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Website visitor tracking is an essential piece in the puzzle of 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 available on the market can help you 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.
You can sign up for a 14-day free trial to test our features and use them to gather and analyze user behavioral data. To learn more, you can book a demo.
In this blog post, 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.
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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, which sends information about the site visitors to a third-party tool that collects statistical data and provides reporting.
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
Website visitor tracking also helps you identify any potential issues or areas you need to improve on your site.
The best way to track website visitors is by using a suitable website visitor tracking software. Your choice will depend on your target audience, industry, price budget, and analytics features that suit your needs.
As you read, you’ll learn more about the features to look out for when choosing a website tracking tool for your business.
Since we explained user behavior analytics, it’s time we get to the main point – how it can improve your online business. Here are some core benefits user behavioral analytics brings:
Website visitor tracking can also help you identify potential security threats and fraudulent activity.
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When choosing a website visitor tracking tool, it’s always best to understand the complete package. Some solutions will give you everything you need, while others won’t.
Here are some drawbacks of website tracking:
Despite these drawbacks, website visitor tracking is still valuable for understanding how people interact with your website. The good news is that plenty of free and paid tools are available to help you out.
Interactive heat maps, 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.
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 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 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 help you watch website visitors’ behavior in real-time and determine which website elements are popular or engaging or cause users’ frustration.
Sometimes you need to hear what users think about their experience. With user feedback, you’ll get 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.
In this comparison article, we have evaluated ten website visitor tracking tools using the following parameters
By considering the evaluation parameters above, you can be sure to select a tool that will work well for your business.
There are many website visitors tracking solutions on the market, and each has its benefits and limitations. Let’s start with our list to help you make your decision faster.
FullSession is a website tracking solution that helps businesses monitor and analyze how users interact 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.
The FullSession analytics platform is ideal for cross-functional teams, including sales and marketing teams, product teams, and UX research teams. They can seamlessly collaborate and have a smooth and productive workflow. Also, it is popular in the e-commerce industry.
FullSession is a web-based, cloud, and SaaS website tracking tool you can deploy by adding its code snippet to your website.
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.
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
You can quickly find the session recording you need or skip user inactivity while watching a session replay to save time.
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, 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
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
Let’s show you examples of each interactive heatmap.
Our advanced segmentation feature allows you to build specific user segments to quickly identify essential user actions and session recordings of significant interest.
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
With this feature, you can quickly uncover hidden patterns in user behavior.
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.
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.
You can monitor conversion metrics like page views, the average number of users, page load time, time to convert, etc., to determine the effectiveness of your product strategy.
You can evaluate all these features by starting a 14-day free trial. Now that we’ve explored FullSession and highlighted its various analytics features, let’s move on to what makes it 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. It provides advanced data segmentation to find issues with laser precision. It also doesn’t slow down your website while collecting and analyzing data.
The FullSession platform allows you to connect with third-party apps like WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, and Wix.
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.
FullSession offers a free trial and includes two premium packages—Basic and Business. Here are more details on each plan.
The FullSession platform also provides a customized pricing package if your business has specific website analytics needs.
To see how FullSession works, start your free trial now or get a demo.
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Kissmetrics is a product and marketing analytics platform enabling you to track and analyze visitor behavior, simplify user behavior data, and pinpoint reasons for user actions. You can recognize hidden patterns and understand your product performance.
According to Capterra, Kissmetrics scores 4.3 out of 5 based on 19 user reviews.
Whether in the SaaS or eCommerce industry or a product or marketing team, Kissmetrics helps you optimize your marketing and sales funnels, increase conversions, and boost customer lifetime value.
You can start using Kissmetrics for web visitor tracking by installing its Javascript code into your website source code.
Kissmetrics offers behavioral analytics features that give you insight into your users and what they do. You can understand your audience, see how people interact with your website during each visit, and track customer behavior—before and after the conversion.
Here is the list of Kissmetrics features:
Kissmetrics allows you to gain a birds eye view of your product usage. It shows you which features your customers use to compare product usage over time. This way, you can identify the product features that provide users with the most value.
Kissmetrics allows you to connect with third-party apps like Hubspot, Slack, Mailchimp, Chargify, Optimizely, and more.
If you have any issue with Kissmetrics, you can visit their help center or knowledge base, start a live chat or send them an email.
Unlike other visitor behavior tracking tools, Kissmetrics offers annual subscriptions and doesn’t offer a free trial. Its premium plans are divided into three:
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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.
According to Capterra, Hotjar scores 4.7 out of 5 based on 449 user reviews.
Hotjar is primarily made for UX designers, UX researchers, data analysts, digital marketing, and product teams.
Hotjar is a cloud, Saas, and web-based platform, and you can deploy it by installing its Javascript code into your site source code.
