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A Beginner’s Guide to Web Analytics

Updated: September 21, 2022

Published: October 20, 2021

Pageviews, unique pageviews, new visitors, and returning visitors — they all sound similar, but these metrics are not the same. If you don’t know the difference, you could be misinterpreting your website analytics and making some ill-informed decisions. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.

In this guide, we’ll be covering everything you need to know about web analytics, so you can truly understand which data points mean what, interpret your findings correctly, and make data-backed decisions for your website and business.

We’ll be covering the following points below — click on any of the jump links to skip to that section:

• what web analytics is and why it's important
• web analytics examples
• web analytics best practices
• web analytics tools
• web analytics APIs

What is web analytics?

Web analytics is the collection, reporting, and analysis of data generated by users’ visiting and interacting with a website. The purpose of web analytics is to measure user behavior, optimize the website’s user experience and flow, and gain insights that help meet business objectives like increasing conversions and sales.

There are tons of data you can collect to understand how people interact with your website and identify opportunities for improvement. You can track overall traffic, bounce rate, traffic sources, new and returning visitors, time spent on site, and much more.

The amount of data can be overwhelming at first. That’s why it’s important to identify a few key metrics, particularly as you’re getting started. For example, you might start by focusing on the bounce rate for a few key pages on your site. If visitors are quickly bouncing from your homepage, then that indicates they’re not finding the information they’re looking for quickly or easily enough. From there, you can identify possible next steps, like redesigning your website navigation .

Let’s take a closer look at why web analytics is important below.

Importance Of Web Analytics

Web analytics is critical to the success of your business. It enables you to better understand your site visitors and use those insights to improve the experience on your site. For example, if you discover that the majority of users on your site are using a mobile device, then you can focus on making your website more mobile-friendly.

Web analytics can also shape your content and SEO strategy. Looking at your top viewed posts, you can begin to identify what types of content and topics perform best with your audience. If you notice how-to WordPress tutorials make up the majority of your top viewed posts, for example, then you might shift and narrow your focus from definition articles about anything web-related to how-to WordPress tutorials. Or maybe you look at your site’s traffic sources and notice that organic and email traffic are your top drivers and paid channels are your lowest. In that case, you might shift resources to invest more in your organic strategy than paid.

Now that we have an idea of what web analytics is and why it’s important, let’s look at some key metrics you might track to measure progress against — and eventually meet — overarching business objectives, like increasing website traffic, leads, and revenue.

Web Analytics Examples

Unique pageviews, new visitors, returning visitors, traffic sources, bounce rate.

Before you read on, it's important to note that various analytics tools may have slightly different definitions of the following terms. It's best to consult your particular tool's documentation to understand exactly how each is calculated.

Pageviews are the total number of times a page was viewed on your site. A pageview (or view) is counted when a page on your site is loaded by a browser. So if a person were to view a page on your site and reload the page in their browser, that would count as two views. If a person viewed one page, viewed a second page on your website, and then returned to the original page, that would count as three views.

Pageviews can give you an idea of how popular a page on your site is, but it’s important to look at this number in context with other metrics — something a traffic analysis tool can help with . A page with a high number of views for a post isn’t necessarily popular since a small group of visitors could be responsible for a lot of those views. A high number may also indicate that a page was confusing and required visitors to return to it multiple times.

Unique pageviews is the total number of times a page was viewed by users in a single session. In other words, a unique pageview aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during a session (which we’ll define below). So if a person viewed the same page twice (or more times) during an individual session, unique pageviews would only count that pageview once.

Since this metric discounts instances in which a user reloads or visits the same page in the same session, unique pageviews help you get a better understanding of how many visitors are viewing pages on your site and how popular individual pages are.

A session is a group of interactions — including not only page views, but activities such as CTA clicks and events — that take place on your website within a given time frame.

The timeframe of a session varies by web analytics tool. For example, sessions in Google Analytics and HubSpot’s traffic analytics tools last 30 minutes by default. A session ends and a new session starts for a user when either A) there has been 30 minutes of inactivity and the user becomes active again, B) the clock strikes midnight, or C) a user arrives via one traffic source, leaves, and then comes back via a different source.

That means if a user lands on your site, leaves, and returns within 30 minutes, Google Analytics and HubSpot will count it as one session, not two. On the other hand, if a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more but then clicks on a CTA or takes another action, Google Analytics and HubSpot will count it as two sessions, not one, even if the user never left your site.

New visitors — also termed new users, unique visitors, or new visitor sessions, depending on the web analytics tools — is the number of unique visitors on your website.

As the name implies, a new visitor is an individual who visits your site for the first time. Healthy websites will show a steady flow of new visitors over time to make up for those who lose interest.

These individuals are identified by a unique identifier. For example, when using HubSpot, the HubSpot tracking code is installed on your site. Then, visitors on your site are tracked by the cookie placed in their browser by this tracking code.

Two important notes to keep in mind: First, a single visitor can have multiple sessions and pageviews on your site. Second, unique visitors is not an entirely accurate metric. That’s because most web analytics tools use cookies to track visitors, which doesn’t always distinguish new visitors from returning ones (which we’ll define below). For example, if a person visits your site via their mobile phone and then on their personal computer, they'll be counted as new visitors on both occasions.

Returning visitors (or users) is the number of visitors on your website who have visited before. Not all web analytics tools include this metric, but some — including Google Analytics — do. In Google Analytics’s Audience reports, you can look at behaviors to see the ratio of new to returning users on your site.

Looking at both new and returning visitors metrics are great for getting a sense of how well you're retaining your visitors, and how effective you are in attracting net new visitors at the top of the funnel.

Your ratio of new to returning visitors will depend on several factors including your industry, how long you’ve been around, and whether you offer incentives to return to your site. But, if you’re an established website that’s seeing returning (or new) visitors top 80% of your traffic, attempt to balance this out by attracting more new visitors or retaining old ones.

Again, keep in mind that this metric won’t be completely accurate if the web analytics tool uses cookies to track visitors.

Traffic sources show where your site visitors are coming from. Like visitor information, this metric is usually collected via the tracking code on your site.

The number of traffic sources you can track will vary depending on the web analytics tool. HubSpot’s traffic analytics tools track multiple categories, including:

• Organic Search
• Organic Social
• Email Marketing
• Paid Search
• Paid Social
• Direct traffic

Ideally, you want to increase all sources of traffic. But, your biggest focus should be organic search , which is traffic that comes from non-paid search results in search engines like Google. This source has the potential to drive huge amounts of traffic to your site. Plus, improving this channel often improves other channels, like referrals and social.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your website after viewing a single page. You can look at bounce rate as a site-wide metric or a page-level metric. At the page level, bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that started on the page and did not move to another page on your site.

Generally, a bounce rate of 40% or lower is considered good, 40% to 70% is average, and anything above 70% is considered high.

If your site’s overall bounce rate is high, it might help to identify individual pages with high bounce rates. A high average page bounce rate might indicate there’s a problem with the page’s loading time, or that external links are not opening in a new tab or window, among other reasons.

