Website Tracking: How to Do It + 5 Tools [Free & Paid]

Website visitor tracking is essential for optimizing your website and increasing conversions. It allows you to learn more about who visits your site, where they come from, what websites refer traffic to yours, and other important information.

Website visitor tracking also helps you discover if people can find the information they need or get confused at any point in the process.

Many tools are available on the market to help with website visitor tracking. However, not all of them are useful or affordable.

We recommend you start using FullSession, our web analytics tool, which helps you build a seamless customer experience with features like session recording and replay tools, website heatmap, and customer feedback tools.

To learn more, you can book a demo.

In this guide, we will discuss the essentials of website visitor tracking and focus on free and paid tools to help you choose the right one for your needs. Let’s start with some elementary information.

What Is Website Visitor Tracking?

Website visitor tracking is the process of tracking and recording user behavior. 

To track visitors, you need to install a tracking code on your website. It sends information about the site visitors to a third-party tool that collects statistical data and provides reporting.

Why Is Website Visitor Tracking Important?

Website tracking helps you improve your site functionality and boost the customer experience. Here are additional reasons why a website tracking tool is vital for your business. It helps you:

1. Analyze user traffic and identify your most profitable customers
2. Reveal which aspects of your website are causing customers to convert
3. Focus on the product or service pages that are most likely to sell

Website visitor tracking also helps you identify any potential issues or areas you need to improve on your site.

What Are the Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking?

Since we explained user behavior analytics, it’s time we get to the main point – how web tracking can improve your online business. Here are some core benefits user behavioral analytics brings:

1. It provides you with a deeper understanding of individuals visiting your website by tracking user activity.
2. You can see the behavior of repeat visitors and identify their preferences.
3. You can deliver a personalized shopping experience to individual visitors.

Website visitor tracking can also help you identify potential security threats and fraudulent activity.

What Features Should Visitor Tracking Software Include?

Interactive heatmaps, session recordings and replays, and user feedback allow you to track user behavior, sentiment, and interests when visiting your website. Let’s explain each of these critical features.

Mouse movement maps

Heatmaps visually represent users’ interaction with your website, web app, or landing page. You can use them to make design and usability improvements.

Scroll maps

Scroll maps track how far visitors scroll down on a page or section of your website. You can identify page areas that cause users to leave without interacting with your content.

Click maps

Click maps let you track website visitors as they navigate your website. You can spot low-engagement areas, optimize them to draw more clicks, and help customers find what they need faster.

Session recordings and replays

Session recordings and replays help you watch user visits in real time and determine which website elements are popular or engaging or cause users’ frustration.

User feedback

Sometimes, you need to hear what users think about their experience. User feedback provides insightful, honest thoughts on your product features, tweaks you should implement or avoid, positive and negative points, and what you should do to improve your product.

So far, we’ve explained the basics of website visitor tracking and the features to look out for in good visitor tracking software. In the following sections, we’ll highlight the evaluation parameters and list the top 10 visitor-tracking software you can start using today.

Our Evaluation Parameters for Website Visitor Tracking Tools

In this comparison article, we have evaluated ten website visitor-tracking tools using the following parameters:

• Target audience
• Deployment
• Features list
• Integrations
• Customer support
• Pricing
• Pros
• Cons

By considering the evaluation parameters above, you can be sure to select a tool that will work well for your business.

The Best Website Visitor Tracking Software in 2024

Many website visitor tracking solutions are on the market, each with benefits and limitations.. Let’s start with our list to help you make your decision faster.

1. FullSession

FullSession is a website tracking solution that helps businesses monitor and analyze user interactions with websites, web apps, and landing pages.

With FullSession, you can track visitor behavior and identify areas where they have issues to solve them and provide an exceptional digital customer experience.

Who uses it?

The FullSession analytics platform is ideal for cross-functional teams, including sales and marketing teams, product teams, and UX research teams. These teams can seamlessly collaborate and have a smooth and productive workflow. It is also popular in the e-commerce industry.

Deployment

FullSession is a web-based, cloud, and SaaS website tracking tool you can deploy by adding its code snippet to your website.

