Thanks to the huge digital transformation wave that the pandemic made inevitable, more and more businesses now have established and are, for the most part, leaning on their online presence to reach a wider audience, generate more leads and retain their existing customers. Websites have become an essential part of every company’s existence through which they can build and promote their brand, improve their credibility and build trust with customers.

That is why it is highly important for you, as a website owner, to monitor your website traffic regularly. In that context, traffic accounts for any information related to the website visitors, including their number, how much time they spend on the site, which pages they browse the most and which ones they take action on.

Analysing such data can yield huge insights into how customers behave before they make a purchase. This can help companies implement changes, make better marketing decisions, and generally invest in improving their overall performance to boost sales.

Monitoring website traffic is not hard at all. Several different web analytics tools are already available that can help you measure the success of your website’s various parts, in addition to analysing the data from your website visitors.

Such tools are especially vital for e-commerce websites, for they can help boost sales and increase profit by showing the most and least sold products, for example. 

Website Traffic Checkers

So, what exactly is a web analytics tool?

Simply put, a website traffic checker, also known as a web analytics tool, is basically an online traffic measurement service that records the activity on websites and gives owners an understanding of their audience and their behaviour. As we mentioned earlier, this could be the number of users coming to the site, how they came to it, how long they are staying on the site, the pages visited, or the activities made, such as clicking on links, searching for certain items, and what these items are, purchasing, submitting a form, etc.

In a way, a web analytics tool can track the success of marketing campaigns by checking whether the number of users increases after they are launched and whether or not the products advertised in these campaigns, if there are any, receive higher demand.

A web analytics tool also shows what kind of audience members the website is entertaining. It gives information, for instance, about their gender, age, or even what country they are from. This point, specifically, reveals where products are most sold, which can help companies better regulate and distribute their products in the markets or even modify the way they are displayed on the website.

Luckily, using a web analytics tool is quite simple. It is only a matter of integrating it into your website before it starts collecting data right away. The question is not actually how to use website traffic checkers but instead which one of the thousands of options available out there is the most efficient.

Well, we are giving you five recommendations.

1. Google Analytics

When it comes to website traffic measurement tools, Google Analytics is the most popular one, with over 85% market share and around 38 million websites worldwide using it. It is suitable for any business of any size, from micro to large-sized enterprises. It not only monitors websites’ performances but also tracks data on mobile apps and even offline traffic.

Google Analytics can be easily linked to other Google products, such as Google Ads, Google Cloud, Search Ad 360, and Google Search Console, to generate more data and insights into website traffic. There is a free version and a paid version, each of which provides a variety of useful options based on the size of the website and the data website owners would like to generate.

For instance, the free version allows you to grab a load of dimensions and metrics, and it works best for small and medium-sized websites. The paid version, which they called Google Analytics 360, on the other hand, is more tailored towards larger websites and provides way more insights such big websites are more in need of.

You might wonder what exactly is meant by larger websites. Well, a website’s size is generally measured by the amount of traffic it receives per month. Larger websites, for example, have traffic in the millions per month, so they need to dig deeper.

That is why Google Analytics 360 costs as much as $150,000 per year, billed monthly at $12,500.

Google Analytics is also quite comprehensive and user-friendly. It can be customized to drive the data website owners believe is more important for their businesses.

Integrating Google Analytics is also relatively easy. You just need to go to Google Analytics and register as a new website. After that, you will be given a script, a tracking mode, that you need to attach to each page of your website. It will automatically start collecting data for you.

If you are using a content management system (CMS), such as WordPress or Magento, Google Analytics will probably be available as a feature or a plugin.

2. Crazy Egg

Quite a funny name, yes, but Crazy Egg is great for analysing website traffic as it gives some really cool features, such as heatmaps, scroll maps, recordings, surveys, confetti and overlay to monitor user activity. These features are convenient to help understand the behaviour of your website and give you an insight into the most viewed sections and the most interesting parts of your website as well.

Crazy Egg is also available for businesses of all sizes. The insights it derives can help you improve your website and make it more interesting for users.

