilarWeb’s team of experienced mathematicians and other data scientists process the data through machine learning algorithms to get the prediction models and estimations of future customer acquisitions.
SimilarWeb’s platform gives clients the opportunity to see the current trends in the industry and what strategies can be employed to boost overall success and revenue. Also, SimilarWeb’s website analytics tools gauge the effectiveness of the competition’s customer acquisition so that you can make the necessary comparisons and see what practices can be implemented in your business and where further improvements can be made.
There are various solutions that SimilarWeb offers depending on what you want to accomplish. Whether it is the growth of your business through marketing solutions, or getting more knowledge about your competition and the industry at large so that you can make the best strategic decisions, or simply improving your sales, SimilarWeb has a solution for you.
Key features
- Traffic and engagement measuring — helps you see how your business fares against the competition and how much time your visitors spend on your site, page views per site, etc.
- SEO and PPC — gives you insight into your organic and paid keywords, and how much traffic they generate.
- Affiliate traffic — helps you to see what affiliates drive traffic to your competitors so that you can find new affiliates for your business.
- Marketing strategy — compares different marketing-channel data to optimize your marketing strategies.
- Funnel analysis — helps you learn about funnel leakage and performance metrics that provide information about which marketing channels provide the highest conversion rates.
Pricing and plans
SimilarWeb offers a free plan which gives you the chance to test the service before switching to the paid version and getting even more out of the platform.
Free plan
- Free of charge
The free plan from SimilarWeb gives you three months of web traffic data, followed by a month of mobile app data, and five results per metric.
Enterprise
- Price upon request
Enterprises that want the complete version of the platform can enjoy unlimited results per metric, up to 28 months of mobile app data, access to global and country-specific data, keyword analysis, and much more.
Pricing for the paid program depends on the services you want to use, the size of your business, and many other factors. What usually comes out to a five-figure price is paid on an annual basis. You need to contact customer support at SimilarWeb for specific details and pricing for your business.
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.
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:
If you want to understand your website visitor, you need a set of web analytics tools. These tools will help you to know everything from their habits, page clicks, and where they came from. Getting access to these tools can be difficult because there are a lot of tools out there that claim they give the best experience but there are some common mistakes all of them make.