The best services for web analytics

Web analytics is a useful tool for website owners and marketers. Analytical reports allow you to better understand the needs and habits of the audience, to find the strengths and weaknesses of the business. Such services offer reports on traffic, search queries by which users find you, heat maps of site behavior, and a lot of other useful information.

What can be done with web analytics tools?

You can find a lot of useful information in web analytics reports, which will help in the promotion.

• Traffic Sources. Find out where visitors come from – search engines, social networks, direct hits. Analytics will also show popular search terms that drive users to your resource.
• Attendance. In the reports you will find detailed information about each visit, the number of views and unique users.
• Usability. How users interact with the site, what elements they click on and what links they follow.
• Failure rate. Sometimes visitors do not interact with the site in any way and immediately leave. The reports will help you understand how often and why this happens.
• Conversion rate – the number of visitors who perform a targeted action on the site – purchases, subscriptions to newsletters, and others.
• Audience Analysis. View detailed reports about your audience – age, gender, geographic location. Based on this data, you will be able to build work with the interests of visitors.

Web analytics allows you to better understand your visitors and use that information to improve the experience on your site. For example, if you find that most users use mobile devices, you can focus on making the site more phone-friendly.

What vulnerabilities can web analytics detect?

In the world of SEO, the worst thing that can happen to your site is to get it blacklisted by search engines. This means that Google or another search engine will not show your resource to anyone at all. Security vulnerabilities are the fastest way to remove a website from the search engine index.

Analytics tools can help find not only security problems, but also other weaknesses:

• Technical problems. These include “broken” and cyclic links, too slow loading pages, incorrect display of content on mobile devices, lack of SSL-certificate – all these problems can lead to lower efficiency of the resource. Web analytics tools allow you to find technical shortcomings.
• Usability issues. Web analytics will help you find weaknesses in the usability of the site – the buttons that no one clicks on, calls to action that do not work, pages with low traffic. Knowing which elements are ineffective can improve the user experience on your resource.

Analytics gives you an idea of the changes you are making. After you’ve worked on individual elements or migrated a domain, analytics will allow you to quickly assess the changes.

What is best for a beginner to use?

There are a huge number of resources for web analytics. They collect data and generate convenient reports for further information and analysis.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics platform in the world. More than 30 million sites use this tool. Google Analytics analyzes a huge amount of data related to the site. If you want your business to be featured in a Google search, this is an indispensable tool. Key Features:

• A large number of reports. View data on visitors, time on site, search engine positions, demographics, and page load speed. To ensure that the site always loads quickly, it’s enough to buy a Windows VPS-server from Tuthost.
• Search for technical problems with the site.
• Evaluations of the effectiveness of different traffic channels.
• View activity on the site in real time, summarizing reports.
• Integration with AdWords and Adsense ad networks to collect monetization data.

To install Google Analytics, you just need to insert a small html fragment into the code of the pages.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a unique platform for data analysis. It collects all kinds of information:

• traffic and channels of traffic;
• site behavior, bounce rate;
• data on competitors in the industry.

SimilarWeb finds and evaluates competitors’ performance so you can make comparisons and see what techniques you can implement in your business. Full functionality is available in the paid version, but a free plan is available to get acquainted with the service.

Serpstat

Serpstat is a service for detailed SEO-analytics of the site. It offers reports on the positions of your site in search engines, data on the link mass, a detailed analysis of semantics. Another advantage is the ability to analyze more successful competitors and take the most effective methods of promotion.

Clicky

Clicky is a popular service for web analytics. Its main feature is that it works in real time. Clicky has been around for more than 13 years, and many users often refer to the service as Google Analytics in miniature. Clicky logs every visit, visitor location, traffic source, time on site, and creates heat maps. The program interface is very simple, but the array of data will be useful even for experienced marketers.

Piwik

Piwik is a software product for hosting. It is installed similar to the CMS and runs on PHP/MySQL. The program provides reports on attendance, traffic sources, search queries and conversions. Piwik offers a free version and a paid solution with advanced features.

Plerdy

Plerdy is a service for tracking conversions and user behavior. It analyzes visitor clicks and even makes video recordings of sessions, and allows you to customize pop-up forms without involving developers. To get started, just install a small script on the site and choose one of the tariff plans, among which there is a free one.

Conclusions

Web analytics – an indispensable assistant in the promotion of sites. The tools will help you understand your target audience – who your visitors are, where they’re coming from and how they interact with the site. Web analytics will also help to analyze the position of the site in search engines and choose effective promotion methods.