To learn what actions you can take to reduce bounce rate, check out our 6 Steps to Reduce Your Bounce Rate .

Web Analytics Best Practices

Many aspects of web analytics are specific to your business: what metrics you track, how you build out reports, what tools you use. But there are some best practices to help anyone collect, analyze, and report website data more effectively. Let’s look at a few.

1. Pick metrics that align with your business objectives.

Focusing on only one or two metrics won’t provide enough insight into how visitors are interacting with your site — but tracking every single metric might provide too much information to be actionable.

To make sure you’re focusing on the right metrics, start by plotting your business objectives. Think about what the top priorities are for your website. Do you want to lower your site bounce rate? Are you looking to attract more new visitors, or better retain existing ones?

Once you have one or more objectives in mind, come up with specific strategies you’ll implement to achieve these objectives, such as fixing broken links and images, changing your site’s copy, or better optimizing for your mobile audience, which probably makes up around half of your traffic .

You’re now ready to narrow down what metrics will help you track your progress for achieving your goals and ultimately your business objectives.

2. Use data to drive decision-making.

After collecting your data, determining whether or not you met your goals is only the first step. The next — and arguably more important — step is using that data to test, experiment, and make changes on your site.

For example, say you identified some high-value content, like your Services and Pricing page, through user testing and feedback in your web design process. However, these pages aren’t getting much traffic.

In this case, you might move the navigation links for these pages to a more visible part of your site, or implement SEO measures on these pages to rank higher and capture more organic search traffic.

3. Don’t limit your focus to traffic.

Understanding and reporting traffic data — including pageviews, top traffic sources, and most viewed pages — is important. But it’s just one piece of your website performance. High traffic doesn’t necessarily mean success.

For example, if you’re getting millions of pageviews but no conversions, then you’re probably not meeting all your business objectives. Or, if new visitors consistently make up a high proportion of your traffic, consider why that might be and how you can attract return visitors more effectively.

4. Always pair data with insights.

If you report that your website received 1 million unique pageviews and 400,000 new visitors this month, that doesn’t mean all that much. Reporting only the numbers provides an incomplete picture of your website performance. For all we know, these numbers could indicate:

• an increase from last month.
• a decrease from last month.
• little to no change in pageviews or visitors month-over-month.
• an increase last month, but a major year-over-year decrease.

That’s why you must pair your data with insights. If you instead report that your website got 1 million unique pageviews, which exceeded last month’s unique pageviews by 20% and also showed a significant increase year over year, then the data is much more meaningful and actionable to you and fellow stakeholders.

5. Look at your data in context.

While collecting and analyzing data, think about it in context. What variables or larger forces could be impacting the numbers? For example, algorithm updates , seasonality, and bots can all have a major impact on your traffic and other metrics.

Imagine that a few pages on your site saw major spikes in traffic. These posts weren’t updated recently, so you look where this traffic came from. If the traffic mostly came from one country where you usually don’t see much traffic, this was likely malicious bot traffic, which accounts for a quarter of all internet traffic .

Viewing your data in context can help you better understand, analyze, gain insight, and make informed decisions with your data.

If you find analyzing data overwhelming, it might be a good idea to invest in an advanced analytics consulting service. They can help you uncover insights that drive your strategy so that you can achieve your business objectives more effectively.

6. Share and ask for feedback from stakeholders.

As an analyst, you want to provide information to stakeholders in a way that is understandable and actionable. You also want to ask for information and ideas from these stakeholders. They can provide valuable feedback on how they use the data, what else they want to see or understand about their users or website, and how they think they can improve the user experience or other issues the data uncovers.

Web Analytics Tools

Measuring organizational success requires more than one metric — and more than one tool. Let’s take a look at three web analytics tools you could use together.

HubSpot Marketing Analytics & Dashboard Software

Get HubSpot's Free Marketing Analytics Software

With HubSpot’s free marketing analytics and dashboard software, you can measure the performance of all your marketing assets — from website and landing pages, to emails, blog posts, social media accounts, calls-to-action, and more — from one dashboard.

You’re able to track your customers’ complete lifecycle, measure traffic overall or on a page-by-page basis, and add multiple reports to your dashboard so you’re tracking your most critical metrics in one easy-to-access place. You can even break down reports by user characteristics for more fine-grained analysis.

HubSpot’s free tool is ideal for anyone looking for built-in analytics, reports, and dashboards so they can make smarter, data-driven decisions.

What we like: Analytics is fully integrated into everything you do in HubSpot, ensuring you always have the right data available when you need it. There’s no more digging through spreadsheets or datastreams — with HubSpot, everything is accessible and actionable, whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned expert.

Google Analytics

Used by over 28 million websites , Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool. With it, you can track pageviews, unique pageviews, bounce rate, traffic channels, user retention, average session duration, sessions by country, sessions by device, and more. You can also build reports about your audience, acquisition channels, engagement, and conversions.

Understanding the value, flexibility, and popularity of Google Analytics, some platforms offer unique integrations with this tool. Analytics Amplifier , for example, is a HubSpot app that allows users to match HubSpot customer behaviors — including “hot leads” and “deal amount” — with real-time Google Analytics data.

If you want to learn more about this tool, check out our Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics . However, the sheer amount of metrics, reports, and integrations that can be tracked or created using Google Analytics might be overwhelming. Users without SEO or technical expertise, like content creators, may find it difficult and prefer a Google Analytics alternative .

What we like: Google Analytics is unmatched in popularity. It gives website owners an all-encompassing view of their site activity, and is relatively easy to set up and link to any live site. Plus, Google Analytics offers many powerful capabilities for free.

Used by over 300,000 users, Crazy Egg is a unique web analytics tool that provides heatmaps, scroll maps, and other visual reports to show you exactly how your visitors are interacting with your site. Thanks to Crazy Egg's tracking code, you’ll be able to watch what visitors are hovering over and clicking on in real-time via heatmaps.

Crazy Egg also offers comprehensive A/B testing so you can test various content variables like color, copy, and content placement, to see how it affects the user experience and conversions. This makes Crazy Egg an ideal alternative or supplement to Google Analytics for users interested in conversion optimization.

What we like: Crazy Egg is a user-friendly tool for conducting heatmap and scroll map testing, A/B testing, and screen recordings of user interactions. These are great means to better understand users in qualitative and quantitative ways, and gain insights to improve the user experience on your site.

Web Analytics API

A web analytics API is a specific type of application programming interface (API) that can help automate reporting, manage how data is processed, and provide deeper insights into your data.

For example, Google Analytics offers several APIs that you can use to automate complex reporting and configuration tasks. One such API is the Google Analytics Reporting API . With this API, you can build custom dashboards to display your Google Analytics data, automate complex reporting tasks to save time (like getting data in two date ranges with a single request), and integrate your GA data with other business applications.

