What is website analytics?
Website analytics collects data associated with your website. This data includes where your traffic comes from, country, browser, and device, as well as which pages your visitors landed on visited and how much time they spent on them. Web analytics helps you review and analyze this data so you can help optimize your website and make informed decisions on what areas of your site to focus on more or less.
In simple terms, website analytics helps you understand how well your website performs and helps you find areas where you can improve.
How do web analytics tools work?
Web analytics tools collect data from your website by getting you to insert a line of code into the head of your website code. This line of code usually uses javascript, relaying the information to the web analytics tool and storing it in your account.
This snippet of code is usually tiny in size and often has negligible effects on your website speed and SEO, with some like Plausible being just 1kb in file size.
Once the data is captured, you can see it often in real-time to analyze at will.
Why use web analytics tools?
There are many benefits of using website analytics in your business. These include:
- Help analyse user behaviour
- Help improve search engine optimization
- Find new content ideas for blogging and websites
- Measure the amount of traffic you get & where from (find target audience)
- Help increase user experience by tracking bounce rate
- Help track marketing campaigns
- Help increase conversion rate optimization
Who uses website analytics?
Anyone with a website should use web analytics to help them understand how it performs in different areas.
Even though it’s best for all website owners, specific job roles like marketers, SEO professionals, and website developers can benefit from using web analytics in their day-to-day jobs.
Analyzing the data in detail helps:
- Marketers find which pages to promote and double down their efforts on
- SEO professionals find new content opportunities and keywords to focus on
- Web developers find new ways to redesign their web pages to help reduce bounce rates and increase engagement metrics.
Website analytics features
The web analytics tool you use will determine what types of features and metrics you’ll get access to. Some provide you with the basics like the number of visitors, pages visited, and which device they visited your website from. Others dive deeper, recording and tracking the country, city, and channel your traffic came from, and lets you track link clicks with event tracking.
Here are a few analytics features you might come across in software like Matamo.
- Visitors – real time, over time, unique visitors
- Entry Pages
- Exit Pages
- Keywords
- Acquisition Type (search engine, social etc..)
- Device & Browser Tracking
- Event Tracking
- Custom Reporting
- Heatmaps
Can I Use Free Website Analytics?
There are many free web analytics tools to choose from, including one of the most popular, Google Analytics. However, when it comes to free software that collects data, you’re still paying, but in another way, with your privacy.
This lack of control is why there are many paid Google Analytics alternatives to choose from that offer a privacy-first approach to website data collection. These analytics tools ensure (to the best of their ability) that your data and visitors’ data remain private and anonymous, with many allowing you to set your privacy levels from within.
If you’re still after free website analytics, plenty of options offer free forever plans. These plans are limited in what data they collect, how long your information is stored, and the accuracy of the data.
So yes, you can use free web analytic tools, but paid tools provide a more accurate, reliable, and feature-rich option that will benefit your website and your business.