Features

FullSession allows you to make smarter business decisions. You can use it to monitor your website visits, identify strengths and weaknesses, and convert more visitors into paying customers with several analytics features. Let’s throw light on each of them.

1. Session recording and session replay

Session recording and session replay give you a clear picture of what users do on your website, including the pages they visit, the buttons they click, their text inputs, funnel drop-offs, and more.

With our session recording and replays, you can access analytics data, such as:

1. User location and IP address
2. The URL user visited
3. Referrals
4. Average time on page
5. Total active time on page
6. Session list
7. Session event

You can quickly find the session recording you need or skip user inactivity while watching a session replay to save time.

2. Interactive heatmaps

Interactive heatmaps allow you to analyze user behavior to figure out the web elements they interact with and the pages they engage with the most on your site.

Our heatmap feature uses a combination of colors – red, yellow, green, and blue – to depict the level of user engagement across various web pages and elements.

You can also use the FullSession interactive heatmaps to filter user actions and perform the following activities:

• Preview the heatmap on different devices
• See the URL the user visited
• See the number of total views and total clicks
• Watch error clicks
• Track rage clicks
• Monitor dead clicks
• See the average load time on the page
• See the average time on the page
• Track the number of users that visited the page

You can use these analytics data to filter necessary customer actions and optimize your site functionality for better performance.

FullSession provides three types of heatmaps:

1. Click map
2. Scroll map
3. Mouse movement map

Let’s show you examples of each interactive heatmap.

Click map example

Scroll map example

Mouse movement map example

3. Advanced data segmentation

Our advanced segmentation feature allows you to build specific user segments to quickly identify essential user actions and session recordings of significant interest.

4. Insights

The FullSession insights give you a comprehensive overview of significant user activities to easily interpret user data. Its various categories help you evaluate your website performance.

Here are the major ones:

• Session playlists
• Top users
• Segment health
• Key pages
• User trends
• Feedback trends
• Device breakdown
• General feedback
• Browser breakdown
• Top referrers
• Screen resolution breakdown
• Error clicks
• Rage clicks

With this feature, you can quickly uncover hidden patterns in user behavior.

5. Customer feedback forms

Our customer feedback forms help you receive real-time user feedback to understand users’ actions and sentiments about your site performance. Each customer feedback connects with a session recording, so you can watch what happened during the specific user session.

You can also use our customer feedback report to analyze customer feedback and assess response details. You can see the user ID, the visited page, sentiment, comment, browser type, feedback date, and details.

You can also see your overall results during a specific period.

6. Notes

FullSession notes feature helps you share comments about user activities and evaluate customer issues. You can share the analysis with your team to improve collaboration.

7. Funnel and conversion tracking

The FullSession funnels feature offers a detailed analysis of user journeys, enabling you to monitor and optimize each stage of your conversion funnel. 

It helps identify key actions that drive conversions, detect issues causing drop-offs, and analyze user interactions to improve the user experience.

With this feature, you can:

• Visualize funnel steps
• Monitor trends
• Identify top events and actions
• Detect and fix issues
• Measure user interaction time
• Analyze engagement
• Track revisit rates
• Compare segment performance
• Analyze performance over different time periods

8. Error analysis

The error analysis feature helps you identify, analyze, and resolve various types of errors impacting user experience. 

By leveraging data on error clicks, network errors, console errors, error logs, and uncaught exceptions, FullSession provides actionable insights to enhance reliability and user satisfaction.

This feature allows you to:

• Detect non-responsive elements causing errors
• Monitor and analyze network errors
• Log and filter console errors
• Capture detailed error information for debugging
• Monitor and resolve unhandled errors
• Segment data for deeper insights
• Receive real-time alerts and notifications

What makes this tool unique

FullSession provides behavior analytics to understand users’ behavior when navigating your site. It helps you run surveys and collect user feedback to skip the guesswork and understand the motivation behind user actions.

Plus, it provides advanced data segmentation to find issues with laser precision. It also doesn’t slow down your website while collecting and analyzing data.

Integrations

The FullSession platform allows website owners to connect with third-party apps like WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, and Wix.

