So, are you looking for an easy way to track your site visitors in let’s say your WordPress website? By tracking the number of your website visitors can greatly help you get insights to grow your business. And you can even better understand your audience, look at which posts they like, where they come from, and how they use your website.
As I mentioned earlier, in this article, if you’re a well-polished webmaster, you very well know that nothing is juicier than having unique visitors to your site traffic. And by far, tracking website traffic is one of the most important indicators of your website’s performance.
During this exercise — as you track your site visitors, more web visitors mean more opportunities for converting them into subscribers and customers. It also unlocks promising insights that you may have missed. That said, why does it matter so much?
Why is it Important to Track your Site Visitors?
Visitor tracking is essential for any business to capture key information and details about their website performance. Any business large or small can benefit from being aware of how customers are behaving on their website. As you try to unlock any promising insights that you may have missed.
For example, you can find out which country or city your visitors are from. As a result, this can help you deliver more personalized content to your readers. Or even figure out which languages you should translate your website in.
And when you see which blog post is getting a lot of traffic, you can then try to come up with similar topics to help your users.
Related Topic: Why are Unique Visitors so Important in Website Analytics?
Equally important, another benefit that’s often seen as you track your site visitors is that of uncovering which source they used to find your website. For instance, did the users perform a search on Google and then landed on your webpage.
Or maybe they found your brand mentioned in a link on another similar site or platform. This way you can focus your marketing efforts and investment on channels that work.
What’s More,
- Better Understand Your Visitors – Tracking traffic sources can help you identify your visitor’s geographic location and which channels they use, so you can better understand them and provide targeted messages
- Measure Your Marketing Campaigns – If a campaign is built around driving traffic then you can measure its effectiveness by tracking different traffic sources
- Focus on Channels for Best Results – By identifying which channel performed the best in getting visitors to your site, you can focus on it more to get better results
- Find New Content Topics – People from different channels might be interested in specific topics, so you can discover new content ideas by checking traffic sources for each page
- Identify Traffic Gaps on Your Site – You can identify which channel doesn’t perform well in attracting visitors, so you can optimize it as relying on a single source can be risky for your site
Tracking also allows webmasters to optimize their site to convert visitors into leads. And depending on the tool you use to track your site visitors, there are many assistance features they’ll provide you with.
Some of them will allow you to:
- Know if your new content is immediately popular.
- Gather information about which social media posts/networks are driving visitors.
- Get real-time insight into how a visitor travels through your website.
- See which products and sales deals are garnering the most attention.
- Real-time notifications if a particular person/company visits your site.
- Analyze and learn more about which pages generate the most sales leads, etc.
In addition, by tracking your site visitors, you can collectively conduct a clean audit on your site. Such as using tracking sources to audit your marketing. Furthermore, you’d want to make sure you’re spending your money where it really counts.
So, in other words, tracking your visitors can provide important information about marketing campaigns and web page content. And as a result, you’ll easily learn where to funnel your marketing funds correctly. With the help of analytics that shows you exactly what appeals to the customer.
What can Customer Journey Analytics do for you?
First of all, a good customer journey analytics (CJA) allows you to see every action in the context of the journey your site customer takes. And in many cases, it’s a service built on experience platforms that lets you join all of your data together.
From every channel into a single interface for real-time, cross-channel analysis and visualization. And as a result, this allows you to make better decisions with a holistic view of your business and the context behind every customer action.
Secondly, you’ll be able to connect all your customer data together. As you connect and standardize data from every online or offline source in Customer Experience Platform too. Allowing for fast, non-destructive querying, analysis, and modeling.
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And you’ll be able to interactively explore the whole customer journey. While you visualize a customer’s journey across multiple channels sequentially. As you also put each action in context while enabling cross-channel analysis of things like flow and fallout.
In addition to that, you’ll also make it easy for anyone in your business team to effectively use this customer journey data. Giving anyone in your company who is responsible for customer experience the ability to make data-driven decisions. Particularly, those informed by a complete picture of a customer’s actions.
Not only that but you’ll also be able to unlock the power of data science. Whereby, you’ll give normal humans access to data science tools. Allowing them to unlock deeper insights and perform a more powerful analysis.
And then lastly, you’ll get value faster. As you discover insights in minutes instead of days or weeks.
Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) & Existing Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions
A good Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) is solely attached to existing Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions perse. But, mainly, CJA allows you to track product purchases across channels in a single interface.
