Web analytics tools are the most measurable aspect of any successful website because it shows how you are doing compared to your expectations. This article focuses on the most common type of web analytics, which is Google Analytics.
You’re not alone if you want to learn more about web analytics tools. It’s one of the most sought-after skills in the marketing industry. There are many web analytics tools that you could use, such as Google Analytics and Microsoft’s Web Analytics. This article will take a closer look at these two apps, how they work and their benefits. Also, I’ll detail other microsoft analytics tools so you know your options. Let’s get started!
Clarity
Recently, Microsoft had announced the general availability of the web analytics tool, known as Clarity. Microsoft Clarity is a free-to-use analytics product built to help website managers improve their website experiences by a better understanding of site visitor behaviour.
According to the developers at the tech giant, with Clarity, they have built a set of tools that help people who manage websites make more informed decisions about the modifications they should make to their sites.
Clarity is an open-source user behaviour analytics tool that helps you understand how users are interacting with your website through features such as session replays and heatmaps. The tool shows which parts of a website get the most and least engagement and it provides an invaluable interface for debugging.
Microsoft has now started a completely new analytics service, which is now available for all users and can be easily added to any web site. The first impression is, that this really intends to be what the name promises: clear and simplistic view of your web service. And compared to Google Analytics, which has been around for 15 years, it really is much simpler to use. On the other hand, it’s not a fair comparison, and I think Clarity is more aimed to competing with tools like Hotjar because there’s a major focus in session recordings and heatmaps.
My quick try-out shows that while it was easy to implement, the product itself is still a bit unfinished. I did manage to see some session replays, but they seemed to be stripped of all the CSS definitions, so I only saw a raw html page with some Times New Roman text and images. Due to lack of insufficient users or some error, I don’t really know of the heatmaps yet, either. But I’m sure both of these will be fixed soon, as they seem to be central to this product.
Main Features of Microsoft Clarity
The Clarity analytics tool is grouped into three top-level features:
- Session playbacks
- Heatmaps
- Insights dashboard
Google Analytics
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.
Open Web Analytics
Another great, free web analytics tool is Open Web Analytic.The open-source framework is a bit more involved in terms of installation, but there are helpful guides to show you what to do.
Open Web Analytics offers a lot of the same features as other website analytics tools, with a few supplementary options. In addition to tracking live site traffic, referrals, and other expected metrics, OWA also provides page heatmaps, that allow you to see where visitors clicked on a page. A helpful feature like this can allow you to reassess your CTA (call to action) placement and adjust accordingly.
Pricing: Free
Good for: A slightly more technically savvy user looking for a free tool.
Finteza
Finteza is a cloud-based analytics solution that provides advanced web traffic analytics in real-time.
Finteza delivers an all-in-one web-traffic analytics solution that helps businesses obtain a better understanding of user behavior and manage advertising campaigns more efficiently. Finteza helps websites tackle some of the biggest issues in web traffic analysis.
As one example of how Finteza helps, a bot detector will recognize bad traffic and identify potential scammers and hackers, so that your information will be based solely on real data.
Also with Finteza, you can customize conversion funnels and create funnels for any desired page, source, UTM tag, and more. With these customization options, you will have a detailed behavioral analysis of your audience at any stage.
Moreover, Finteza gives detailed reports on the characteristics of your audience, starting with the device type and model they are using when browsing your site, the provider, IP, browser, geographical location, and language, without breaching their privacy.
Last but not least is the fact that Finteza does not do data sampling, so all of the results you get are accurate and have been processed.
Key features
- Audience analysis on 15 parameters — visit sources, UTM parameters, page addresses and more.
- Detailed reporting in real-time — you will receive detailed visitor analytics in real-time.
- No bot traffic — a bot detector recognizes bad traffic and finds its source.
- Page analytics — monitor page traffic and compare findings.
- Customized sales funnels — customers can visualize all data in the form of a funnel and see where improvements can be made.
Pricing and plans
Every new client gets a 30 day free trial from Finteza. After that, they can opt for a paid plan.
Paid plan
- $25 per 100,000 unique users a month
The paid plan for website and application analytics is $25 per month, and it comes with a built-in bot detector, 15 types of audience reports, and event-based sales funnels.
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.
Conclusion:
Websites that incorporate analytics use the information they receive from tracking data to discover how users interact with their sites. Analytics can offer insight into user behavior and traffic sources, as well as identifying areas where improvement is needed. Analytics allows site owners to see how successful their site is and adjust it to improve its effectiveness.