7 Best Web Analytical Tools to Track Your Visitors In 2018

7 Best Web Analytical Tools to Track Your Visitors In 2018 1Getting traffic is very important to build your business. And at the same time, you need to know how you are getting these traffic.

Analyzing the traffic data can help you to grow your sales, leads, and traffic even further. 

As a website owner, you should know which sources provide the highest quality traffic, which posts deliver the highest amount of traffic, which posts are ranking high on Google, and other useful data.

There are plenty of web analytical tools out there to track your visitors. But you need to be careful while choosing an analytical tool as you have to stick with the tool to get the old data. 

To make things easier for you, I am going to share a list of 7 Best Web Analytical Tools with pros and cons.

Let’s get started.

1. Google Analytics

We can’t talk about analytics and data without mentioning the beast by Google — Google Analytics. It’s the best analytical tool to track your visitors. It will tell you who is visiting your site, from where they are visiting, how long they are staying, and many more.

This tool is free of charge and has a lot of advanced features you can’t find in many of the other tools, even the paid ones.

Read: How To Set Up Google Analytics On WordPress

Pros:

  • Free of charge.
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    Show all the traffic stats.
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    Create custom goals and funnels to track the ROI of the traffic you get.
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    Track e-commerce data.
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    Create custom reports as you need.
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    The Analytics Academy is great to help get you up to speed when using the tool.

Cons:

  • There is a bit of a learning curve to understand and benefit from all the data you get.
  • The user interface is not that simple, and you can get lost getting the data you want with all the reports available in the dashboard.
  • Sometimes it is tricky to set up manually.
  • If you have high traffic and you want to upgrade to premium, the price is $150k per year.

2. Clicky

Clicky is the best alternative to Google Analytics. It’s my favorite analytical tool. I found it more user-friendly than Google Analytics. You can see all the stats like visitors, content, referring links, searches, countries, traffic sources, and more from a single dashboard.

Founded in 2006 by Noah Merritt, this company has been growing very fast. A lot of bloggers are moving to Clicky and view it as a better option over Google Analytics including Ramsay from Blog Tyrant.

Pros:

  • Create heat maps on any page in the site you want.
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    Real-time data without leaving your site using the button at the bottom.
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    The interface is so much cleaner than Google Analytics.
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    Analyze videos on your site and see the number of hours watched for each video.
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    See Twitter mentions in the dashboard.

Cons:

  • Most of the benefits can’t be used except on the paid plan.
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    The data is simple which is beneficial for most bloggers, but if you want to get geeky, this tool is not for you.


3. Jetpack Site Stats

Jetpack is the ultimate WordPress plugin for design, marketing, and security. It has a feature named Site Stats which can show you a quick glance about your traffic data inside the WordPress dashboard.

It’s very easy to setup and use. You don’t have to add any scripts or code. All you need to do is, install and activate the Jetpack plugin. You can also check your site stats via WordPress Mobile App.

Pros:

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    Free to use.
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    Easy to install.
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    Checking traffic directly from the WordPress dashboard.
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    Great for beginners. It easily offers most of the data you need as a beginner when tracking is not that important for you yet.

Cons:

  • Provides only basic data when compared to Google Analytics and other tools in this post.
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    You need to have a WordPress.com account. (not a big deal)

4. Gaug.es

Gaug.es is another tool created to combat the confusing dashboard of Google Analytics. It is geared more toward the people who would like to get started and be able to understand data in much less time.

Again, it doesn’t compete with Google Analytics when it comes to features. That is why many sites, like Github, use both.

Pros: 

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    Simple to use. There is not a lot of cluttered data — just the important ones.
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    The real-time data is very good.
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    The site is fast.

Cons:

  • Not packed with features like Google Analytics.
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    It costs a little bit of money.

5. Woopra

Woopra is another popular Traffic Tracking Software. Founded in 2009, it’s the first to offer real-time visitors count way before Google Analytics did.

It is way more advanced than all the tools mentioned in the post. One feature that separates it from all the other tools is the ability to trigger personalized message or interaction based on viewers’ behavior and attributes.

So you can trigger emails or post slack messages when visitors trigger a specific action. But to get it, you need to pay $1000/mo.

Pros:

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    Has 50+ integration.
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    The ability to trigger messages can be great when closing high-end deals.

Cons:

  • The free version is limited and has only 500k actions tracked.
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    Very, very expensive: $1k/month.
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    Won’t be useful for most bloggers.

6. SEMRush

SEMRush has built a great name when it comes to SEO and getting traffic to your site. It has also expanded its feature set to help you analyze your organic traffic and PPC of any keyword.

Not only that, you could use it to track and analyze your competitors to get a better understanding of their efforts and how they get their traffic.

Pros:

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    Easily analyze your competitors and see how you compare with them.
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    Analyze paid keywords.
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    Uncover positions of your URLs and see how you can quickly improve your rankings by analyzing other sites.

Cons:

  • It is not a complete tracker. It helps with certain aspects of getting more organic traffic. You can’t depend on it only.
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    It starts at $100/month, which is quite expensive. But don’t forget all the other features when it comes to getting organic traffic.

SEMrush has both free and premium version. If you want to give a test drive on SEMrush premium, you can use our promo link to get free trial for 14 days.


7. SimilarWeb

Another great tool that enables you to see the data of other websites and as well as their traffic source.

It has a great way to track users on multiple platforms instead of the cookies used by Google Analytics.

Pros:

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    Track users on multiple platforms.
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    Compare your sites to your competitors.
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    See all the traffic going out from your site.
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    See similar sites who are competing on the same keyword.

Cons:

  • The pro version starts at $199, which is not cheap.

Conclusion: Which Tools to Use?

So after we analyzed the top 7 tracking tools you can use, now let’s see which ones you should use.

If you are on WordPress and you are just starting out, Jetpack is a great tool to help you get started.

If you want all the data you can get, Google Analytics is the way to go. You may consider adding it with Jetpack and other tools.

If your site is getting more traffic and you want simpler tools to check out, Clicky and Gaug.es are the tools you should use.

If you really have so much traffic and want to optimize things and trigger events, then Woopra is the tool to use.

Hope this post helped you to find the right analytical tool for you. If you’ve found this post useful, please help me by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

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4 responses to “7 Best Web Analytical Tools to Track Your Visitors In 2018”

  1. Sajid Akhter Avatar

    Hi Istiak,

    I have been using Google Analytics on my website. I think SEMRush is good though I dont know much about similarweb.

    Thanks for sharing this lovely list. Have a good day. :)

    1. Istiak Rayhan Avatar
      Istiak Rayhan

      Hi Sajid,

      Thanks for stopping by. Google Analytics and SEMrush are enough to track your visitors.

  2. Shout Me Crunch Avatar

    Still, third-party tracking software like Histats can be a great tool. It is free and gives real-time traffic monitoring.

    1. Istiak Rayhan Avatar
      Istiak Rayhan

      Thanks for sharing this tool.

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