Using an integrated product, order, and revenue metrics. As you build your analysis with the right metrics in minutes. You’ll also be able to show which web pages prompt the most call center calls.
While on the other hand, with CJA, you’ll be able to build flow analysis charts for individual segments or customers across channels. It’s also so seamless to create easy-to-use, self-serve data views that update in real-time using CJA solutions.
But, how does Customer Journey Analytics compare to existing Business Intelligence Solutions? Well, there are some known instances where Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions gets to compare with Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) Solutions. Let’s, for instance, consider the Use Case in our comparison.
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Whereby, you may compare CJA to other existing BI solutions — it acts on comparing orders made on the web, in an app, at a point of sale, and through a call center. As well as learning why website visitors call customer service. Or even tracking customers from an ad impression to your web visits to in-store visits.
Then again, compared to BI solutions, it also allows executives to view Black Friday in-store and online traffic in real-time. On the contrary, let’s consider the Existing Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions — that require complicated data science and are quickly out of date.
With comparable metrics and analysis taking even weeks to build. And thus, this particular solution is not possible with other modern and newly existing stacks. Not forgetting, at times, the BI Solutions Analysis of Black Friday is not available for executives until days or weeks later.
How do you Track your Site Visitors?
Now that you know why it’s important to track your site visitors, do you run your own website? Well, you can easily see who’s visiting your site right now with some of the best real-time visitor tracking tools. Out there, there are so many tools for live website visitor tracking (a sub-set of web analytics).
Uniquely, all these tools give you a way to instantly see what people are doing on your site in real-time. But, before we dive into the tools to use, there’s a quick note about website visitor tracking on sites you don’t own. And that note is:
Any tool which claims to be able to show you live data on third-party sites is not being truthful. Not to mention, sites like Alexa can give you a few clues about the headline visitor numbers. But no external tool can see a site’s real-time visitors without the owner’s consent.
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Even if it’s such a powerful tool like Google Analytics — the most powerful website visitor tracking software on the market. And now that it’s a tool that allows you to see how many visitors you are getting on your site. As well as what they do while visiting your website.
Besides Google Analytics, there are no doubt about other excellent site analytic packages out there. Okay, let’s have a look at some web tracking tools that can greatly help you track your site visitor easily and quickly. Starting with the obvious one:
Google Analytics
As I have mentioned, Google Analytics is one of the most powerful website visitor tracking software on the market today. It allows you to see how many visitors you are getting and what they do while visiting your website.
But, you’ll need to sign up for a Google Analytics account first. Luckily, you can use any Google or Gmail account to sign up. Next, you will be asked to provide an account name. And then after that, Google Analytics will ask you to choose your most preferred platform.
In that case, you can select your website as your preferred tracking property here. Next, you’ll need to provide your website name, URL, country, and time zone. And then after that, you can click on the Create button to continue.
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So, to get set up, you’ll need to add a tracking code to your site. Finally, you will be presented with the Google Analytics tracking code to copy and paste into your website. You can manually place the code after the <head> tag on each page you want to track.
Some backends such as WordPress offer plugins that’ll add the code automatically. If you use Real-Time, you will be able to use event tracking to monitor the usage of your site’s mobile app. Or even watch the performance of any promotions you’re running.
As well as monitor your goals in line with site changes. What’s more, is that Google Analytics is entirely free to use.
Other Analytics Tools Include:
- Adobe Analytics
- Mixpanel
- Matomo
- Statcounter
- Yandex Metrica
- Amplitude
- Baidu Analytics
- HubSpot
- Leadfeeder
- Kissmetrics
In addition to the list above, you can also consider other additional tools too. Like Woopra, GoSquared, FoxMetrics, Heap, Clicky, Serpstat, SE Ranking, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. As well as Mention, Chartbeat, Optimizely, Marketo, etc.
Whether you’re trying to build a low-cost marketing automation stack or trying to get personalized information about who’s visiting your website, the tools here provide a variety of options beyond what you get from Google Analytics.
Why traditional web analytics tools are useful
Traditional web analytics tools help you understand who visits your website, and what user interaction is taking place. For example, you can collect data like:
- Traffic: find out how many people view your website, where they are coming from, and whether they are new or returning users
- Time on page: see how long visitors spend browsing your most important pages
- Bounce rate: learn how many visitors leave your website after visiting a single page
With this information, you can start to optimize your website performance and make significant improvements. But, there is a caveat! Eventually, you’ll reach the point where traditional analytics data won’t be enough to really understand how visitors are experiencing your website.