Another popular example is Chartbeat’s Real-Time API . This API consists of data that is updated every three seconds so you can see how your visitors are interacting with your content in real-time. You can use this data to improve audience engagement, inform editorial decisions, and increase readership, which is why Chartbeat is used by bigwig news organizations including The New York Times and The Washington Post .

To understand what APIs are and how they work, check out The Ultimate Guide to Accessing & Using APIs .

Using Web Analytics to Improve Your Website

Whether you’re a small business, ecommerce site, or enterprise company, web analytics can help you and your company grow. By collecting, reporting, and analyzing data about your website, you can improve the user experience on your site and meet larger business objectives like increasing online sales.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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The Ultimate Guide to Website Traffic Analytics: How to Track and Analyze Your Site's Performance

Are you curious about how your website is performing? Wondering if all those marketing efforts are truly paying off with increased traffic? Well, worry no more, because in this ultimate guide, we'll take you on a journey through the mesmerizing world of website traffic analytics. Think of it as your very own crystal ball into the online success of your site.

From deciphering those perplexing numbers to uncovering hidden insights, we'll equip you with the tools and knowledge to track and analyzeyour website's performance like a seasoned digital guru. So grab a cup of coffee, buckle up, and prepare to unravel the mysteries of website traffic analytics one data point at a time.

Why Website Traffic Analytics Matter

Key performance indicators (kpis).

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) serve as important metrics to analyze and improve website traffic. By tracking KPIs, businesses gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their online presence. For instance, measuring organic search traffic can help identify the impact of SEO efforts. Monitoring referral traffic reveals the effectiveness of marketing campaigns or partnerships.

Additionally, tracking user engagement metrics such as average time spent on page or bounce rate helps determine the quality of website content and user experience. By regularly analyzing relevant KPIs, businesses can make data-driven decisions to optimize their website and drive more targeted traffic.

Understanding User Behavior

Understanding user behavior is integral to the success of any website. By analyzing website traffic analytics, businesses can gain valuable insights into how users interact with their site. This information can help identify areas of improvement, optimize user experience, and ultimately increase conversions.

For example, if the analytics show that a large number of users are leaving the site after viewing a particular page, businesses can investigate and make changes to improve engagement and encourage users to explore further. By regularly monitoring and analyzing user behavior, businesses can make data-driven decisions that result in a more effective and user-friendly website.

ROI and Conversion Tracking

ROI and Conversion Tracking are crucial for effectively measuring the success of your website traffic analytics. Here are some key insights and actionable advice to consider:

• ROI (Return on Investment) helps you understand the profitability of your marketing efforts. By tracking the financial impact of your website traffic, you can determine which channels and campaigns are generating the best returns.
• Conversion Tracking allows you to measure actions users take on your website, such as completing a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a form. This data helps you identify areas of improvement and optimize your website for better results.
• For example, by analyzing conversion rates from different traffic sources, you can allocate your marketing budget to those driving higher conversions.

Additionally, identifying drop-off points in the conversion funnel can help you enhance user experience and increase conversions.

Remember, focusing on ROI and Conversion Tracking empowers you to make data-driven decisions, optimize your marketing efforts, and ultimately drive better results for your website.

Setting Up Website Traffic Analytics

Choosing the right analytics platform.

When choosing the right analytics platform for website traffic analysis, consider the following factors:

• Ease of use : Look for a platform that offers a user-friendly interface and intuitive navigation, allowing you to quickly access and understand your data.
• Customization options : Ensure the platform allows you to tailor your analytics to your specific needs, such as creating custom reports and setting up personalized goals and metrics.
• Integration capabilities : Check if the platform integrates seamlessly with other tools and platforms you use, such as content management systems or advertising platforms, for a more comprehensive view of your website performance.
• Data visualization : Look for a platform that offers clear and visually appealing data visualizations, enabling you to easily identify trends and patterns.
• Real-time reporting : Consider a platform that provides real-time reporting capabilities, allowing you to monitor and react promptly to changes in website traffic.

Remember, choosing the right analytics platform is crucial for gaining valuable insights and optimizing your website's performance.

Installing Tracking Code

Installing tracking code is an integral part of website traffic analytics. It allows you to collect crucial data about your visitors and their behavior on your site. By adding a small snippet of code to your website, you can gain valuable insights into metrics such as page views, bounce rate, and conversion rate. This data can help you make informed decisions about your website and marketing strategies.

Additionally, tracking code enables you to set up goals and track the success of your campaigns. Ensure that you follow the installation instructions provided by your analytics platform to accurately track your website's performance.

Setting Up Goals and Conversions

Setting up goals and conversions in website traffic analytics is crucial for measuring the success of your website and tracking user behavior. By defining specific goals, such as completing a purchase or filling out a contact form, you can monitor how well your website is performing in terms of conversions. This allows you to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.

For example, if you notice a high bounce rate on a particular page, you can analyze the page design and content to optimize it for better engagement. By regularly reviewing and adjusting your goals and conversions, you can continuously improve your website's performance and ultimately drive more conversions.

Website Traffic Analytics Best Practices

Regularly review and analyze data.

Regularly reviewing and analyzing website traffic analytics is crucial for optimizing performance and making informed decisions. It provides valuable insights into user behavior, allowing you to identify trends, determine the effectiveness of your marketing strategies, and improve the user experience.

For example, by analyzing the bounce rate, you can identify pages that fail to engage visitors and take action to improve their content or design.

Additionally, tracking conversion rates helps you identify the most successful conversion paths and refine your sales funnel. By consistently reviewing and analyzing data, you can continually refine your website and drive better results.

Set Up Custom Dashboards and Reports

Set up custom dashboards and reports to track and analyze website traffic. Custom dashboards allow you to monitor specific metrics and key performance indicators that are relevant to your business goals.

For example, you can create a dashboard that displays the number of visitors, conversion rates, and revenue generated from different marketing channels. Custom reports provide deeper insights into specific areas of interest, such as bounce rates, user behavior, and page performance. By tailoring your dashboards and reports to your specific needs, you can quickly identify trends, measure the effectiveness of your strategies, and make informed data-driven decisions.

A/B Testing and Conversion Rate Optimization

A/B testing allows you to test different versions of your website or landing page to determine which one performs better in terms of conversion rate. By splitting your audience into two or more groups and showing each group a different version of your page, you can identify the most effective elements and make data-driven improvements.

For example, you can test different headlines, images, or call-to-action buttons. Conversion rate optimization is the practice of continuously improving your website or landing page based on the insights gained from A/B testing. It involves making iterative changes that have been proven to positively impact conversion rates.

Advanced Techniques for Website Traffic Analytics

User segmentation and cohort analysis.

User segmentation and cohort analysis are two valuable techniques in website traffic analytics. User segmentation involves dividing your website visitors into distinct groups based on their characteristics and behaviors. This helps you better understand different user types and tailor your marketing strategies accordingly.

