Is tracking your website’s performance important to you? If so, you’ll need a comprehensive analytics software solution.
In this post, we’ll cover the basics of web analytics software and how to choose the best one, so that you can:
- Improve your organic positioning
- Boost your conversions (and ultimately, your revenue)
We’ve gathered a list of the best web analytics tools for eCommerce and small businesses, including:
- Free & paid options
- Key features
- Best tools by industry
Let ‘s get started!
How Web Analytics Software Works
Analytics tools are software programs that gather data about your website. Based on that data, you can get a 360-degree view of what is happening on your platform. By using these tools, you’ll be able to:
- Discover the number of visitors your website receives
- Find out the average time visitors spend on your site
- Find out your conversion rates
- Get real-time reports about user behavior
In short, analytics tools help you make better business decisions, guided by data.
Top 7 Web Analytics Tools to Track Your Business Performance
Analytics tools are vital for monitoring your website and improving its performance. However, not everyone can invest in high-end enterprise tools. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the best free and affordable web analytics tools.
Here are the top 7 analytics tools to track your business performance:
- Google Analytics
- Adobe Analytics
- Mixpanel
- Hotjar
- Yandex Metrica
- Chartbeat
- Statcounter
Let’s get a closer look
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is a web analysis tool that enables you to track and measure your website’s performance holistically and intuitively. In fact, it’s the most widely used analytics tool in the industry.
GA can:
- Get information from your website
- Analyze website data to gain specific insights — including traffic, user behavior, and conversions.
- Organize and display data in customized reports — providing snapshots, real-time, and life cycle reports.
- Provide useful insights about traffic-generating channels.
- Analyze when traffic to your website has occurred.
- Get a better understanding of how users interact with your site.
- Provide additional data to complement your Google Search Console metrics, thus improving your SEO efforts
- Integrate with SEO audit tools and CRMs like WordPress.
Pricing: Free.
Best for: All types of teams and all budgets. GA is the industry-leading choice.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is one of the most popular tools for combining, linking, and analyzing all aspects of your website’s customer journey.
Adobe Analytics allows you to:
- Discover the way customers navigate your website
- View where and how conversions occur
- Collect customer data across channels
- Analyze that data with variables customized to your business goals
- Analyze offline data as an additional source of information
Adobe Analytics is a powerful marketing tool. It’s best known for using machine learning and predictive algorithms to provide a new dimension of information for your website’s performance.
Pricing: Adobe Analytics is paid and its pricing is based on request.
Best for: Large enterprises & online stores.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel analyzes web and mobile product data and lets you know:
- How users use your product
- Why and when users abandon your site
- Which types of users have better retention
Plus, Mixpanel can:
- Create interactive reports
- Connect to other data sources for in-depth analysis
Mixpanel helps you analyze trends in user behavior, so you can optimize your platform intelligently. As a result, you could improve conversion and retention rates, as well as your users’ overall experience.
Pricing: There’s a free version of Mixpanel with limited features, and a paid version with unlimited reports, data modeling, group analytics, and pipeline add-ons as well as email support. It starts at $25/month. Mixpanel also offers a custom enterprise plan.
Best for: Digital products, SaaS.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a product experience analytics software that helps you understand how your users interact with your website by:
- Analyzing the reasons your users take certain actions on your site (or why they don’t).
- Providing real-time feedback from customers using tools like heatmaps and session video recordings
- Conducting surveys
- Including several workflow tool integrations like Miro, MailChimp, Slack, and Hubspot.
Hotjar is key for SEOs, managers, designers, and product researchers looking to analyze website performance and improve their UX practices.
Pricing: Hotjar offers a free version with basic features, like automated data capture and unlimited heatmaps. Paid plans start at $31/month for the Plus plan and $79/month for the Business plan.
Yandex Metrica
Yandex Metrica is Yandex’s search engine analytics tool. It’s considered an alternative to Google Analytics.
Yandex Metrica can:
- Identify how users engage with your website – including click rates, scrolling, mouse movements, and typing.
- Analyze clicks with click heat maps.
Plus, Yandex provides:
- An intuitive dashboard with comprehensive metrics.
- Customizable reports.
- Data analysis without sampling.
Pricing: Free.
Best for: All types of teams and all budgets. Yandex is considered an equally powerful alternative to Google Analytics.
Chartbeat
Chartbeat is an analytics tool for marketing teams focused on content performance. It lets you:
- Identify the most engaging parts of your website.
- Spot the most appealing/engaging pieces of content.
- Filter website data by sections, authors, location, traffic source, referral, and device type.
- Organize all data by visitor frequency, subscriber status, and app traffic.
- Analyze the historical performance of your website content.
Pricing: No pricing is publicly available. You’ll need to contact the sales team and sign up for a demo.
Best for: Online publications, content-centered businesses, and brands heavily investing in content marketing.
Statcounter
Statcounter provides real-time website analytics for small and medium-sized businesses.
Some of its key features are:
- Analyzing your traffic trends over time.
- Tracking your paid traffic.
- Detecting when an individual visitor returns to your website (thus, you won’t miss a returning visitor).
- An overview reporting dashboard showing the performance of your site.
Statcounter also allows you to visualize:
- Traffic locations.
- Traffic sources.
- Website visits & time-on-page.
- What files your users are downloading.
- Pages and outbound links with the most clicks.
Pricing: Statcounter has a free plan that includes analytics and visitor activity. Premium plans start at €18/month with a free 30-day trial.
Best for: Small and growing businesses looking for a solution that’s a little more refined than Google Analytics.
Key Takeaways
In this post, we shared our 7 favorite web analytics tools. Luckily, there’s amazing web analytics software like Google Analytics, which is free and has all the features you’ll ever need to analyze your website. And if you’re looking for something a little more complex (such as Adobe Analytics) or that’s designed for a specific use case (such as Mixpanel), you have tons of great options to choose from.
But when it comes to website analytic tools, there isn’t a one-fits-all solution. Chances are that your digital strategy will require many tools to cover different dimensions of your online presence.
For example, none of these tools will give you an in-depth view of your on-page SEO. Improving your SEO requires an auditing and alerting tool. This is something SEORadar can help you with.
SEORadar monitors your website’s code and notifies you of every change that could adversely affect your organic positioning. We automatically monitor over 100 HTML elements (including titles and meta descriptions). For deeper insights into your website’s change history, SEORadar also integrates with your favorite tools, including Google Analytics.
Curious yet? Start a free trial today or book a demo.