And the majority of analytics professionals we polled for our survey agreed—Google Analytics and equivalent tools don’t help them understand why customers do what they do. This brings us to our next point…
What traditional web analytics data won’t tell you
Web analytics tools—like the ones we mentioned above—give you a useful and comprehensive log of what happens on your website, but there are some questions they cannot answer on their own, like what:
- Your visitors were looking for when they landed on your site,
- What they think and experience as they browse through its pages,
- Which information is missing,
- Whether visitors left happy after finding what they needed, or
- If they left frustrated after getting stuck somewhere, etc.
This is where complementary behavior analytics software can help you paint a clearer picture and understand how visitors experience your site.
With tools like heatmaps and session recordings (more on this later), behavior analytics tools add a qualitative dimension to the information you collect from tools like GA, so you can get answers to those magic wand questions that web analytics alone can’t answer.
What should you do?
Instead of seeing traditional analytics and behavior analytics as giving you two distinct datasets (quantitative traffic data and qualitative UX data), you’ll get a lot more out of both if you learn how to combine them for greater effect. For example:
- First, use quantitative data—like page views, bounce rate, or session duration—to identify problem pages and find your best-converting content
- Then, add a behavior analytics tool to collect qualitative information, and to understand the user behavior behind the big numbers
Using both quantitative and qualitative data, you’ll know more about why users leave without converting and will be able to identify which changes and improvements to make to your site.
Behavior Analytics Tools Used By Experts
Behavior analytics tools help you collect and analyze user behavior on your website by giving you visual cues about visitor clicks and browsing activity, and by allowing you to get direct feedback on the user experience (UX).
Below is a list of the top 8 behavior analytics tools that came up in our web analytics survey, in order of popularity:
By conducting your website analytics, you can measure the Lifetime Value (in short LTV) for users acquired through your different analytics channels. The LTV Report lets you understand how valuable different users are to your business based on lifetime performance.
Basically, LTV is an estimate of the average revenue that a customer will generate throughout their lifespan as a customer. This ‘worth’ of a customer can help determine many economic decisions for a company.
Including marketing budget, resources, profitability, and trade forecasting. It is a key metric in subscription-based business models, along with MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).
3 New (ish) Cookieless Analytics Tools
Privacy-focused analytics is a relatively new category that addresses two customer concerns that came up during our survey: privacy, and feature bloat. Below are three simple, cookieless, and privacy-focused analytics tools to try:
When we asked 2000+ experts about their biggest challenges with traditional website analytics, their second most common issue was that the volume of data and options were overwhelming.
Privacy concerns also popped in the ‘other (please specify)’ field, so we think both are worth addressing too.
Final Thoughts,
As an illustration, in one of our State of Web Analytics reports, we asked 2000+ professionals to name the web analytics tools they currently rely on. And then we closely looked at the results they provided. Including the Top 9 traditional analytics tools, and the 8 most popular behavior analytics tools.
Plus, in this article, we go one step further by introducing 3 new(ish) cookieless analytics options for you to consider. And as you know, any blogger or site owner worth his or her salt will tell you how essential it’s to know if your site is performing well or not.
But, first, you’ll have to know what is working, what isn’t, — what trends will make your site the next “must-read” stop for visitors each day. And the only way to effectively do this is to have a good statistics package working in the background. However, figuring out which package is best for your site can be tricky.
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Not until your site starts earning some revenue, you’re best starting off with something free. Then, as your site grows, you may want to pay for a few more features. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll start off with a free package that can grow with you, and it may be the only package you’ll ever need.
With that in mind, the list above covers our top ten both free and paid solutions to track your site visitors. While allowing your site to hit the ground running. Hopefully, some of these insights from these tools will show you just what a success your site really is.
But, of course, there are so many other new and well-established web analytics tools that have dozens of features you won’t find elsewhere. Specifically, some of them are even custom-designed to fit your unique needs. Such as recognizing which businesses are visiting your site or monitoring brand mentions throughout the web.
Have you used any of the tools listed above to track your site visitors? Which one of them did you find to be more useful? Please, do let us know some of your thoughts in our comments sections. But, if you’ll need more support, you can Contact Us and let us know how we can help you.
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