For example, you may segment users based on demographics, such as age or location, or by their interaction with your site, such as frequent visitors or first-time users. Cohort analysis, on the other hand, allows you to track and analyze how specific groups of users behave over time. This helps identify trends and patterns, enabling you to make data-driven decisions to optimize user experience and drive conversions. By combining user segmentation and cohort analysis, you can gain deeper insights into your website's audience and make informed decisions to improve its performance.

Cross-Device and Cross-Channel Tracking

Cross-Device and Cross-Channel Tracking enhances website traffic analytics by providing a comprehensive view of user interactions across different devices and channels. This approach allows businesses to understand the customer journey and optimize their marketing strategies accordingly.

• Tracking user behavior across devices helps identify patterns and trends, enabling businesses to personalize their messaging and experiences.
• By tracking user interactions across various channels, businesses can determine which channels are most effective in driving traffic and conversions.
• With cross-device and cross-channel tracking, businesses can measure the impact of their marketing efforts holistically, leading to better decision-making and resource allocation.
• For example, analyzing data from website visits, social media engagements, and email click-through rates can reveal the most impactful touchpoints in the customer journey.
• Implementing cross-device and cross-channel tracking requires the integration of various tools and platforms, but the insights gained are invaluable for optimizing marketing strategies and enhancing overall website performance.

Integrating Website Traffic Analytics with Other Tools

Integrating website traffic analytics with other tools allows for a more comprehensive understanding of user behavior and optimization opportunities. By combining data from sources such as social media analytics, CRM systems, and A/B testing platforms, insights can be gained on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, customer segmentation, and website performance.

For example, by linking website analytics with social media analytics, you can determine the referral traffic from different platforms and tailor your content accordingly.

Over to you

Website traffic analytics are essential for understanding and improving the performance of your site. This ultimate guide provides a comprehensive overview of how to track and analyze your site's traffic. It covers various analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, and explains their key features. The guide also delves into the importance of setting goals and understanding key metrics, including sessions, pageviews, bounce rate, and conversion rate.

It offers practical tips on interpreting analytics data, identifying patterns and trends, and optimizing your website for better performance. Whether you're a novice or an experienced webmaster, this guide will help you make informed decisions and drive more traffic to your site.

• Perspectives
• Best Practices
• Inside Amplitude
• Customer Stories
• Contributors

What is Web Analytics? Definition, Examples, & Tools

Learn what web analytics is, which metrics you should track to improve website experience, and helpful tools to overcome common issues.

Web analytics is the gathering, synthesizing, and analysis of website data with the goal of improving the website user experience . It’s a practice that’s useful for managing and optimizing websites, web applications, or other web products. It’s highly data-driven and assists in making high-quality website decisions. You might also get ideas on how to improve your product and drive business growth from web analytics.

Product managers, data scientists, UX designers and others can use web analytics if they’re looking to enhance their website or product experience to meet customer needs. They need to know which website metrics to track while also being mindful of the shortcomings of web analytics.

• Web analytics refers to the process of collecting website data and then processing, reporting, and analyzing it to create an online strategy for improving the website experience.
• Refine your marketing campaigns

Understand your website visitors

Analyze website conversions.

• Improve the website user experience
• Boost your search engine ranking

Understand and optimize referral sources

• Boost online sales
• Use a web analytics tool to automatically track key site performance metrics, like bounce rate, conversion rate, monthly unique visitors, and more.
• Some common issues with web analytics are that it can be overwhelming to keep track of so many metrics, data is not always accurate, and data privacy could be at risk. Find an analytics tool that addresses these concerns effectively.

What is web analytics used for?

Web analytics features like Amplitude’s Pathfinder show how users interact with your site.

Web analytics is helpful for understanding which channels users come through to your website. You can also identify popular site content by calculating the average length of stay on your web pages and how users interact with them—including which pages prompt users to leave.

The process of web analytics involves:

• Setting business goals: Defining the key metrics that will determine the success of your business and website
• Collecting data: Gathering information, statistics, and data on website visitors using analytics tools
• Processing data: Converting the raw data you’ve gathered into meaningful ratios, KPIs, and other information that tell a story
• Reporting data : Displaying the processed data in an easy-to-read format
• Developing an online strategy: Creating a plan to optimize the website experience to meet business goals
• Experimenting : Doing A/B tests to determine the best way to optimize website performance

You can use this information to optimize underperforming pages and further promote higher-performing ones across your website. For example, French news publisher Le Monde used analytics to inform a website redesign that increased subscriber conversions by 46 percent and grew digital subscriptions by over 20 percent . Le Monde was able to identify which paid content users engaged with the most, then use that information to highlight top-performing content on the homepage.

The importance of web analytics

Your company’s website is probably the first place your users end up on to learn more about your product. In fact, your website is also a product . That’s why the data you collect on your website visitors can tell you a lot about them and their website and product expectations.

Here are a few reasons why web analytics are important:

Web analytics tools reveal key details about your site visitors—including their average time spent on page and whether they’re a new or returning user—and which content draws in the most traffic. With this information, you’ll learn more about what parts of your website and product interest users and potential customers the most.

For instance, an analytics tool might show you that a majority of your website visitors are landing on your German site. You could use this information to ensure you have a German version of your product that’s well translated to meet the needs of these users.

Conversions could mean real purchases, signing up for your newsletter, or filling out a contact form on your website. Web analytics can give you information about the total number of these conversions, how much you earned from the conversions, the percentage of conversions (number of conversions divided by the number of website sessions), and the abandonment rate. You can also see the “conversion path,” which shows you how your users moved through your site before they converted.

By looking at the above data, you can do conversion rate optimization (CRO ). CRO will help you design your website to achieve the optimum quantity and quality of conversions.

Web analytics tools can also show you important metrics that help you boost purchases on your site. Some tools offer an enhanced ecommerce tracking feature to help you figure out which are the top-selling products on your website. Once you know this, you can refine your focus on your top-sellers and boost your product sales.

Boost your search engine optimization (SEO)

By connecting your web analytics tool with Google Search Console , it’s possible to track which search queries are generating the most traffic for your site. With this data, you’ll know what type of content to create to answer those queries and boost your site’s search rankings.

It’s also possible to set up onsite search tracking to know what users are searching for on your site. This search data can further help you generate content ideas for your site, especially if you have a blog.

Understand top performing content

Web analytics tools will also help you learn which content is performing the best on your site, so you can focus on the types of content that work and also use that information to make product improvements. For instance, you may notice blog articles that talk about design are the most popular on your website. This might signal that your users care about the design feature of your product (if you offer design as a product feature), so you can invest more resources into the design feature. The popular content pieces on your website could spark ideas for new product features, too.

Web analytics will tell you who your top referral sources are, so you know which channels to focus on. If you’re getting 80% of your traffic from Instagram, your company’s marketers will know that they should invest in ads on that platform.

Web analytics also shows you which outbound links on your site people are clicking on. Your company’s marketing team might discover a mutually beneficial relationship with these external websites, so you can reach out to them to explore partnership or cross-referral opportunities.

