You’ve got your shiny new website and you want to make it a success, but before you can do that, you need to find out what’s working and what’s not. The way you’ll be able to do this is by using web analytics tools. You’ll want to be conscious of what your goals are when picking the right tools for your business. So, in this article, I will review the best web analytics tools that you can use today without a charge.
Web analytics is the method used for measuring and analyzing web traffic data. With the help of web analytics tools, you can know how many visitors came to your site. I’ve made this list of free web analytics tools so you can understand which one is best for your business.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the best free tools that any website owner can use to track and analyze data about Web traffic. You get to see what keywords are bringing the most visitors to your pages and what aspects of your designs are turning them off. This tool will generate a report for your website that includes information about visitors, traffic sources, goals, content and e-commerce. The downside of Google Analytics is that it can take time to update. (The real-time version is still in beta testing.) There are other tools that offer real-time updates of your data now.
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.
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.
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.
ADOBE ANALYTICS
Adobe is a leading name when it comes to software: Photoshop, Illustrator, the most popular PDF reader, and many other programs bear the company name. Adobe Analytics lives up to the stellar reputation held by Adobe. One of the many difficulties encountered with other web analytics tools is managing your custom tags. This process often requires altering the existing analytics code to allow registered users to be tagged as well. But with Adobe Analytics, you won’t need to involve an IT team (or hire an expert) to set up a dynamic tag management system.
Adobe Analytics also offers real-time analytics, which is incredibly important if you need to make a pitch to potential investors and advertisers “on the spot.” You’ll also be able to track user activity on social media, third-party data integration, for your videos, and for mobile users. These are often not covered sufficiently by Google Analytics (mobile user analytics in particular, as mentioned in the previous section). The use of mobile browsers is at an unprecedented high, and optimizing your site (and your SEO strategy) for these users has never been more important than now.
Adobe Analytics’ advanced segmentation makes understanding your aggregated data much easier. This feature allows you to spend more time on implementing new and improved strategies rather than trying to figure out what those strategies should be. While it’s a tool everyone will want to use, Adobe Analytics is certainly an enterprise solution. You’ll need to contact their support team for a quote, but you can expect it to be in the $5,000 per month range.
ANGELFISH ACTUAL METRICS
Angelfish Actual Metrics is designed to make viewing and understanding statistics on how your visitors interact with your site (or sites) easily. Angelfish also keeps your aggregated data within your network’s confines, proving full data security and making it a valid alternative to Google Analytics. If your business also uses internal and (or) external web-based applications, Angelfish will help you track user activity on these platforms as well. This is one of the glaring exclusions in Google Analytics and will give you a truer understanding of how your online platform is performing.
Sometimes, sites (or particular posts) experience a spike in traffic—especially when the content is new or being shared on social media a lot. Web analytics tools can get confused by this spike at times; Google Analytics is particularly notorious for showing the spike and then absolutely no traffic for a day or two after. But Angelfish handles traffic spike analysis very well, going so far as to incorporate a feature focused on these occurrences.
You’ll also receive data on hidden visitors—those that block analytics codes for any number of reasons—something that Google Analytics doesn’t even attempt to address. Furthermore, you’ll also be able to track the click path of your visitors, allowing you to see exactly which backlinks and ads are generating the most views.
And if there any broken links or bandwidth errors, Angelfish will pick them up and give you a full analysis. This tool is a cheaper premium alternative to Adobe Analytics, with a $1,295 per year Standard Package and $6,000 per year Grand Deal package.
Hotjar
If you want to know what your website visitors are doing and why, Hotjar can help.
Hotjar is a website analytics tool combining traditional analytics with website visitor behavior data.
A visual display, or heatmap analysis, and session recordings provide valuable insight, alerting you to areas in your content that need reviewing.
This web tool is easy to set up and easy to use.
Start with their free plan, which allows up to 2,000 pageviews per day. If you need more, consider adding the Hotjar Business version starting at $99 per month.
Conclusion:
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. That’s why every business needs to know how to measure web analytics. Analytics is a powerful metric that can tell you a lot about your website performance, audience behavior and more.