top web analytics tools

Top Web Analytics Tools for Your Website

Last updated on July 25th, 2024 at 09:24 am

When you run a website, it is essential to keep track of important metrics such as number of visitors, source of traffic, landing pages, time on site and so on. It can be tedious write JavaScript code from scratch to measure each of these metrics, let alone all of them in one place. This is where web analytics tools come into picture. Web analytics Tools make it easy to monitor website traffic, understand user behavior and optimize it to convert visitors into customers. Here are the top 5 web analytics tools that you can use for your website.

What are Web Analytics Tools

Web Analytics tools allow you to collect, measure, analyze and report data about your website. You can easily do this by adding a small piece of code on your web pages, for which you want to get web analytics information. Typically, site administrators use it to gather information about their website’s visitor traffic. But these days, they are also used by marketing teams to understand the performance of their various online marketing campaigns, on site marketing widgets, and more. In fact, they are also used by web design teams to understand how people use their website and interact with its various elements, to improve user experience.

Web analytics tools already come packed with tons of useful data points and reports for ready use. But they can also be customized to track new metrics and data as per your requirement. There are plenty of free and paid web analytics tools available in the market. We will look at some of the most popular ones.

Top Web Analytics Tools

Here are the top web analytics tools for your website.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best web analytics tools that allow you to easily monitor your website visitors and get a lot more useful information such as their source, location, device, age group, landing page, and more.

It also has effective spam filter that discounts traffic from spam bots. Also, adding Google Analytics to your website allows you to easily integrate its data with other Google products such as Adwords and Search Console.

It also allows you to create custom reports and graphs that you can share with your team. Google Analytics Standard Version is completely free and suitable for most websites & blogs. It also has a paid version with more advanced features.

It even comes with a more advanced Google Tag Manager that is a one code for all option. Once you add this code on your site, you can easily switch on/off various Google services such as Google Analytics, with just one click.

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2. Matomo (Piwik)

Matomo is a free and open source web analytics tool. It works on PHP/MySQL and tracks your website visitors, their attributes and behavior.

Matomo allows you to view distribution of visitors by social media, geo location, country, and even on a map. It also displays visits over time.

Just like Google Analytics, it allows you to setup & track goals, events, and funnels. You can even do A/B testing and configure heatmaps.

Matomo has quick configuration options for Ecommerce, Forms, and even media files. You can also create custom reports as per your requirements.

Its on-premise version is free to use while cloud-hosted one is paid.

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3. Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics tool that allows you to pull data from multiple sources and not just websites. It is a robust platform for advanced users who want to work with multiple data sources from one place.

It supports web, marketing and customer analytics, and also omnichannel data collection and reporting. However, it is price is available by quote, meaning it is suitable for medium-large businesses.

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4. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is an affordable web analytics and heatmap tool that allows you to increase website traffic, drive more sales.

It enables you to create video recordings of how users interact with your website, understand where they spend more time, which buttons they click, and which page areas they scroll.

This helps you identify user pain points and optimize your website to improve conversions. It also allows you to do A/B testing and determine the most converting page variant.

Crazy egg also allows you to segment visitors as new, mobile and most active to help you separately understand their behavior. Its paid plans start from $24/month.

Crazy Egg is suitable for SMBs and startups.

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5. Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics is a free and open-source web analytics tool that allows you to easily track live site visits, referral, goals, funnels, events, and other key website metrics.

It also allows you to create heatmaps, and conversion rates. Open Web Analytics provides most of the web analytics features offered by other tools. However, it requires a little more effort in installation. Nevertheless, it well-documented and has many guides.

6. Hotjar

Hotjar is also a popular, although expensive, web analytics tool. It basically captures visitor interactions on your web pages and displays the information using heatmaps and video recordings. The recordings can help you precisely understand how your visitors moved the mouse pointer during their session. It is mostly useful for web designers who need to find out how people respond to their website.

While most web analytics tools simply measure visitor data and require you to analyze their reports, Hotjar even allows you to set up feedback forms and user surveys to proactively interact with site visitors and ask them for their views. It is more suitable for medium to large websites, especially those running web applications.

Conclusion

There are many web analytics tools available today. If you are small website, or a blog, then go for one of the free web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Matomo or Open Web Analytics. If you have multiple data sources and need advanced analytics, try Adobe Analytics or Hotjar. Nevertheless, whether you run an online store, blog or a web application, you must have at least one web analytics tool to measure your web traffic and their demographics. Sometimes, you may need to use a combination of web analytics tools to measure certain specific metrics.