Example metrics to track with web analytics

Website performance metrics vary from company to company based on their goals for their site. Here are some example KPIs that businesses should consider tracking as a part of their web analytics practice.

Page visits / Sessions

Page visits and sessions refer to the traffic to a webpage over a specific period of time. The more visits, the more your website is getting noticed.

Keep in mind traffic is a relative success metric. If you’re seeing 200 visits a month to a blog post, that might not seem like great traffic. But if those 200 visits represent high-intent views—views from prospects considering purchasing your product—that traffic could make the blog post much more valuable than a high-volume, low-intent piece.

Source of traffic

Web analytics tools allow you to easily monitor your traffic sources and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. For example, if you’re seeing lots of traffic from email campaigns, you can send out more email campaigns to boost traffic.

Total website conversion rate

Total website conversion rate refers to the percentage of people who complete a critically important action or goal on your website. A conversion could be a purchase or when someone signs up for your email list, depending on what you define as a conversion for your website.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate refers to how many people visit just one page on your website and then leave your site.

Interpreting bounce rates is an art. A high bounce rate could be both negative and positive for your business. It’s a negative sign since it shows people are not interacting with other pages on your site, which might signal low engagement among your site visitors. On the other hand, if they spend quality time on a single page, it might indicate that users are getting all the information they need, which could be a positive sign. That’s why you need to investigate bounce rates further to understand what they might mean.

Repeat visit rate

Repeat visit rate tells you how many people are visiting your website regularly or repeatedly. This is your core audience since it consists of the website visitors you’ve managed to retain. Usually, a repeat visit rate of 30% is good. Anything below 20% shows your website is not engaging enough .

Monthly unique visitors

Monthly unique visitors refers to the number of visitors who visit your site for the first time each month.

This metric shows how effective your site is at attracting new visitors each month, which is important for your growth. Ideally, a healthy website will show a steady flow of new visitors to the site.

Unique ecommerce metrics

Along with tracking these basic metrics, an ecommerce company’s team might also track additional KPIs to understand how to boost sales:

• Shopping cart abandonment rate shows how many people leave their shopping carts without actually making a purchase. This number should be as low as possible.
• Other relevant ecommerce metrics include average order value and the average number of products per sale . You need to boost these metrics if you want to increase sales.

Web analytics tools

There is a whole range of tools you can use for web analytics, including tools that traditionally specialize in product, marketing, or experience analytics.

Amplitude's Digital Analytics Platform combines the best of all worlds. Our unified platform supports analytics across digital products and experiences—including your app or website. Pair quantitative data with qualitative insights using built-in Session Replay so you can better understand user behavior on your site.

Common issues with web analytics

While web analytics can be extremely useful for optimizing the website experience, there are some drawbacks to it. Some of these include:

Keeping track of too many metrics

There are so many data points available to track. It can be overwhelming to combine web analytics, product analytics , customer experience tools, heatmaps, and other business intelligence analytics to make sense of things.

As a general rule, only measure the metrics that are important to your business goals, and ignore the rest. For example, if your primary goal is to increase sales in a certain location, you don’t need metrics about anything outside of that location.

Data is not always accurate

The data collected by analytics tools is not always accurate. Many users may opt-out of analytics services, preventing web analytics tools from collecting information on them. They may also block cookies, further preventing the collection of their data and leading to a lot of missing information in the data reported by analytics tools. As we move towards a cookieless world, you’ll need to consider analytics solutions that track first-party data, rather than relying on third-party data.

Your web analytics tool may also be using incorrect data filters, which may skew the information it collects, making the data inaccurate and unreliable. And there’s not much you can do with unreliable data.

Data privacy is at risk

Untracked or overly exposed data can cause privacy or security vulnerabilities. People could reveal all sorts of personal information about themselves on your website, including credit card details and their address. Any breach to an analytics service provider that compromises your user data can be devastating for your business’ reputation. Since privacy laws have become more stringent over the last decade globally, it’s important you pay attention to cyber security.

Website data is particularly sensitive. Make sure your web analytics tools have proper monitoring procedures and security testing in place. Take steps to protect your website against any potential threats.

Data doesn’t tell the whole story

While web analytics are useful to learn how users are interacting with your website, they only scratch the surface when it comes to understanding user behavior. Web analytics can tell you what users are doing, but not why they do it. To understand behaviors, you need to go beyond web analytics and leverage a behavioral analytics solution like Amplitude Analytics . By looking at behavioral product data, you’ll see which actions drive higher engagement, retention, and lifetime value.

Ready to explore your own data?

Now that you know more about web analytics, make sure you’re measuring the right metrics with our North Star Playbook . Or, see how website data looks in Amplitude .

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Top 12+ web analytics tools to improve your site and grow your business

With the number of web analytics tools out there, it’s easy to get lost, not know where to start, and not pick the right tool or combination of tools (hint: Google Analytics can’t do it all 😉). 

We’ve selected the top web analytics software, tools, and platforms to make it easy for you to choose and start growing your business with data-backed decisions.

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Reading time.

But before we dive into the heart of the topic, a short (but necessary) clarification is needed.

What are web analytics tools?

Web analytics tools are software designed to track, measure, and report on website activity including site traffic, visitor source, and user clicks.

Using web analytics tools helps you understand what’s happening on your website and get insights on what’s working (and what’s not). In turn, you can use this insight to optimize the user experience and drive more engagement and conversions.

What are the different types of web analytics tools?

There are two main types of web analytics tools depending on how data is collected:

On-site/hosted: a piece of code installed on your site will generate analytics unique to you (e.g. Google Analytics or Clicky)

Third-party/off-site: insights collected from third-party sources (like search engines and toolbars) generates analytics data about multiple websites. Ideal for competitive analysis (e.g. SimilarWeb)

Within these groups, web analytics software fall into five categories:

Traditional analytics tools: quantitative website traffic data, like bounce rate and pageviews (e.g. Google Analytics)

Behavior analytics tools: individual or aggregate qualitative user website behavior data (e.g. Hotjar)

Customer journey analytics tools: customer touchpoint data across multiple channels (e.g. Woopra)

Content analytics tools: editorial analytics to measure website content performance (e.g. Chartbeat)

SEO analytics tools: data on keyword performance, backlinks, search traffic, and competitors (e.g. SEMrush)

While some tools overlap several categories, we’ve listed the best tools for each, as well as their closest alternatives.

Top 12 web analytics tools used by professionals (and their best alternatives)

When the topic of analytics comes up, people might immediately think of the industry leader, Google Analytics; but that’s just the tip of a vast web analytics iceberg.

Here are the top 12 web analytics tools used by professionals (we also included their most similar alternatives 👇)

Google Analytics

Kissmetrics

Adobe Analytics

Matomo (formerly Piwik)

Open Web Analytics

1. Google Analytics

What it is : Google Analytics is a traditional web analytics tool providing quantitative user and customer data across devices and platforms. 

