The 29 Best Web Analytics Tools

Revised March 8, 2017
Revised February 22, 2017

While chief marketing officers are under increasing pressure to quantitatively demonstrate the ROI of marketing investments, most still struggle with it. Yet as pointed out on Marketing Charts, “What’s interesting to see is that CMOs don’t seem to be pursuing what’s being touted as the solution to the ROI struggle: marketing analytics.”

Analytics tools can ultimately help measure ROI. But more importantly, they can provide more granular detail on what’s working and what’s not, helping marketers make smart decisions about what to do more of, less of, differently, or not all, and even what to try next. ROI is a financial metric, and vital at a high level to show value to the business. But web analytics tools ideally provide marketers with actionable information.

Put another way, it’s great to be able to demonstrate a positive ROI from content marketing; it’s more essential, particularly at the director level and below, to understand why, in order to continually optimize strategies and tactics.

In the web presence optimization model, content is distributed through online channels to maximize brand visibility. Metrics (measured by web analytics tools) provide actionable insights that feed back into content development planning.

These 29 tools can help marketers understand web traffic and industry trends, sources of traffic, website visitor engagement and behavior, content performance, competitive insights, campaign results,  social media metrics, conversion optimization, and more.

1) Google Analytics
Google Review Count: 600

By far the most popular free web analytics tool, Google Analytics is used on more than half of the top one million websites. Though the tool has its shortcomings and limitations (e.g., it often miscategorizes visits from smaller search engines as referral traffic, and requires use of advanced segments to filter out bot traffic), its extensive capabilities for tracking visit sources and on-site behavior make it appealing.

Sample review: “Google offers a ton of free tools on how  to use its amazing platform so if you have the time, you can teach yourself all you need to know to manage your own analytics. While it’s not the simplest tool in the world, the only thing better at measuring would be your own servers.” — Hunter & Bard

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Blogging Wizard (Analytics), Blogging Wizard (Monitoring), Hunter & Bard, iMedia Connection, Marketing Insider Group, MarketingLand, Online Marketing Institute, RazorSocial (Analytics), RazorSocial (Technology), RazorSocial (World), Robbie Richards, SmartBug Media, SnapApp, Social Media Examiner, StoreYa Blog

2) Inspectlet
Google Review Count: 353

Inspectlet records videos of your visitors as they use your site, allowing you to see everything they do. See every mouse movement, scroll, click, and keypress. Pinpoint what gets visitors’ attention, what causes confusion, and where individual users dropped off within the conversion funnel.

Sample review: “Inspectlet provide site owners a visitor oriented analytics alternative with brand new technology – recordings of site use through the eyes of the visitor…Using this data, owners can raise conversion rates by focusing sales copy and tasks in the areas visitors see most often.” — Oneextrapixel

Pricing: free, plus four levels from $39 to $299 per month, with enterprise pricing by quote

Showcase reviews: Oneextrapixel

3) Chartbeat
Google Review Count: 295

Identify your top content and traffic sources; filter your audience by location, referral source, device, or visit frequency; uncover pages with the highest new and return traffic; and test headlines and benchmark performance.

Sample review: “Website monitoring of individual visitor events rather than page views providing a complete look into what works and what does not…see where traffic comes from, what visitors are doing, how long they have been doing it, and how far down the page they scrolled. These pieces of information come in an easily digestible form.” — Oneextrapixel

Pricing: plans start at $10 per month

Showcase reviews: Oneextrapixel

4) Clicky
Google Review Count: 292

Clickly logs and reports on a wide range of onsite activities including pageviews, downloads, and outbound link clicks; event alerts (on conversions, for example); bounce rate; campaigns; goal conversions; traffic sources; Twitter analytics; and more.

