- Marketing
The Best Website Analytics Tools For Your Website
Written by Alex Curtis
In the digital marketing space, interpreting web data drives success.
If your business is doing well, why should you track so much data? Ask yourself, how did it get there? Where is the business going next?
The reason lies in the efforts of your marketing strategies, ideas and various sources of measuring site traffic.
Acquiring information on how your audience interacts with your services or products as well as gaining insights on your competitors can be achieved and managed through a strong digital analytics platform.
Here are 3 of the best website analytics tools for 2021:
Google Analytics
(Best All-rounder)
Google Analytics is one of the most popular and robust analytics platforms available. Most of the platform is free to use, with the exception of some enterprise marketing aspects. This makes it ideal for any small to medium business to get started on a user friendly interface. They even offer free training on the digital analytics platform through the Google Analytics Academy, which is why they’ve made it on our list for best website analytics tools.
Key Features:
- Ecommerce tracking: Find out where your most profitable customers come from via the ecommerce analytics platform.
- Goals: Track anything that keeps the lights on e.g. sales, newsletter signups, ad views.
- Adwords: Track paid and organic search traffic.
- Site search: Find out what’s missing on your site by collecting search terms from your users.
- Campaigns: Track ROI of all your marketing campaigns
Clicky
(Best New)
Clicky has been making waves in web data in 2020 as one of the best analytics platforms with some users even migrating from Google Analytics. A key difference is that Clicky’s focus is on real time data whereas GA gives only partial realtime information as standard.
Key features:
- Real time data: Up to date information by the minute.
- Detailed reports: More details per unique visitor compared to the competition.
- Heatmaps: Visually see areas of your website where your visitors spend time.
- Spam/Bot Filter: Block automated bots from degrading the quality of your data.
Adobe Analytics
(Best Enterprise Package)
If you have a large and complex set of requirements, Adobe analytics is the way to go. It processes high volumes of data across all your marking segments in real-time. For large businesses looking to integrate and unify their data streams, look no further.
Key features:
- Advanced metrics: Combine metrics to calculate mathematical and statistical operations with infinite possibilities
- AI & ML engines: Uses artificial intelligence with machine learning to detect anomalies and patterns in your data.
- Advanced Segmentation: Segment audiences based on a time-based path through a series of interactions.
Other notable analytics tools: Mozz, Mint, Crazy Egg, SEMRush, Oribi, Alteryx – we’ll cover these in a future article.
If your website turns into a business, tracking success metrics becomes a standard. When you compare web analytics tools, they often provide a similar set of data and so it comes down to what is most useful to you and what you want to know for your business.
If you plan to outsource your digital needs, consider the extra costs of maintenance and paid advertising through those channels. However, if you are looking to get started on your own, Google Analytics is the best self-starter kit on the market.