Customer support

If you have any issues with FullSession, you can start a live chat or send us an email. You can also check out the FullSession help center or read our guides for additional information.

Pricing

FullSession offers a free trial for our two premium packages, Starter and Business. The annual plan can save you up to 20%.

1. The Starter plan costs $39/month or $32/year and lets you track up to 5,000 monthly sessions. 
2. The Business plan starts at $75/month or $60/year and lets you track up to 100,000 monthly sessions.
3. The Enterprise plan gives you full access to all features. You can book a demo for more details. 

We also provide a customized pricing package if your business has specific website analytics needs. Check out our Pricing page.

Pros

• It allows you to make accurate CX analysis without slowing down your site loading speed
• It provides advanced filtering options to identify critical events in a session faster
• You don’t need advanced technical skills to use our analytics platform

2. Hotjar

Hotjar is a user behavior tracking tool that helps businesses understand user behavior via session recordings, heatmaps, surveys, form analytics, and website feedback forms.

It is a web-based analytics tool that helps you collect data about visitors’ engagement with your website and identify any usability issues.

User rating

According to Capterra, Hotjar scores 4.7 out of 5 based on 514 user reviews.

Who uses it?

Hotjar is primarily made for UX designers, UX researchers, data analysts, digital marketers, and product teams.

Deployment

Hotjar is a cloud, Saas, and web-based platform, and you can deploy it by installing its Javascript code into your site source code.

Features

With features like heatmaps and visitor recordings, Hotjar can be used by businesses of all sizes to track users, leverage data, generate leads, see how many visitors convert on their website, and boost sales.

If you choose Hotjar, you will get the following features:

• Heatmaps
• Session recording and replay
• Conversion funnels analytics
• Form analytics
• User feedback polls
• Incoming feedback
• Surveys
• User testing recruitment

What makes this tool unique

Hotjar allows you to uncover hidden user actions and your users’ objections to your website functionality. It helps you skip the guesswork and see the product features your users engage with, including how they click, scroll, and tap across various web pages.

Integrations

Hotjar integrates with popular marketing tools like Slack, HubSpot, Zapier, and more.

Customer support

If you have questions about Hotjar, you can head to the help center for answers. If you need faster assistance, you can also fill out a ticket, read documentation, or find useful guides on their official website.

Pricing

Hotjar currently offers a free basic plan that allows you to track up to 1,050 sessions per month. To improve your conversion rates, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid plan—Observe, Ask, and Engage.

The Observe plan lets you track and analyze user behavior data using heatmaps and session replay. It includes:

• Basic plan: costs $0 and allows you to track up to 35 sessions/day
• Plus plan: costs $39/month and lets you track up to 100 sessions/day
• Business plan: starts from $99/month and lets you track 500 to 270,000 daily sessions
• Scale plan: starts at $213/month and lets you track 500 to 270,000 daily session recordings

The Ask plan helps you understand how your users feel and what they have to say about your site performance via the user feedback tool. It includes:

• Basic plan: costs $0 with access to 20 monthly responses
• Plus plan: costs $48/month with access to 250 monthly responses
• Business plan: starts from $64/month and lets you receive 500 to 100,000 monthly responses
• Scale plan: starts at $128/month and offers access to unlimited monthly responses

The Engage plan helps you automate most of the processes that come with conducting moderated user interviews, including finding interviewees and scheduling. It includes:

• Basic plan: costs $0 with access to 3 interviews/month from your own network
• Plus plan: costs $39.2/month with access to up to 3 interviews/month from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network
• Business plan: starts from $440/month with access to 12 interviews/year from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network
• Scale plan: offers customized pricing and access to 20 interviews/month from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network

Pros

• It has a low learning curve
• It provides real-time visitor tracking

Cons

• It doesn’t let you track visitor data on mobile apps
• You have basic customization options for your surveys
• It slows down your website while collecting data

How other solutions compare to Hotjar

Want to learn more about Hotjar and see how it compares to other user behavior tools? Check out our comparison articles

1. Hotjar review
2. Hotjar alternatives
3. Hotjar vs Crazy Egg
4. Lucky Orange vs Hotjar
5. Hotjar vs FullStory
6. Hotjar vs Crazy Egg vs Mouseflow vs FullStory
7. Hotjar vs Google Analytics
8. Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity
9. Hotjar vs Inspectlet
10. Hotjar vs Mixpanel vs Clicktale
11. Smartlook vs Hotjar
12. Decibel Insight vs Hotjar

3. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that helps you monitor and analyze user engagement and conversion in real time. It lets you track conversions, build funnels, visualize user flows, and create cohorts.