Key features & what it’s good at : 

Track quantitative data, like sessions or bounce rate , organized in dedicated reports, to learn what's happening on your site

Collect event-based data from websites and apps with GA4

Integrate with the rest of the Google Marketing Platform tools, like Adwords or the Search Console, to combine all your data in one place

Price : free

Most similar alternatives :

Yandex Metrica : web analytics tool from Russian search engine Yandex

Baidu Analytics (or Baidu Tongji): web analytics tool from Chinese search engine Baidu

⏫ Power up: get more from your Google Analytics data by combining it with Hotjar’s heatmap, session recording, and feedback tools. Here are 5 ways to use Google Analytics and Hotjar together to grow your business. You can also use the Hotjar and Google Analytics integration to better understand why your website visitors act the way they do.

2. Mixpanel

What it is : Mixpanel is a self-serve product analytics platform that helps you convert, engage, and retain more users. Learn more in our Mixpanel guide .

Get insights on how your product is being used and which are your most popular features

Visualize where your users drop off by building retroactive funnels and measuring conversion rates between each step

Analyze which users stick around and improve customer retention

Complement your quantitative data with qualitative insights via the Hotjar integration

Price : from free for up to 20M events/month, with paid plans starting at $20/month

Most similar alternative :

Kissmetrics (see below)

Pro tip: did you know that you can do funnel analysis in Hotjar? Funnels lets you spot where users drop off so you can improve your most important flows. Better yet: you can watch session recordings of users who didn‘t convert to understand exactly why they didn’t make it to the next step and improve your site’s UX.

3. Kissmetrics

What it is : Kissmetrics is a product and marketing analytics software that helps scaling SaaS and ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth with quantitative data. 

See key metrics at a glance in your customizable dashboard

Track power users to understand how they behave on your site with segmentation and cohort analysis

Measure key revenue metrics like customer lifetime value and churn rate

Price : from $299/month

Most similar alternatives : 

4. Adobe Analytics

What it is : Adobe Analytics is a traditional web and marketing analytics tool part of the Adobe Experience Platform, designed to provide actionable insights. Consider it an Enterprise alternative to Google Analytics.

Collect and measure data from multiple channels to get a complete picture of your customers and business

Segment your customers to understand why they behave the way they do and how they differ from one another

Leverage AI, machine learning, and automation to predict and modelize customer behavior

Price : on request; Adobe Analytics is better suited to scaling rather than small businesses

Most similar alternative : Google Analytics

5. Matomo (formerly Piwik)

What it is : Matomo is an open-source web analytics tool that emphasizes the protection of your data and your customers’ privacy. 

With 100% data ownership, users can safely use analytics without worrying about data being used for marketing or any other purposes

Protect your and your users’ privacy with a tool compliant with the strictest of privacy laws, including GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, LGPD, and PECR

Comprehensive web analytics data, from behavioral data to SEO and paid ads performance

Price : free for self-hosted users, 19€/month for hosting on Matomo’s servers (21-day free trial)

Clicky : privacy-friendly, GDPR-compliant website analytics tool

Plausible : privacy-friendly, no cookies, GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant Google Analytics alternative made and hosted in the EU 

Fathom : easy-to-use, privacy-friendly, GDPR-compliant GA alternative with a stylish user interface (UI)

Simple Analytics : privacy-first, EU-based & hosted, no cookies GA alternative, also with a sleek UI

Pro tip: Hotjar was designed with privacy in mind since the very first day. Read more about our approach to privacy .

6. Open Web Analytics

What it is : Open Web Analytics is a free and open source web analytics framework that lets you stay in control of how you instrument and analyze the use of your websites and web applications.

Open source framework customizable to your needs with built-in first-party control

Integration with raw data sources available via an extensive data access API

Combination of standard web analytics metrics, dimension, and reports with qualitative data from click maps

Price : free and open source

Pro tip: click maps are only one type of heatmap . Learn exactly how much of your page is actually seen by your users before they leave with scroll maps , and how they move on the page with move maps . 

Learn how to improve your site’s UX with Hotjar Heatmaps .

What it is : Woopra is an end-to-end customer journey analytics tool which tracks what users do on your site to help you acquire and retain more customers. 

Get a holistic understanding of every action your users take from the first touchpoint

Track, analyze, and optimize every touchpoint that affects the customer experience 

Automate workflows with built-in triggers and integrations with other popular web analytics tools and more

Price : starts for free for 500K actions/month, then $999/month (14-day free trial)

Contentsquare : enterprise digital experience insights platform with built-in customer journey analytics

Totango : composable customer success platform and customer journey builder

Pro tip: integrations are key to increased productivity. Hundreds of Hotjar integrations let you automate your work so you have more time to focus on what matters most—providing a brilliant user experience and creating customer delight.

What it is : Hotjar is the only digital experience insights platform that provides visual behavior insights, in-the-moment feedback, and 1:1 interviews—all on one platform.  

Get holistic, actionable insights by understanding what your users do with heatmaps , surveys , conversion funnels , and integrations with traditional web analytics tools, and why they behave this way with session recordings , feedback widgets , and user interviews

Focus on growth with industry-leading tools built with privacy in mind from day one (GDPR, CCPA, LGPD compliant, and more)

Save time and money with all the insights you need in one easy-to-use central platform

Price : get started for free with our ‘free forever’ plan or unlock more features to grow your business with one of our paid plans

Most similar alternatives (use at your own risk 😉):

CrazyEgg (read our Hotjar vs CrazyEgg comparison)

FullStory (read our Hotjar vs FullStory comparison)

Learn more: Brand24 increased conversions by nearly 300% with Hotjar. And that’s just one of many happy customer stories .

What it is : HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is a marketing analytics platform gathering all your marketing tools and data in one place. 

Measuring traffic, and managing leads, email automation, and conversion rate optimization (CRO)

Integrated multimedia content management platform to create and distribute content

Lead generation and nurturing features including form and landing page builders and email marketing automation

Built-in marketing analytics to turn quantitative data from SEO, social media, and lifecycle campaigns into actions

Price : the free tools are always free to use; paid plans start from $30/month

Adobe Marketing Cloud : end-to-end digital marketing platform

Salesforce Marketing Cloud : comprehensive digital marketing solution

10. Chartbeat

What it is : Chartbeat is a content analytics software designed to help you grow your audience by delivering insights to improve your content.

Understand how your audience is connecting with your content (including videos) in the moment across platforms, channels, and devices

Pull app traffic into the real-time dashboard to learn what’s resonating with your most loyal audience on a second-by-second basis, and discover which sections they’re engaging with, how push alerts draw their interest, and more

Intuitively assess content performance, KPIs, and valuable trends over the long term with the historical dashboard

Price : on request

Most similar alternative: Parse.ly , a content analytics platform

Pro tip: place a content feedback survey on your site to get insights from readers and make decisions to improve your content based on voice of customer data.