Sample review: “While other analytics tools update once per day, Clicky gives you real-time stats and even lets you watch visitors’ actions live (spooky, but fun). Clicky’s dashboard is user-friendly and non-intimidating for those who get overwhelmed by too many numbers (I’m with you!). A premium account will also give you access to cool features like heatmaps, goal-setting, funnel/path analysis, campaign tracking, and conversions.” — Blogging Wizard (Analytics)

Pricing: free or four levels from $10 to $38 per month

Showcase reviews: Blogging Wizard (Analytics), Oneextrapixel, Sourcewp

5) W3Counter
Google Review Count: 290

See who’s on your site right now, what content has their attention, and how they found you. Track how many signups or sales each of your ad campaigns, social media posts, or other promotions have generated.

Sample review: “W3counter offers you over 20 real-time web stats report to help you have a detailed information about the incoming traffic to your website. With this system, you can identify the most engaging pages of your site so that you can improve them further to increase the revenue of your site.” — Sourcewp

Pricing: free, $5 or $20 per month

Showcase reviews: Sourcewp

6) KNIME
Google Review Count: 284

An open source analytics tool for data scientists.

Sample review: KNIME is “an open source piece of software used mostly outside of marketing, but is excellent for data piping, prototyping custom built software, advanced analysis, and reporting. As far as tools are concerned, it’s a jack of all trades.” — Robbie Richards

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Robbie Richards

7) Google Tag Manager
Google Review Count: 255

Create and implement tags to track events (such as off-site clicks) and marketing campaign results. Powerful but not easy to use.

Sample review: “In the past, updating your website’s tags probably involved a call, email, and follow-up call to your IT department. But with the arrival of Google Tag Manager, the process has been streamlined.” — iMedia Connection

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: iMedia Connection

8) Woopra
Google Review Count: 255

Profile individual users, track real-time activity, analyze segments and funnels, and automatically display personalized content based on  notifications.

Sample review: “This system is focused on what’s happening on your site rather than the page views, because generally the number of page views doesn’t give you any idea about how to create your revenue of your site…Also, it can offers you real-time data driven analytics.” — Sourcewp

Pricing: free; multiple levels from $80 to $1,200 per month; and enterprise pricing by quote

Showcase reviews: Sourcewp

9) QuickSprout
Google Review Count: 250

Displays traffic from organic search, top pages viewed in the past week, top referral sites, and social media traffic. Be sure to enter the right URL; you can’t change this once it’s been tracked.

Sample review: “Type in any URL, even a popular authority site and see which posts have performed well in social media by the number of social shares. QuickSprout also gives you quick SEO and website speed analysis along with recommendations for improvement.” — Cent Muruganandam

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Buffer Social, Cent Muruganandam, Perception System

10) Mixpanel
Google Review Count: 233

Measure actions users take in your app, see if they come back, send notifications via email or push, pinpoint where and why you lose customers, and conduct A/B split tests.

Sample review: “MixPanel says it has created the most advanced platform for mobile and web to measure engagement metrics, not just page views. The segmentation tool simplifies queries by allowing marketers to visualize data in less than 10 minutes.” — MarketingLand

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: MarketingLand, Oneextrapixel, Sourcewp

11) Mint
Google Review Count: 221

Tracks site visits and trends, referring sites, top searches, most-viewed pages, subscription patterns, and other traffic metrics.

Sample review: “Mint is a simple alternative to Analytics. The setup is simple, the interface is simple, and report generating is simple. Rather than paying a monthly fee, users pay a one-time $30 licensing fee per site to download and use the current version with updates available free or at a low cost.” — Oneextrapixel

Pricing: $30 (one time) per site tracked, plus update fees

Showcase reviews: Oneextrapixel

12) FoxMetrics
Google Review Count: 210

The usual visitor metrics plus personalization, targeted surveys, customer-level tracking, and eCommerce data tools.

Sample review: “FoxMetrics gives you an option to create detailed profile for target audience and increase your sales. This is one of the best event tracking web analytics tool which can be really helpful for any business site. FoxMetrics offers you a number of different products and each one of them are focused towards increasing the revenue of your business.” — Sourcewp

Pricing: $299 or $599 per month, with enterprise pricing by quote

Showcase reviews: Oneextrapixel, Sourcewp

13) Kissmetrics
Google Review Count: 210

Analyze funnels / conversion paths through your website, compare results among different groups of visitors, track A/B tests, and optimize content for conversions.