Unlike Google Analytics, Crazy Egg does not have a free version. All the cool features we mentioned above must be paid for, and billing is annual. This option of monthly billing, unfortunately, is not available there. That said, you still get a 30-day free trial, which you can use to test the service for real and see if you are happy enough to pay for it.

Speaking of the paid plans, their prices are way lower than that of Google Analytics 360. There are five plans: Basic, Standard, Plus, Pro and Enterprise. The Basic plan is for $29 per month, billed annually. The Enterprise plan, on the other side of the spectrum, is a custom one that the website builds for enterprises, and the price is calculated accordingly. But the cost is usually more than $249/month anyways, which is the price for the Pro plan. The Plus plan, with $99/month, is the most popular one and the website’s best-selling.

As we mentioned, all those plans have a 30-day free trial.

3. Statcounter

Next, we have Statcounter.

Based in Dublin, Ireland, Statcounter is one of the oldest and most trusted web-based analytics tools, with over 1.5 million websites worldwide using it. It was founded back in 1999. For six whole years, it was the world’s most popular website traffic checker before Google Analytics came about in 2005 and took over. Yet, even with Google Analytics around, many web owners still use Statcounter, for it does have some unique features.

Besides the regular insights, such as the number of site visitors and the pages they viewed, Statcounter checks visitors’ demographics and gives you information about their location, which browser they are using to visit your website, the operating systems of their devices and whether or not they accessed your website using search engines or through social media and other websites.

Statcounter also offers a live update feature, which tracks what your website visitors are doing on the site in real time. It records their activities and enables playback so you can analyse those activities and understand why some visitors are becoming customers and why others are not—this is known as customer conversion.

Statcounter stands somewhere between Google Analytics and Crazy Egg. It has a free Basic plan with some features that do not include recording sessions replay. On the other hand, there are two other paid plans with different prices and more features.

There is the Premium plan and Premium Plus plan at €16 and €28 per month, respectively. Both plans have a free 30-day trial to try out the features and see which of them is suited for your website. No credit cards are required to start the free trial.

4. Kissmetric

Kissmetrics was launched back in 2009 and is based in San Francisco, California, USA. It is another excellent web analytics tool to ‘unlock unlimited revenue potential’ and is known for its easy implementation.

Kissmetrics gives you information about user segmentation and makes it easy to track users’ activity and which steps they take to convert to customers. It analyses the comings and goings of the website and pretty much checks where you are losing potential customers.

Kissmetrics is especially good for e-commerce websites. If you do use marketing methods, such as SEO, social media, or Google Ads, you can use Kissmetrics to measure the best marketing strategy for your website. 

There are no free plans on Kissmetrics. All three of its paid plans are recommended for small, medium-sized, and large teams, respectively. The Silver and Gold plans cost $199 and $499 per month, respectively, while the Platinum plan is custom, and the price is calculated based on the features added to it.

Yet, you can request a demo to see how the tool generally works or try out any of the three plans for free for 30 days to decide whether or not Kissmetrics will satisfy your website’s needs.

5. Contentsquare

The last web analytics tool is actually the most recent. Founded in 2012, Contentsquare is a cloud-based website traffic measurement tool that offers various features to help you understand how visitors interact with your website and what it takes to make a purchase.

One of Contentsquare’s outstanding features is session logging, which uses JavaScript and client-side logging to give you annoyingly detailed insights into what visitors do on your website over a certain period of time. It helps define visitors’ wants and needs and what you have to do to get them to take action.

Contentsquare offers solutions for teams working in digital marketing, e-commerce, analytics, design, and UX, as well as for businesses specialised in retail, telecom, and financial services. You can get a demo to understand how this platform generally works.

Last but not least, Contentsquare is also a paid tool. Unfortunately, plans and prices are not available on their website, so you will have to contact them to learn about that.

Monitoring website traffic is essential to gaining a detailed understanding of your visitors and what it takes to convert them into customers. It also helps reach a wider audience, gain more traffic, design and implement more efficient marketing campaigns, and eventually increase revenue.