Website Analytics Tools
With the use of online methods of advertising and shopping become more mainstream the need for companies to monitor the performance of their online resources such as a website has never been more important. Website analytics tools connect to a desired website and monitor their customers behavior and actions while they are using website with hopes of collecting information for you to make changes to optimize your website. The use of website analytics allows entrepreneurs to determine if their website is effective at capturing a customer’s attention and in turn contributing to the success of their company. These tools will allow entrepreneurs to determine many things such as which pages have had the most views and which pages cause the customer to leave the site as well as creating reports about your site for you to analyze. The website analytics tools that I will be discussing are Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Clicky, Smartlook, Matomo (Piwik) and Woopra. I am going to focus on the following 3 aspects that I think are important to entrepreneurs and start-ups:
1. Price
2. Features
3. Complexity
1) Pricing
The price and pricing plan of the website analytics tools are all very similar in terms of how they are priced. A free version of the tool is available in all but Matomo where the cheapest plan starts at $19/month. The price increases as more features are available and as more users or events are tracked. The option to upgrade to a more advanced version is available in all the tools I am discussing, allowing for entrepreneurs to properly scale given the size and complexity of their business.
Google Analytics:
Analytics: Free forever, 10 million monthly tracked users (MTU), basic features
Analytics 360: Payment is monthly, greater than 10 million MTU, Custom plan, advanced features
Mixpanel:
Starter- Free, 1000 monthly tracked users (MTU)
Growth- Users can request a free trial, starts at $89/month for 1000 MTU to $879/month for 25,000 MTU, discount of up to 30% if price paid annually
Enterprise- Users can request a free trial, greater than 25,000 MTU, custom pricing
Clicky:
Free- 3,000 daily page views, limited features
Pro- 30,000 daily page views, 21-day free trial, $9.99/month or $79.99/year
Pro Plus- 30,000 daily page views, 21-day free trail, all features, $14.99/month or $119.99/year
Pro Platinum- 100,000 daily page views, 21-day free trial, $19.99/month or $159.99/year
Custom- 20 Million daily page views, custom price
Smartlook:
Free- 1500 MTU, limited features,
Starter- 7,500–350,000 MTU for a price of $31/month-$327/month, 10-day free trial, 2 months free if paid annually
Custom- 25,000–500,000 MTU for a price of $79/month-$660/month, 2 months free if paid annually
Matomo (Piwik):
Essential- 50,000-50 million MTU for a price of $19/month-$4,990/month, free 21-day trail, basic features
Business- 50,000–50 million MTU for $29/month-$6,9990/month, free 21-day trial, almost all features
Enterprise- Custom amount of MTU and many more features available, custom price
Woopra:
Core- 500,000 MTU, free, limited features
Pro- 5 million MTU, $999/month, all features, demo can be requested
Enterprise- Custom plan with custom pricing, demo can be requested
2) Features:
Given that I am only concerned with giving information useful to an entrepreneur or start-up, I will only be focused on the features offered in the basic packages which are free in all except Matomo. The basic version will provide you will enough features to monitor your website proficiently. The features that the website analytics tool provides is integral to the success of a website because when you can properly analyze and understand behavior of your customers, you can make the necessary improvements to generate more traffic and keep users engaged on the site which will increase sales. I am going to be comparing the various tools with a comparison chart based on the following features:
Real Time Analytics- allows the user to see things like how many active users are on the website and what kind of device they are accessing the website from. They can also analyze the top referrals to their site, their top pages and the locations of where their users are accessing their site from as well as many other things.
Heat Maps- shows you where the most clicks are on a website by displaying a hot and cold area in the form of a glow on a page. The brighter the glow the more attention that section received. This will allow you to modify your website to adjust to the interests of the customers.
A/B Testing- this is useful when you want to compare two versions of a web page against each other to see which one performs better. Half of your website traffic is shown one web page while the other half gets the other. This allows you to choose the web page that is performing best as the as the one customers will interact with.
Mobile Analytics- this is an important category as “consumers spend 70 percent of their time on mobile devices, and most of that time on apps”. Mobile analytics captures data from mobile apps instead of just recording data from a computer. It identifies unique visitors and tracks their journey and behavior while using the site.
Attribution Modelling- this feature shows you which part of the website, such as a touch point or marketing channel led to a conversion. After the data is recorded you can see which marketing channel gave you the best return on investment. There are different ways the data is modeled such as last-interaction model or first interaction model, which will show you respectively the last feature interacted with before a conversion or the first feature the customer interacted with before a conversion.
