Every business with an online presence (which, in this day and age, is every business) needs to keep track of what’s happening on its website.
You want to know what actions users are taking, which pages they’re viewing, and what their path to conversion looks like. If you have a web-based SaaS tool, this is particularly crucial; you need to understand what features are being used, and look for signs of sales opportunities or churn.
Web analytics are must-haves for your tech stack, and there are plenty of great choices on the market. In this post, we’re going to look at seven of the most useful analytics tools in 2023.
Web analytic tools are those that help you track what’s happening on your website. Many will show you important data like where online traffic came from, which pages visitors viewed, and what actions they took on your site.
Web analytics can be used for website development purposes, but they’re also often used as part of a brand’s product analytics and marketing analytics research.
There are a number of different types of web analytics tools that you can choose from, each of which may show you slightly different information. Because of this, it’s often a good idea to either choose a tool that covers all the data you need or to choose a few tools that complement each other well.
These are the most common types of web analytics tools:
When you’re choosing a web analytics tool (or tools plural!), there are a few things you want to consider:
All web analytics solutions have their own unique features and strengths. When choosing a tool that meets your needs, figure out which features you really want. In many cases, you’ll do best by finding a combination of tools that cover all of your business needs.
It’s actually best, when possible, to avoid finding a single tool for two reasons. First, it will reduce your dependency on a single solution (which can prevent a potential disaster if it stops being supported). And second, no tool is equally strong across all of its features, even if it positions itself as versatile.
Flexibility and being open to using multiple tools will often serve you best, giving you the strengths of multiple different platforms.
Matomo is a marketing-focused web analytics tool that advertises itself as a “Google Analytics alternative.” For brands who like Google’s overall analytics approach but who worry about privacy, data ownership, and user trust, this is a good option to consider.
See where traffic is coming from, what keywords are bringing them there, what actions they’re taking, and more.
With Matomo, you can:
Google Analytics is an exceptionally popular, thorough, and free website analytics tool. Many brands use it in 2023, knowing that it gives a pretty solid look at what’s happening with your website activity.
Google Analytics can show you a lot, including the following:
Google Analytics is a great free, accessible tool. It does have some limitations, especially compared to the other tools on this list, but it’s a good place to start.
Google Analytics, for example, is not capable of providing user journey data for individual users, like many other platforms. There’s also an incredibly strong reliance on sample data, which can be incredibly limited and not always provide the most accurate data.
Woopra is a customer journey product analytics tool that’s a great choice when you want to track user activity on your site and through your SaaS software.
This web analytics tool offers similar capabilities to what we’ve discussed so far, but they go more into detail about the activities of individual users. You can see their name, email, company size, average screens per session, and links to their social media profiles.
As users of your product take specific actions— like submitting a help desk ticket or using a specific feature— you can have this information logged and even sent to your CRM so your sales team can act. There are also triggered automation options you can set up through the platform, like sending an email when new users subscribe to your email list.
If you want to track real customer journeys at an individual level— which can be exceptionally helpful for product development and sales teams— this could be a good one to consider.
Smartlook is a session recording and behavioral analytics tool for both websites and mobile apps. You can see what users see during a session, including what pages they view and how long they’re looking at different parts of a page.
If you want to get exceptional insights into the user experience (or how your user is thinking), session recording tools can give you that like few other tools can. The ability to see exactly where users are looking and what their mouse is doing is incredible.
You can see what copy they read before they decide to add an item to a cart (or not). If they click on pricing and then immediately click away, for example, it’s possible that the price point was out of their budget. And if they seem to like a product enough to click on the care or manufacturing details and then click away, it means they found something they didn’t like.
In addition to session recording, Smartlook also offers heatmaps, along with event tracking to see all user actions. This is a detailed look inside your customer journey.
Hotjar is another session recording and heatmap tool, but it’s been around and wildly popular for a few years. With some great features, we had to mention it here.
Their session recording feature is outstanding, with a mouse-tracking feature that shows where users are scrolling so you can really see where they’re looking. They’ve also got a feedback widget that you can add to your site so users can share about their experience using your site. If there are any issues or optimization opportunities on your site, these features will help you find them.
When it comes to split testing web analytics tools, you’ll be hard pressed to beat Unbounce. It’s specifically a landing page testing creation tool with exceptional A/B testing features built into it.
Their traditional landing page builder allows you to create two versions of the same page, and they’ll alternately serve it to visitors to see which performs better. You can really see how small changes— like shifts in copy, or even shifts in the font the copy is written in— can make a huge impact on conversions and the user experience.
MyTracker offers detailed analytics for both mobile apps and for websites. Our analytics software is a free tool that combines both marketing and product analytics.
First, we’ll help you understand who your audience is, including their gender, age, and location.
We also offer behavioral analytics, showing you how users move through your site and how they’re progressing through different steps of funnels you’re tracking. You can see in the graph below, for example, how many users who entered a specific funnel would go on from step one to complete step two or three.
You can also track the following:
Web analytics are crucial tools that you absolutely need in 2023. Which tools you choose will depend on the information that you’re trying to obtain, and what your specific goals are. An eCommerce site won’t need the same kind of data a mobile app might need, for example.
Most of the tools on this list offer free trials, and those that don’t offer free demos. Take some time to find out which tools are right for you and give them a shot.