Sample review: “These top marketing tools will help you grow…(use) Kissmetrics for increasing website conversions, tracking analytics, and personalizing experiences.” — Marketing Insider Group

Pricing: multiple levels from $220 to $1,400 per month, based on number of events tracked

Showcase reviews: Marketing Insider Group, MarketingLand, Oneextrapixel, Sourcewp, StoreYa Blog

14) Crazy Egg
Google Review Count: 190

Provides multiple types of heat maps to help analyze visitor behavior: what content elements get attention, where users (sgemented by referral sources and search) click on your site, which elements get the most clicks, and how far users scroll down your content.

Sample review: “Crazy Egg is a fantastic platform that allows marketers to see where users are clicking and what they’re interacting with while they’re on your website. It can also help you understand why people leave your site and how they’re interacting with your calls to action.” — Express Writers

Pricing: four levels from $9 to $99 per month

Showcase reviews: Express Writers, MarketingLand

15) Open Web Analytics
Google Review Count: 187

An open source analytics application that provides many of the same website visitor statistics as Google Analytics (pageviews, visits, conversion goals, events) plus click heatmaps and mouse movement recording, with no data logging limits or sampling.

Sample review: “Click heatmaps, mouse movement record and playback, and DOM click tracking are three features included you will not find with Google. WordPress and MediaWiki instrumentation is built-in and extensive.” — Oneextrapixel

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Blogging Wizard (Analytics), Oneextrapixel

16) Cyfe
Google Review Count: 186

Monitor web analytics (referring domains, search, keyword rankings) and conversions plus social media metrics, results from marketing channels, sales, and more.

Sample review: “Like dashboards? Then you’ll love Cyfe. You can create an unlimited number of dashboards with an unlimited number of widgets for only $19 per month.” — Social Media Examiner

Pricing: free or $19 per month

Showcase reviews: Blogging Wizard (Monitoring), Catherine Pham/SlideShare, Entrepreneur, MarketingLand, Moz, Robbie Richards, Social Media Examiner

17) Quill Engage
Google Review Count: 186

Analyzes your Google Analytics data and delivers insights about your site’s KPIs including sessions, pageviews, bounce rate, referral traffic, goal conversions, events, ecommerce, and AdWords.

Sample review: “Most (analytics tools) are complicated with too many options and data that is difficult to filter through. That’s where Quill Engage stands out. This is a fantastic social media tool that connects to Google Analytics, scans it, and puts the data into a detailed report. It focuses on the most important information you need and reports any significant changes.” — Rebekah Radice

Pricing: free, $20 or $50 per month

Showcase reviews: Rebekah Radice

18) Piwik
Google Review Count: 185

Self-hosted or cloud-based web analytics tracking visitors, engagement, on-site actions, goad converions, traffic sources, devices and more.

Sample review: “Piwik is an open-source analytics software that you can download and install on your own server…they also offered a hosted cloud version called Piwik Pro…Piwik’s data is updated in real time, and the dashboard is a bit more user-friendly than Google Analytics. Also, Piwik has some unique features including ecommerce analytics, advanced security/privacy measures, visitor profiles, and even a mobile app for iOS and Android.” — Blogging Wizard (Analytics)

Pricing: free(download) or four levels from $29 to $249 per month (hosted)

Showcase reviews: Blogging Wizard (Analytics), Sourcewp

19) Keen IO
Google Review Count: 170

Track any event from your website, app, game, or device and store it with Keen, connect to third-party applications, and view / share data in custom reports and dashboards.

Sample review: “Keen IO takes the pain out of custom analytics with powerful APIs to gather the data you want to find the answers you need, which is stored in the Cloud. Transform your data into answers to strengthen your network with scalable information in minutes.” — MarketingLand

Pricing: contact vendor for quote

Showcase reviews: MarketingLand

20) Tableau Software
Google Review Count: 170

Connect analytics data from different sources and discover insights through interactive dashboards or maps. Perform trend analyses, regressions, and correlations for statistical understanding.