Segmentation- this is an integral feature of an analytics software because not all the people using your website are actual customers, so it is useful to filter out some data. Using this feature, you can also compare segments such as the differences in behavior between bounce (when someone leaves the website) and non-bounce sessions.
E commerce Tracking- allows you to get a very in-depth analysis of your website sales such as conversion rate, number of transactions, revenue, average order value, per session value, etc. Conversion rate is the percentage of sessions that result in eCommerce transactions. Per session value allows you to see the average value of a session from a customer on your website.
Funnel Analysis- this outlines the steps a customer should go through to purchase a product or service. Then data is recorded and you can analyze how many customers arrived at each step and which step they left the process at. A funnel analysis is one of the most important features to take advantage of because it can locate a bottleneck and determine what is preventing customers from creating a conversion for you.
Cohort Analysis- this is used to compare users based on shared characteristics over time which will allow you to discover insights into the way customers are behaving on your website. For example, you can run a cohort of the date of the users first session with the metric being measured the revenue per user.
In Page Analytics- this allows user users to be able to see information about their website such as time on page on bounce rate directly on their website without having to go into a analytics platform such as Google Analytics.
Goals- measure how often users complete specific tasks on your website such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. You can also set a goal value such as a purchase of $50 or more which will allow you to measure the number of purchases you have that are of a significant amount.
Event Tracking- Event Tracking- this is a very use feature that enables you to capture information of the behavior of those on your site, such as how many users clicked on a specific link on the website, or how many users filled out and submitted a form.
3) Complexity:
All the tools are very easy to use and the signup process is especially easy with Google Analytics, Smartlook and Woopra as they only require a Gmail account so it is very fast to sign up. The others require more information such as adding the number of employees and company name to create an account. Adding a tracking code to each page of your site is standard across all the tools which will enable you to track and receive information about your website. This can be a difficult process if you do not have knowledge of HTML coding and may require you to seek the help of the internet or a software developer.
Google Analytics:
- The dashboard in Google Analytics is very simple with the menu being easy to navigate and located on the left side of the page. Customization is very easy as you can click on the tab for it and add whatever feature you want to the dashboard. The reports shown are very easy to read and interpret and are all easy to find.
Mixpanel:
- The dashboard is easy to navigate however it is not as user friendly because the menu is not as detailed. Adding a report to your dashboard is very quick and allows you to customize the info you want to have available on the home screen. The analysis is detailed and allows you to select what report you are looking for from the drop down menu.
Clicky:
- The dashboard for Clicky is a little disorganized as everything is scattered across the home page but the menu is easy to navigate. The information is available right on the home page with data clearly labelled but customization is lacking.
Smartlook:
- The dashboard is very simple, and some features are hidden and not intuitive to find from looking at the menu, but it is very simple to navigate and access data. The addition button allows you to customize the dashboard and easily add features that are important to you so that they are more easily viewable.
Matomo:
- The menu on Matomo is the most user friendly and very easy to find the information you are looking for as the menu is easy to navigate and detailed. The menu on the left side is clearly labelled and the dashboard has information clearly displayed that is easy to read.
Woopra:
- The dashboard is straightforward, however the menu is not as easy to navigate as there are a limited number of tabs. It is not very easy to customize, however you can create different dashboards which can display different information.
Conclusion:
The various website analytics tools I have mentioned are very suitable for entrepreneurs looking to optimize their website, however they do all provide different features with varying price ranges. Every entrepreneur with a website should be utilizing one of the various available tools to improve the performance and success of their website. After researching the various website analytics options on the market I would use Google Analytics because it has an abundance of features, is free to use for as long you want and is very user friendly.
Resources:
Websites-
Compare Free & Enterprise Analytics Options. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/compare/
Help “ Pricing. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://clicky.com/help/pricing
Product Analytics. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://mixpanel.com/pricing/
Smartlook Pricing & Subscription Packages. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.smartlook.com/pricing/
Matomo Pricing. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://matomo.org/pricing/
logo. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.woopra.com/pricing
List of Top Web Analytics Tools 2020. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.trustradius.com/web-analytics#overview
Koks, P., Mentel, R., Mentel, R., & Koks, P. (2019, October 15). Top 25 Google Analytics Features You Should Use. Retrieved from https://online-metrics.com/google-analytics-features/
Bly, R. W. (2016, January 19). 8 Tools You Need for Tracking Website Performance. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/253394
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(n.d.). Retrieved from Reville, P. (2019, November 19). Do Consumers Want “Mega Tech” to Be Their Bank? It’s Complicated. Retrieved from https://www.paymentsjournal.com/do-consumers-want-mega-tech-to-be-their-bank-its-complicated/