11. SimilarWeb

What it is : SimilarWeb is a competition and market analysis platform that tracks online traffic data to help you measure how you perform compared to your direct competitors—and the rest of the market.

Get an exclusive view into any website’s performance via the free browser extension, and track how competitor traffic trends over time

See how sites rank globally and across every industry, and analyze their traffic and engagement over time

Find and connect with more qualified leads and turn them into customers with key insights and data on their business

Price : SimilarWeb offers several free tools, with their paid Competitive Intelligence plan starting at $167/month

SpyFu : comprehensive competitor analysis solution

Ahrefs and SEMRush (more info below)

What it is : Ahrefs offers a comprehensive suite of SEO tools to help you rank higher in search engine results pages and get more traffic.

Find keywords your customers are searching for and track how your rankings progress

Analyze where your competitors stand, from their backlink profile to the keywords for which they rank and which of their content pieces performs best

Audit your own website and identify both technical SEO and content optimization opportunities

Price : from €74/month if you pay annually (€89/month for a monthly subscription)

SEMRush : comprehensive SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing platform

Moz : all-in-one SEO software

Why traditional web analytics tools are useful… but not enough

Traditional web analytics tools like Google Analytics help you understand who visits your website, and what user interaction is taking place. For example, you can collect data like:

Traffic: find out how many people view your website, where they're coming from, and whether they're new or returning visitors

Time on page: see how long visitors spend browsing your most important pages

Bounce rate : learn how many visitors leave your website after visiting a single page

But there is a caveat:

Traditional analytics data isn’t enough for you to really understand how visitors are experiencing your website and why they behave the way they do. 

There are some questions web analytics tools can't answer on their own, like

What your visitors were looking for when they landed on your site

What they think and experience as they browse through its pages

What information is missing

Whether visitors left happy after finding what they needed—or frustrated after getting stuck somewhere

which is where complementary behavior analytics software (like Hotjar 👋) can help you paint a clearer picture and understand how visitors experience your site.

Examples of how to combine traditional web analytics tools with behavior analytics software

Understand why users leave your site.

Find a page with a high exit rate in Google Analytics, place a Hotjar heatmap on it, start reviewing what’s being clicked on or ignored, and see how far visitors are scrolling.

For additional context, watch session recordings of people exiting the page, and observe their behavior: what do they do before they leave? Are they leaving in frustration (tip: look for rage clicks ), or did they simply get what they needed?

Session replays are a particularly useful complement to traditional A/B testing tools: they let you see how users behave on each variant of your page so you can confirm your hypotheses and improve conversion rates. That’s how Every.org increased donations to charities by 29.5% .

Go beyond traditional analytics

Google Analytics is a great starting point, but it’s not enough—and neither are its alternatives. Web analytics is more than simply quantitative data. 

To improve your site and ultimately grow your business, you need to understand user behavior, not just know what people do on your site.

Combine traditional web analytics tools with a behavior analytics tool like Hotjar to get the complete picture.

Go beyond traditional analytics with Hotjar

Hotjar helps you measure the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of your product’s performance so you can grow by putting customers first.

Web analytics tools FAQs

What are the best website analytics tools.

The best website analytics tools, based on popularity in our survey of 2000+ analytics users, are

Google Analytics for tracking and website traffic reports, and

Hotjar for user clicks and browsing insights from heatmaps and session recordings

How do web analytics tools work?

Most  on-site analytics tools  track your website by adding a  snippet of JavaScript code  to each page. Some analytics tools install  browser cookies  (small text files), which allow data to be collected from entire sessions across multiple domains until the third-party cookie is deleted.

Cookieless analytics tools still use JavaScript, but can only track the individual user session as no cookies are stored.

Off-site analytics tools , like SimilarWeb or Alexa, track websites externally by collecting data from browser toolbars and crawling website links and search engine results pages (SERPs).

What are the best web analytics tools for beginners?

The best web analytics tools for beginners are Google Analytics and Hotjar: they have free plans, are easy to set up, and will give you insight very quickly. GA and Hotjar are also two of the most popular analytics tools, so there are plenty of free tutorials and  guides  to browse if you get stuck.

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How Google Analytics works

Google Analytics is a platform that collects data from your websites and apps to create reports that provide insights into your business.

Measuring a website

To measure a website, you first have to create a Google Analytics account. Then you need to add a small piece of JavaScript measurement code to each page on your site. Every time a user visits a webpage, the tracking code will collect pseudonymous information about how that user interacted with the page.

For the Google Store, the measurement code could show how many users visited a page that sells drinkware versus a page that sells houseware. Or it could tell us how many users bought an item like an Android doll by tracking whether they made it to the purchase-confirmation page.

The measurement code will also collect information from the browser like the language setting, the type of browser (such as Chrome or Safari), and the device and operating system on which the browser is running. It can even collect the “traffic source,” which is what brought users to the site in the first place. This might be a search engine, an advertisement they clicked on, or an email marketing campaign.

Processing and reporting

When the measurement code collects data, it packages that information up and sends it to Google Analytics to be processed into reports. When Analytics processes data, it aggregates and organizes the data based on particular criteria like whether a user’s device is mobile or desktop, or which browser they’re using.

But there are also configuration settings that allow you to customize how that data is processed. For example, you might want to apply a filter to make sure your data doesn’t include any internal company traffic or developer traffic.

Once Analytics processes the data, it’s stored in a database where it can’t be changed.

So remember, when you set up your configuration, don’t exclude any data you think you might want to analyze later. Once the data has been processed and stored in the database, it will appear in Google Analytics as reports.

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How to Keep Track of Website Visitors with Google Analytics – a Step by Step Guide

Monitor: what is the current status?

Before you can improve your metrics, you need to understand the baseline you’re starting from. Begin measuring key metrics now to see where your business is today and how you can improve tomorrow.

Set objectives: where do we want to be?

Once you understand where you currently are, you can set goals for where you want to go. Part of setting objectives involves understanding the benchmarks for your industry. For example, you might have a shopping cart conversion rate of 30 percent. Your ability to improve that may depend on industry benchmarks. B2B SaaS companies often achieve a 60 to 80 percent conversion rate, for example, while offline software companies average about 25 percent conversion.

Analyze and act: how much did we improve?

Once you establish your baseline and objectives, you can start analyzing the data you track and taking action to ensure that you keep improving your metrics and progressing toward your goals. First, of course, you’ll have to set up user tracking to ensure you’re analyzing the right data to support your decisions.

Bonus: Download this Free Analytics Minibible for Software and SaaS and learn how to be in control of Google Analytics and Adobe SiteCatalyst.

 Here’s how to start setting up the user tracking you’ll need in order to analyze data and take your business to the next level.

How to Use Google Analytics to Track Website Traffic

Before you start setting up a website flow design to track, you’ll need to choose the tool you want to use . Considering Google Analytics is one of the main web analytics tools with a market share of  84.1 % , and it’s free, we’ll talk about it in this article. To set up Google Analytics, visit the official landing page and click Start for Free to get the free version of the Google Analytics suite. You’ll go through a three-step process for user activity tracking: Sign up, Add tracking code, and Learn about your audience .