Sample review: “Tableau is a way to organize and visualize your data, but it’s actually much more than that…if you learn how to use Tableau, you can get a much clearer view of business data for your site or company while also taking your content governance and analytics to the next level AND creating visually stunning charts, graphs and maps.” — Jeff Bullas

Pricing: $999 for personal edition or $1,999 for professional Tableau Desktop (purchase)

Showcase reviews: Jeff Bullas, MarketingLand

21) IBM Watson Analytics
Google Review Count: 170

A smart data discovery service in the cloud, IBM Watson Analytics guides data exploration, automates predictive analytics and enables effortless dashboard and infographic creation.

Pricing: $30 or $80 per month per user

Showcase reviews: MarketingLand

22) Gauges
Google Review Count: 143

Graphical, real-time web analytics including visitor data, top referral sites, pageviews, search terms, devices, and more.

Pricing: $6, $12, or $48 per month

Showcase reviews: Sourcewp

23) Chartio
Google Review Count: 141

Drag and drop data from a variety of sources to create, edit, filter, and share dashboards with a few clicks.

Pricing: editors $95 per month; viewers $25 per month

Showcase reviews: Marketing Insider Group

24) gShift Labs
Google Review Count: 140

A comprehensive analytics tool to track SEO (search traffic, top keywords, keyword rank) and content metrics, identify industry influencers, monitor backlinks, track competitors, and visualize conversion funnels.

Sample review: “Among several tools in its arsenal, gShiftlabs can help you identify which keywords to focus on and build your content around for your specific industry areas.” — SnapApp

Pricing: starts at $325 (brands) or $999 (agencies) per month

Showcase reviews: SnapApp

25) Megalytic
Google Review Count: 96

Connect data from Google Analytics, AdWords, Search Console, Facebook Insights, and other sources then create reports from scratch or using pre-built templates.

Pricing: four levels from $40 to $400 per month

Showcase reviews: MarketingLand

26) LeadSocial
Google Review Count: 90

Simple Facebook reports for business for spotting trends and opportunities, with industry comparisons for performance benchmarking.

Sample review: “Leadsocial is all about finding ways to get a return of your investment in Facebook.  One piece of functionality that’s useful for targeting the right people is the list of engaged fans. Leadsocial picks out the fans on your page that are engaging the most – sharing, commenting and liking.” — RazorSocial (World)

Pricing: three levels from $12 to $35 per month per page

Showcase reviews: RazorSocial (World)

27) Birdsong Analytics
Google Review Count: 90

BirdSong YouTube Analytics gives you access to over 30 key metrics for any publicly available YouTube channel/videos, including date posted, likes/dislikes/comments, views and activity, content analytics, and engagement measures.

Sample review: “Analyzing your competitors is a necessary step in any content marketing campaign. While it’s not meant to hinder your creativity, competitive analysis can help you identify what works better and how to engage your viewers effectively. The easiest and most effective tool to analyze your competitors’ Youtube channels is BirdSong Analytics’ Youtube Analysis feature.” — Moz

Pricing: “pay as you go” pricing based on report credits; $30 for a single report, with quantity package discounts available

Showcase reviews: Moz

28) Whatagraph
Google Review Count: 63

Whatagraph is a simple tool that automatically converts website and social data into visual reports for a quick performance overview. Create visual reports from Google Analytics, Facebook, or ecommerce analytics.

Sample review: “Whatagraph is (an) amazing tool that helps you know how your website and your social profiles have been performing.  This is a modern technology application that can help you stay connected with your audience.” — ToolOwl

Pricing: $29/$50/$399 per month

Showcase reviews: ToolOwl

29) KYA
Google Review Count: 40

Track your number of engaged readers per article/post/page, referral sources, audience demographic information, relative content performance, and other actionable metrics.

