Best Tools to Track Web Metrics

Imagine building without a blueprint? Or running a marathon in the dark? This is what many businesses do when running a website without accurately tracked web metrics. Web metrics allows anyone to understand a site better and take advantage of this understanding to get a desired result on the website.

Important web metrics to track

First, the web metrics have to be tracked. Once tracked, it becomes easier to measure and analyze web data to optimise website usage. Having knowledge of the finest details about how viewers interact on a website can give the website owner a competitive advantage over others in the same niche.

There are a lot of website metrics that need to be tracked to give a very comprehensive overview of the website. The traffic of the website needs to be tracked. Website owners must be mindful about whether they are getting the desired traffic or not. There is also need to track where the traffic is coming from (traffic source); is it direct and organic? (Those who type in the website address in a web browser). Or Is it from social media? Is it from search engines and which search engine? While doing that, the bounce rate on the website also needs to be tracked because it details how long website visitors stay on the website.

Other metrics to track include top pages, conversion rate, lifetime value of each repetitive visitor and so on. Having a tool that makes it easy to track all these different web metrics will expose website owners to the fundamental understanding of how to properly position the website to get the desired objective. This can be done with the help of a specialist SEO agency or with the help of the following 8 Best Tools to Track Web Metrics.

Google Analytics

This is a free tool for getting real-time website metrics. Asides from the popularity of this tool, Google analytics prides itself in being one of the best tools for tracking the different parameters of a website which can be downloaded (as a report) to study later. The benefits of this tool are numerous, and website owners can start with this free tool.

Another advantage of this is that Google AdWords can be integrated based on web metrics gotten to create a more effective marketing campaign. It is a simple tool to use, and it can be customised to support the specific web metrics that are important to the website owner. Google analytics is very compatible with most websites (if not all) because of the simplicity of implementation. While the free version of Google Analytics is available to all, there is also the paid version, called Google Analytics 360, which is for big brands needing larger data analysis.

Mint

This is not a free tool. The company charges about thirty dollars per website registered on it but comes with a lot of free add-ons to personalize the kind of web metrics that website owners want to track. Just like Google Analytics, Mint allows website owners to track and measure different types of web metrics. One of the impressive features of Mint is that website owners can get real-time statistics of website visitors.

Moz

Moz is a very specific tool for tracking the website SEO and focusing on ways to improve it. For website owners who are more concerned about getting more traffic through search engines, they can consider using this to improve the SEO ranking of the website.

Crazy Egg

If concerned about whether the website design and content is effective, the Crazy Egg web metrics tracking tool is the best option. Crazy Egg gives website owners accurate detail about each activity of visitors on the website; like pages or post where visitors are visiting, links they are clicking on and the ones they are not clicking on, areas of the website that they frequently hover their mouse on and so on. Crazy Egg is able to do this by generating heat maps and scroll maps.

Website owners also have the opportunity to do an a/b test on improvements they want to make on the website (as regards content and website design). Although Crazy Egg is not free, neither is it too price. Using the tool costs twenty-nine dollars per month. Unsure about using this for your website? There is a thirty-days free trial that you can take advantage of before finally making any serious financial commitment.

Clicky

Clicky is also another interesting tool for tracking web metrics. It has the same features that Google Analytics offers but it takes it a step further by giving users the opportunity to get real-time analytics of their website (just like Mint) with the big screen feature. With this, website owners can know the number of visitors on the website, what they are doing on the site and their point of existing (showing the last activities they performed on be website before leaving).

This web metrics tracker is free to use. However, to have access to features like the big screen, users would have to pay a fee monthly (as low as about nine to ten dollars per month).

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is often referred to as the advanced form of Google Analytics. This tool is the Holy Grail for tracking web metrics because of the excellent feature that allows website owners to get precise data about activities of each visitor. This is really good for e-commerce websites that help with gathering data about items visitors are checking, how they behave with sections of the website that is important to the website owners like shopping carts and checkout pages (which is where they make a decision to buy or not).

Kissmetrics also offers users the opportunity to send emails to very specific visitors based on the observed bahavior on the website, especially if it signals that they are potential customers who are likely to make a purchase. Using Kissmetrics costs about five-hundred dollars per month.

Woopra

Woopra is also another interesting tool to track web metrics. It also offers real-time analytics and the opportunity to live chat with visitors on the website. Overall, this tool comes in very handy for e-commerce websites.