User rating

According to Capterra, Mixpanel scores 4.5 out of 5 based on 138 user reviews.

Who uses it?

Mixpanel is primarily made for product and digital marketing teams.

Deployment

You can deploy Mixpanel by adding its code snippet to your website.

Features

Mixpanel provides various analytics features like:

• Conversion tracking
• Customer journey mapping
• Funnel analysis
• Multivariate testing
• Predictive analysis

What makes this tool unique

With Mixpanel, you can identify the users that actively engage with your product and those that don’t. It helps you understand the product features that provide the most value and measure the right performance metrics.

Integrations

Mixpanel integrates with third-party apps like AB Tasty, Chameleon, AWS, and more.

Customer support

Mixpanel provides support via email and a knowledge base.

Pricing

Mixpanel offers a free plan and two premium pricing packages – Growth and Enterprise.

1. Free plan: allows you to track 20 million monthly events
2. Growth: starts at $28/month and enables you to build a plan that suits your analytics needs
3. Enterprise: offers a custom pricing structure and lets you track up to 1 trillion monthly events

Pros

• It provides a central analytics platform where you can track and analyze the actions of mobile and website users
• It is easy to set up and deploy

Cons

• Customer segmentation lacks advanced functionalities
• The UI is not ideal for a non-technical audience

Read our article on Mixpanel alternatives to understand how it compares to other platforms.

4. Smartlook

Smartlook allows you to track and analyze user behavioral data on your website and mobile apps. It combines quantitative and qualitative analytics features to help you visualize user actions and how they interact with various product features and site elements.

User rating

According to Capterra, Smartlook scores 4.7 out of 5 based on 134 user reviews.

Who uses it?

The Smartlook platform is designed for SMBs, e-commerce brands, web design agencies, UX, marketers, and product teams.

Deployment

Smartlook is a cloud, SaaS, and web-based platform that you can deploy by installing its code snippet on your site.

Features

Smartlook provides various analytics features for tracking website visitors and users. Here are the major ones:

• Heatmaps
• Session recordings
• Event tracking
• Funnel analysis

What makes this tool unique

Smartlook provides a funnel feature that allows you to monitor user journeys and identify funnel drop-offs to optimize user flows and improve conversion rates. It can also track user activity, like button clicks, page visits, and more.

Integrations

The Smartlook platform integrates with popular platforms like Segment, Slack, Zapier, Hubspot, and more.

Customer support

Smartlook provides support via email and chat.

Pricing

Smartlook offers a 30-day free trial. During this trial period, you can enjoy all the features of the business plan. However, there is a limit of 3,000 monthly sessions. 

You do not need to enter your credit card information to start the trial. After 30 days, you can buy a paid plan or return to the free version. Smartlook offers three paid plans:

• Pro: 5,000 sessions/month for $55 per month
• Enterprise: provides a tailor-made solution, so you need to contact sales reps

Pros

• It can automatically record user events on your site
• You can use its session recording feature to analyze user behavior and quickly resolve bugs

Cons

• The price can get expensive as you scale
• It lacks a feedback widget that you can use to collect user feedback

Read our article on Smartlook alternatives to see how it compares to other platforms.

5. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that lets you track where your visitors are coming from, how they interact with your website, and what content on your website is most popular.

User rating

According to Capterra, Google Analytics scores 4.7 out of 5 based on 8,070 user reviews.

Who uses it?

Google Analytics is a popular solution for retail, healthcare, hospitality, real estate, computer software, IT and services, automotive, marketing, and advertising.

Deployment

You can use Google Analytics by installing its code snippet on your website.