Sample review: “KYA’s focus on the individual user makes it easy to grasp your site’s data and put it into action. They have some great tools like their Engagement Tracking, which calculates a unique score for each page based on its audience engagement, including traffic, audience behavior, and social shares.” — Blogging Wizard (Analytics)

Pricing: free; three levels from $10 to $50 per month; and enterprise pricing by quote

Showcase reviews: Blogging Wizard (Analytics)

More Tools

Countly
Google Review Count: 160

An open source web and mobile analytics tool that supplies information about onsite and in-app behavior, push notifications and crash reports, user profiles, attribution tracking for traffic sources, the ability to segment groups of visitors, and campaign tracking.

Sample review: “Countly is an open-source mobile app analytics tool that supports Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry apps…It provides real-time analytics, multi-platform support and a non-prohibitive license. Their admin dashboard is detailed, fast, light and responsive.” — WooRank

Pricing: free (community version) $250 per month and up (enterprise version)

Showcase reviews: WooRank

Klipfolio
Google Review Count: 154

A tool for creating sales and marketing analytics dashboards, with pre-built integrations for hundreds of popular data sources (social networks, Google Analytics, Salesforce.com, email and marketing automation platforms, etc.) and databases (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.). Use pre-built visualization templates, combine data from different sources, and perform mathematical functions before display.

Sample review: “At the mid-to-low price range, Klipfolio provides excellent dashboard functions and powerful business intelligence features that compete with the largest players in the space.” — ClickZ

Pricing: four levels from $24 to $199 per month

Showcase reviews: ClickZ

PaveAI
Google Review Count: 14

PaveAI analyzes your Google Analytics data and automatically provides actionable recommendations. Some of the insights are more valuable than others, but while this tool won’t completely replace human analysis, the fact it looks at 16+ million possible combinations means it will almost certainly recognize patterns that human-only analysis would miss.

Sample review: “Marketers spend a fair amount of time analyzing and interpreting reports from tools like Google Analytics for clients and executives. AI can do most of the heavy lifting here. PaveAI combs through more than 16 million possible combinations of your analytics data to produce data-driven reports with insights and recommendations written in natural language.” — Marketing AI Institute

Pricing: $39/$79/$179 per month, plus enterprise pricing by quote

Showcase reviews: Marketing AI Institute

Showcase Reviews

Blogging Wizard (Analytics)
Blogging Wizard (Monitoring)
Buffer Social
Catherine Pham/SlideShare
Cent Muruganandam
ClickZ
Entrepreneur
Express Writers
Hunter & Bard
iMedia Connection (Content)
iMedia Connection (Tools)
Jeff Bullas
Marketing AI Institute
Marketing Insider Group
MarketingLand
Moz
Oneextrapixel
Online Marketing Institute
Perception System
RazorSocial (Analytics)
RazorSocial (Technology)
RazorSocial (World)
Rebekah Radice
Robbie Richards
SmartBug Media
SnapApp
Social Media Examiner
Sourcewp
StoreYa Blog
ToolOwl
WooRank

This was the 23rd post in the Best Online Business Tools series.

#1: Best Online Business Tools Series Kicks Off Today
#2: The 12 Best Competitive Intelligence and Benchmarking Tools
#3: The Nine Best Facebook Marketing Tools
#4: The 14 Best Content Planning and Research Tools
#5: The 23 Best Content Ideation Tools
#6: The 24 Best Online Writing Tools and Apps
#7: The Six Best Google+ Marketing Tools
#8: The Four Best Online Education Tools For Business Pros
#9: The 14 Best Marketing Automation Tools
#10: The 17 Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO and SEM
#11: The Seven Best File Sharing Tools
#12: The Five Best Infographic Creation Tools and Services
#13: The 28 Best Influencer Marketing Tools
#14: The Five Best Pinterest and Instagram Marketing Tools
#15: The 24 Best Visual Content Creation Tools
#16: The Six Best Online HR, Payroll, and Employee Scheduling Tools
#17: The 20 Best SEO Rank Tracker Tools
#18: The Six Best Screen Capture Tools
#19: The 15 Best Special-Purpose SEO Tools
#20: The Four Best Online Survey Tools
#21: The 26 Best All-in-One SEO Tool Suites
#22: The 32 Best Twitter Marketing Tools
#23: The 29 Best Web Analytics Tools