Website visitor tracking is an important factor for strengthening your online business. A free website visitor tracker helps you decrease bounce rate, strengthening customer focus. By simultaneously displaying multiple core statistics on websites, it allows you to easily analyze the changes of your online business.
The best thing about free website traffic tracking tools is that they are 100% free. Yes, you read that right! They do not cost a dime. Still, while there might be a price tag attached to the other tools on the market, these ones are for real for free.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the go-to platform for many marketers, in large part because it’s totally free, chock-full of features, and comes with the clout of the Google brand name.
After you enter the Google Analytics code into your website’s HTML, the service will measure certain goals for you, including which pages a visitor clicks on, how long they stay, and the actions they take. For example, the tool can tell you whether a visitor is sharing the content on social media or clicking on an ad. Each time a goal is completed, Google logs the conversion in your analytics report.
As Kissmetrics points out, one of Google Analytics’ best features—especially for retail sites and marketers tracking purchases—is the Goal Funnel, with which you can set up a string of URLs that a consumer clicks through when purchasing an item. You can find out not only how many people are going through the process of making a purchase, but also how many are abandoning it at a certain stage. This information will allow marketers to adjust their strategies and make the purchasing experience easier for the consumer.
Google will also report the keywords people search that bring them to your site, as well as which browsers and devices they are using—not to mention from where they are being referred. I often monitor the behavior on our site in order to see which pieces are driving the most traffic and where that traffic is coming from.
When it comes to customizing data, you can track certain campaigns that are driving traffic to your site, create your own reports with hand-picked metrics, and set up custom alerts to have your insights delivered at specific times.
Perhaps the most common complaint about using Google Analytics is the information can be cluttered and the interface difficult to navigate. However, Google is working to counter these complaints with new tools like Data Studio, which lets users turn data into shareable, visually engaging reports. While the platform still may not be the most intuitive, you should be more comfortable with the settings after about a month, and, in turn, get the most out of Google’s free service.
Bitly
Bitly may be best known as a free link shortener, but its features do more than just save space. Once you’ve shortened links—and possibly even added a vanity URL shortener—Bitly gives you the tools to efficiently share those links and analyze their performances.
For example, Bitly reports how many clicks each link generated and when people clicked, down to the hour. The report will also include which platforms people used to share the link so you know if most of your traffic is coming from Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. Below is an example of Bitly’s map of your link’s geographic distribution of clicks, which is helpful for optimizing and targeting future content.
On the stats page, Bitly gathers results from all of your links so you can assess how your collection of content has performed in the past hour, day, week, and month.
Bitly may not provide as much detailed information as Google Analytics, but if you’re already taking advantage of its free link shortener and clean interface, you might as well use the perks that come with the package.
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.
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.
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.
Conclusion
It’s free software that tracks visitor’s information, locations, browser type, operating system, length of stay, pages visited on your site etc. It’s very easy to install and can track unlimited amount of visitors on your website.