With features like heatmaps and visitor recordings, businesses of all sizes can use Hotjar 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:
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.
Hotjar integrates with popular marketing tools like Slack, HubSpot, Zapier, and more.
If you have questions about Hotjar, you can head to the help center for answers. You can also fill out a ticket if you need faster assistance, read documentation, or useful guides on their official website.
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 and Ask.
The Observe plan lets you track and analyze user behavior data using heatmaps and session replay. It includes:
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:
Although Hotjar allows you to use its features via its free version, it still has some benefits and limitations. Let’s explore some of the pros and cons of this event-tracking tool.
Want to learn more about Hotjar and see how it compares to other user behavior tools? Check out our comparison articles
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Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that helps you monitor and analyze how users engage and convert in real-time. It enables you to track conversions, build funnels, visualize user flows and create cohorts.
According to Capterra, Mixpanel scores 4.5 out of 5 based on 105 user reviews.
Mixpanel is primarily made for product and digital marketing teams.
You can deploy Mixpanel by adding its code snippet to your website.
Mixpanel provides various analytics features like
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.
Mixpanel integrates with third-party apps like AB tasty, Chameleon, AWS, and more.
Mixpanel provides support via email and a knowledge base.
Mixpanel offers a free plan and two premium pricing packages – Growth and Enterprise
Now that we’ve covered the pricing plans for Mixpanel, let’s move on to its pros and cons.
Read our article on Mixpanel alternatives to understand how it compares to other platforms.
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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.
According to Capterra, Smartlook scores 4.7 out of 5 based on 130 user reviews.
The Smartlook platform is designed for SMBs, e-commerce brands, web design agencies, UX, marketers, and product teams.
Smartlook is a cloud, SaaS, and web-based platform that you can deploy by installing its code snippet on your site.
Smartlook provides a wide range of analytics features for tracking website visitors and users. Here are the major ones
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 actions like button clicks, page visits, and more.
The Smartlook platform integrates with popular platforms like Segment, Slack, Zapier, Hubspot, and more.
Smartlook provides support via email and chat.
Smartlook provides a free version and three premium plans. Here are more details on each plan:
Read our article on Smartlook alternatives to see how it compares to other platforms.
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Woopra is a product analytics solution that allows you to go beyond traditional analytics to analyze customer journeys and understand how every touchpoint impacts the CX to drive business growth.
According to Capterra, Woopra scores 4.3 out of 5 based on 11 user reviews.
The Woopra platform covers the needs of the product, support, marketing, and sales teams.
Woopra is a cloud, SaaS, and web-based platform that you can deploy by adding its Javascript code into your site’s source code.
Woopra provides marketing and product analytics features like
Woopra provides retention features that allow you to analyze how long users engage with your product features to reduce churn. You can also measure user actions and identify the events that drive growth.
Woopra integrates with third-party apps like ActiveCampaign, Azure, Drift, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Segment, and more.
You can get support from Woopra via email, FAQs, knowledge base, and phone.
Woopra provides a free version that allows you to track 500K customer actions per month. As for its paid plans, they include
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Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool. It lets you track where your visitors are coming from, how they’re interacting with your website, and what content on your website is most popular.
According to Capterra, Google analytics scores 4.7 out of 5 based on 7287 user reviews.
Google Analytics is a popular solution for retail, healthcare, hospitality, real estate, computer software, IT and services, automotive, marketing, and advertising.
You can start using Google Analytics by installing its code snippet on your website.
You can use Google Analytics for website traffic tracking and looking into demographic data such as your audience’s location, device, and language.
There are many features that Google Analytics provides, but we’ll focus on the most important ones.
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.
Google Analytics integrates with popular marketing tools like WordPress, Facebook, Shopify, Zendesk, and more.
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.
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.
The Google Analytics 360 is a premium version of Google Analytics. Large businesses use it for $150,000/year.
Read our Google Analytics vs Amplitude comparison to see the differences between these platforms.
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Adobe Analytics is a marketing and web analytics platform that helps you capture and analyze data to discover hidden patterns in customer behavior and evaluate marketing activities to understand the impact on the user experience.
According to Capterra, Adobe Analytics scores 4.5 out of 5 based on 196 user reviews.
Adobe Analytics is primarily made for various online businesses, including e-commerce, retail, healthcare, financial, high-tech, and marketing brands.
Adobe Analytics is a cloud, SaaS, and web-based platform, and you can deploy it by adding a code snippet to your site.
Adobe Analytics provides visitor tracking features that enable you to monitor the impact of every customer interaction. Some of its core features include:
Adobe Analytics provides predictive analytics features that help you track your marketing activities and get a clear picture of the customer journey.
Adobe Analytics allows you to connect with popular apps like Slack, MailChimp, Hubspot, and more.
Adobe Analytics provides support via email, knowledge base, FAQ, and forum.
