In our business of digital marketing, promotions is the first part of the equation. The second part is understanding why visitors come to your site and how to optimize their experience.
And this holds true for any businesses that sells online – from Amazon to Kayak. This is why you see a collection of web-analytics solutions in the market. I’ve scoured the web and shortlisted a few tools that are feature rich, robust and easy to use.
Google Analytics – granddaddy tool for web analytics
Granddaddy of it all, Google Analytics is a free service that gives detailed statistics about your visitors. It is a tool that is vastly used by marketers to gauge their online presence. It is very easy to use and gives very vital information like, what keywords are bringing in the most traffic to your pages, how long to do they stay, helps you track your ROI, etc. If you are not using it you now, you definitely need to start. So that you can better understand your web visitor behaviours and respond accordingly.
Crazy Egg – heat map analytics tool
When using Crazy Egg, it is like wearing x-ray glasses and looking at the heatmap to see how people are behaving when they visit your website. In other words Crazy Egg lets you understand your users clicking and scrolling behavior when they visit your website. It provides priceless insights for high-ROI changes, use your web budget more effectively, speed up your user testing & analysis process to name a few benefits. All plans are free for the first 30 days and the basic plan starts at $9/month.
Spring Engage – analytics for the hospitality business
Spring Engage (formerly Spring Metrics) provides solution to hotel marketing professional that allows them to better serve their travelers online. There is a 14 day, no obligation trial to see the results you can expect beforehand. Each plan is based on total rooms per hotel and a request for a price quote needs to be sent.
Kissmetrics – easy behavioral analytics
In Kissmetrics, the behavioral analytics is studied to understand and track different groups of visitors to drive growth. The data analysis helps to increase engagement, conversions and retention across the growth cycle. The funnel report is a great feature to check the leaks, which just means that anywhere on your website where visitors don’t complete the step you want them to, Kissmetrics funnel report identifies those areas. Segmenting your traffic to see who converts the best and finding more on the ideal audience. Kissmetrics A/B test report can also show if the changes implement truly improve the revenue.
GoSquared – Google analytics alternative
GoSquared is a great alternative to Google Analytics. It’s a tool to measure visitor engagement especially with its real time reporting system. It has a very user-friendly interface, with widgets that can be customized. Gives great insights about individual visitors. Each GoSquared product has an unlimited, fully-featured 14 day free trial. Depending on your usage, at the end of your 14 day trial you can use GoSquared completely free, or upgrade to a premium plan.
Mouseflow – the analytics tool to fix pain points
Mouseflow gives insight to visitors’ behavior and provides opportunity to fix pain points with session replay, heatmaps, funnels, form analytics, and feedback campaigns. It shows a recording of the activity from each visitor on your site – just like CCTV. And you can also filter/segment them. Thus eliminating guesswork and ensuring more concrete actions are taken quickly. Free plan for 500 pageviews/month and basic packages start at $29/month for 10,000 pageviews/month.
Woopra – analytics across platforms
Woopra promises to track your website, apps, emails, and more to truly understand your customers. It is real time website analysis tool that targets customer engagement and provided meaningful reports. There are plans available for startups to Fortune 500. It is free for up to 30,000 actions/month and starts from $79.95 for 400,000 actions/month.
Chartbeat – analytics tool for editors
Chartbeat provides real time data that lets you know your audience. It helps in identifying top content and traffic sources, its is analytics for editors. It lets you filter your audience by location, referral source, device, or visit frequency. With Chartbeat, you can build a loyal audience through audience-behavior trends, quality interactions and other benchmarks.
Clicky – real time web analytics
Information from Clicky is real time and it provides a detailed report on every segment of visitors. It lets you see every visitor and every action they take on your website. It also allows you to view heatmaps for individual visitor sessions, including segmentation. Clicky is free for 3,000 daily page views and starting at $9.99 for 30,000 daily page views.
Mixpanel – user engagment measuring tool
Mixpanel is another real time analytics tools that is very handy in measuring user engagement. It is a tool that measures and understands every user’s journey with instant insights for everyone on mobile and web. It is free for 20M data points/month and starts at $99/month for 1M data points /month.
The right web analytics for you
Finding a good analytics tool will help you in the long run. So make the effort and compare the different tools to assess which will bring you the most benefits. As you will be able to gauge your success and make changes with the information provided from web analytic tools that you use.