Features

You can use Google Analytics to track web page traffic and analyze demographic data, such as your audience’s location, device, and language.

Google Analytics provides many features, but we’ll focus on the most important ones:

• User and conversion modeling
• Audience reports and demographics
• Advertising reports
• Acquisition reports
• Behavior reports
• Conversion reports
• User flow reporting
• Funnel analysis
• Predictive analysis
• Data access, filtering, manipulation, and segmentation
• Visualization and monitoring

What makes this tool unique

Google Analytics provides a clear understanding of the results of your marketing activities. It offers many customization options for visualizing reports, changes in user behavior, and website content.

Integrations

Google Analytics integrates with popular marketing tools like WordPress, Facebook, Shopify, Zendesk, and more.

Customer support

Google Analytics offers a range of useful articles and guides to help you better understand how your visitors use your site. Also, if you have any issues with your Google Analytics account, you can start a live chat or send an email to customer support.

Pricing

Google Analytics is a free service. You need an email address and a password to start using it. However, you can also use an existing Google account if you already have one.

Google Analytics 360 is a premium version of Google Analytics. Large businesses pay $150,000/year for it.

Pros

• You can create custom reports or see traffic data in real-time
• It’s great for basic data tracking

Cons

• Google Analytics has a high learning curve
• It lacks advanced features, such as user behavioral data

Read our Google Analytics vs Amplitude comparison to see the differences between these platforms.

Visitor Tracking Tools: A Short Overview

This section summarizes the features of the tracking software we explained above.

Features	FullSession	Hotjar	Mixpanel	Smartlook	Google Analytics
Real-time Session recording	✔	✔	✘	✔	✘
Funnel analysis	✘	✘	✔	✔	✔
Conversion tracking	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Behavioral analytics	✔	✔	✘	✔	✔
Customer segmentation	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
A/B testing	✘	✘	✘	✘	✘
Customer journey mapping	✘	✘	✘	✔	✘
Dynamic heatmaps	✔	✘	✘	✘	✘
Free version	✘	✔	✔	✔	✔
Free trial	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
User feedback	✔	✔	✘	✘	✘
Insights	✔	✔	✘	✔	✔
Monthly pricing	$39	$39	$28	$55	Free

Website Visitor Tracking Software: Our Verdict

A positive customer experience is essential to the success of any business. How customers view your business, products, or services directly impacts their willingness to spend money with you.

That is why you must choose suitable website analytics software to track how users interact with your site. This will help you improve the customer experience while following data privacy laws.

We consider FullSession the best user tracking tool on this list. It provides a wealth of user data and behavior-tracking tools, such as session recordings and replays, three types of interactive heatmaps, website feedback forms, reports, error analysis, and more.

What’s best is that it doesn’t slow your website down and protects the privacy of your users in the process.

FullSession Pricing Plans

The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial. It provides three paid plans—Starter, Business, and Enterprise. Here are more details on each plan.

1. The Starter plan costs $39/month or $32/year and allows you to monitor up to 5,000 monthly sessions.
2. The Business plan costs $75/month or $60/year and helps you to track and analyze up to 100,000 monthly sessions.
3. The Enterprise plan has custom pricing and offers customizable sessions plus full access to all features.

Book a demo today.

FAQs About Website Tracking Tools

What is website tracking?

Website tracking is the process of collecting and analyzing visitor interactions on a website. It includes page views, clicks, time spent on pages, and user behavior patterns.

How can a website be tracked?

Websites can be tracked using tools like cookies, pixel tags, and analytics software. These tools monitor visitor activities, collect data, and provide insights into user behavior, helping improve the site’s performance and user experience.

Is website tracking legal?

Yes, tracking user behavior is legal, but it must comply with privacy laws and regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Websites usually need to inform users about tracking and data collection and obtain their consent according to data privacy law, often through a cookie consent banner.

How do I stop website tracking?

You can stop website tracking by using browser settings to block cookies, enabling Do Not Track (DNT) in your browser, or using privacy-focused browsers and extensions that block tracking scripts. Additionally, regularly clearing your browser cookies can help reduce tracking.