The Adobe Analytics platform provides three pricing plans – Select, Prime, and Ultimate. However, its website doesn’t give a transparent price structure, so you have to contact the sales team for more information.
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Matomo is a web analytics platform that helps you understand how individual visitors interact with your web elements and content so you can identify gaps in your site performance.
According to Capterra, Matomo scores 4.9 out of 5 based on 43 user reviews.
Matomo is a good solution for development, marketing, support, and sales teams in companies of all sizes. It is popular in government agencies, financial and educational institutions, digital and media agencies, nonprofits, retail, and healthcare.
You can integrate the Matomo features into your site by adding its Javascript code to your website.
The Matomo platform is open source and has the following features:
Matomo focuses on going beyond most traditional website analytics tools by providing 100% data ownership. Unlike Google Analytics which leverages user data for advertising purposes, Matomo users can perform analytics without worrying about user data being used for marketing purposes.
Matomo can integrate with over 100 third-party apps like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, WooComerce, Joomla, and more.
If you have any issues with Matomo, you can email them, read their user guides, visit the FAQ section or discuss with other users on the forum.
Matomo is a free and open-source analytics platform if you host it on your servers. If you want to use Matomo hosted on their servers, you must pay 19EUR/month.
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Clicky is a real-time analytics solution that helps businesses track and analyze website traffic and marketing campaigns, conduct split tests, and evaluate web performance.
With Clicky, you can identify website traffic sources and find relevant visitor sessions and Javascript events.
According to Capterra, Clicky scores 4.0 out of 5 based on one user review.
Clicky is designed for small and mid-sized online businesses across various industries like marketing, product development, e-commerce, and more.
You can deploy Clicky by installing its code snippet into your site source code.
Clicky provides analytics features that help you monitor key website statistics. Some of its main features include:
The Clicky platform provides a spy feature that helps you to identify precisely where your web visitors are coming from. It also allows you to set and track conversion goals to improve your sales and marketing efforts.
Clicky lets you connect with popular platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Django, and more.
You can contact the customer support team via email if you have any issues with Clicky. The Clicky platform also provides a knowledge base and forum where you can get answers to your questions.
Clicky provides a free plan that allows you to track one website. Its paid plans are divided into four, including a 21-day free trial. Here are more details about its pricing structure.
Now that we’ve highlighted the various pricing plans for the Clicky platform, let’s move on to its pros and cons.
So far, we’ve evaluated the functionality of the Clicky platform. In the next section, we’ve prepared a table that summarizes the various features of all the web visitor tracking tools we covered in this article.
This section summarizes the features of the tracking software we explained above.
Features | FullSession | Kissmetrics | Hotjar | Mixpanel | Smartlook | Woopra | Google Analytics | Adobe Analytics | Matomo | Clicky |
Real-time Session recording |
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Funnel analysis |
✘ |
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Conversion tracking | ||||||||||
Behavioral analytics |
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Customer segmentation | ||||||||||
A/B testing |
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✘ |
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Customer journey mapping |
✘ |
✘ |
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|
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Dynamic heatmaps |
✘ |
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✘ |
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Free version |
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Free trial |
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User fedback |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
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✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ | ||
Insights |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
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.
It is why you must choose a suitable website analytics software to track how users interact with your site so you can improve the customer experience.
We consider FullSession as the best website visitor 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, and reports.
What’s best, it doesn’t slow your website down and protects the privacy of your users in the process.
You can try FullSession for free for 14-days to evaluate all features.
You can sign up today and learn how to use our analytics features to conduct web analysis. You can also request a demo if you need more information.
Here are some answers to frequently asked questions on visitor tracking tools.
The FullSession six-step process is simple and quick. Here’s how it works:
That was easy! You can start with website visitor tracking in only a few minutes.
You can track your visitors with good website visitor tracking software such as FullSession.
There is no universal answer to this question, as each business and website is unique, but there is a solution that will help you take your website performance to the next level.
We recommend you start using FullSession, our advanced website visitor tracking solution that provides all the features you’ll need to see how your visitors interact with your website. Sign up today.
Marketing and product teams, sales teams, UX designers, and UX researchers use website visitor tracking tools as a part of their work process.
Website visitor tracking relies on a web visitor tracking tool to collect user behavioral data. In contrast, website analytics is the process of analyzing how users behave on your website.
You need to monitor every aspect of your customer journey, from their initial interest in your brand to their eventual decision to make a purchase or use your services.
Website visitor tracking logs user activities and interactions with your website. User behavioral analytics data is categorized into segments, device type, browsing history, and more.
It depends on your website tracking strategy. If you collect the personal information of your website visitors and you haven’t already made changes to your privacy policy, it’s time to check in with your team and see what steps you need to take to make your site GDPR compliant.