As part of the setup process, you’ll choose different “properties” for storing data. These properties might be different websites or different sections of your website. You will be able to analyze data by property.To add a tracking code, just paste in your tracking ID into your website. An alternative to insert your Analytics tracking code directly in your website HTML code is using Google Tag Manager – GTM is a tag management system that’s simple, reliable, and integrates easily with other existing systems.Google Analytics is also offered through third-party partners who can help you with the setup and customized solutions. If you have the budget, using a partner will ensure a fast and accurate setup tailored to your business needs. Here’s where you can find partners near you for this website click tracking services .

Set Up Tracking

After your account is established, it’s time to decide how you’ll track user activity on your website or websites . Using data to improve your business relies on having precise site flow data. Setting up your website usage tracking properly will be key to getting precise data. Users interact with your websites and software applications in many ways. Every time there is an interaction, a request can be made to a web analytics service to show that a page was loaded, an event was fired or a purchase occurred. Typically, you’ll need to add JavaScript code to your website to track website activity. That code will look different from one provider to another, but most often follows a similar pattern:

• Load a library with the characteristics and methods of the web analytics
• Set some properties about the user, page or event to track
• Trigger a request that tracks the data

The quality of your website usage tracking will be influenced by several factors, including your visitor flow and navigation flow. Do you send users through multiple domains or subdomains? Do visitors come back to your site often over a period of time? To follow visitors across different domains and subsequent visits, you’ll need to use something called “ tracking cookies. ” Cookies are what track users from web page to web page. However, they might be cleared when a user goes to a different domain or comes back at a later date. To track users across all of your web properties, you’ll need to set up your analytics tool appropriately.

Website User Tracking Code

This is how the tracking code should look on your main domain (e.g., www.mysite.com) and all of the subdomains where you want to track user activity:

We’ve highlighted the elements in the tracking code that differ from the default tracking code offered in your Google Analytics settings. Below, we explain each bit of new code:

• ‘auto’, {‘allowLinker’: true}); tells Google Analytics to automatically determine the best cookie domain to use and allow the passing of this cookie between domains linked to your main Website.
• ga(‘require’, ‘linker’); loads the JavaScript library that will pass the cookie from one domain to another.
• ga(‘linker:autoLink’, [‘subdomain.mysite.com’] ); tells Google Analytics which domains should to pass the cookie to automatically when users click on links to those domains. Make sure to fill this in with all of your relevant domains.

When a user clicks on a link from your website to a 3 rd party shopping cart or another third-party domain, you’ll notice that the link is automatically populated with a variable called _ga to keep tracking that user through your website flow. On the 3 rd party cart template or another third-party domain, you’ll need to set the following tracking code:

It’s almost identical to the code on your main domain. The only difference is on this line:

That’s where you’ll place your main website domain to let Google Analytics know that if this user clicks on a link back to the main website, it’s still the same user. This code also checks the current URL. If it finds the _ga variable, it sets a cookie matching the one from the main website so Google Analytics knows it’s dealing with the same user and will be able to report on all the user’s properties and history across the website user flow.

How to Track Website Usage Over Time and Across Devices

If you thought tracking users across your own domains was tricky, try tracking them after they’ve spent a few weeks away or when they access your website on their mobile phone instead of their laptop. Here are a couple of tricks for making sure you retain consistent website user tracking no matter how (in)frequently users visit or what devices they use. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is an important metric for any business. To accurately track this metric, companies need to make sure that returning visitors aren’t reported as new users. This requires you to define the length of a session in your website tracking tool. For example, if a user visits your website in March, creates an account a week later but doesn’t return until October, will that user be tracked as the same user?That depends on the definition of “session” in your web analytics tool. This user might be tracked as one user with two sessions (one in March and one in October), one user with three sessions (two in March and one in October) or even two users with three sessions (one user with two sessions in March, another user with one session in October). It all depends on how you set things up.

Defining a Session

In Google Analytics, you can define the timeout for each session in My Website > Tracking Info > Session Settings . You can choose whether sessions time out after hours, days or months. Your decision will depend on how your own website and software treats sessions, so check with your development team on this matter. Although you can control the length of a session, Google Analytics will track a single user for two years (or until cookies are deleted).

Tracking Users Across Different Devices with Logins

Tracking Users Across Devices

Tracking Visitor Conversions

Google Analytics lets you track micro-conversions as page views or events . Page view tracking works if the conversion sends users to a different URL. To track this, simply set up a funnel step goal in the Goals section of Google Analytics that updates whenever the appropriate URL loads. Event tracking, which you’ll need to use anytime users stay on the same page after doing something you want to track, requires adding a snippet of code to links. You can create Events within your Google Analytics account at Behavior > Events > Top Events and learn more about event tracking in this tutorial .

Custom Dimensions for More Precise Website Click Tracking

If page views, events or funnel steps aren’t enough, you can add custom dimensions that allow more precise tracking of your website visitors. You might use custom dimensions when you have a few different options that you need to track distinctly. For example, if you offer three versions of a SaaS product, you might want to track whether people click on the Silver, Gold or Platinum package, and compare conversion rates based on this information. You can also track other information about this user, like their location, on top of the package type. This helps you understand if different packages are more popular in different countries or regions. You can add up to 20 custom dimensions or metrics in Google Analytics for free. For instance, another great way to track your website visitors is through QR codes, as QR code tracking in Google Analytics offers you the opportunity to understand your end-users much better. This way will get a better overview on how your website visitors interact with your content once they land on your website. Read more about the different types of dimensions available to you here . There is clearly a lot more to say about t racking visitors to your website and analyzing the traffic they generate. 

Check out this full Analytics Minibible for Software and SaaS companies to learn how to become a pro at web analytics .

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How to Check Website Traffic On Google Analytics Step-By-Step

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In this guide, you’ll learn how to check website traffic on Google Analytics.

This step-by-step tutorial is divided into two parts to show you how to check website traffic in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Universal Analytics (UA) so you can get the reports you need for both versions of GA.

The first part of this guide will explain how to check website visitors in Google Analytics in a way that reveals an overview of how well your digital marketing strategies are working for SEO. You’ll learn the steps for how to track the various website acquisition channels, audience demographics, technology being used, and real-time data as a whole. The second part of this tutorial will teach you how to check page traffic on Google Analytics so you can analyze specific page URLs, traffic sources for that content, and other important tracking data on a page-by-page basis.

Table of Contents

How to Check Website Traffic On Google Analytics

1. log into google analytics.

The first step for how to check website traffic on Google Analytics is to log into the dashboard.

Go to https://analytics.google.com and then select the correct website property and Google Analytics version (Universal or GA4) that you want to view the website traffic.

2. Go to Website Acquisition Overview

After you’re logged into Google Analytics, the next step for how to check website traffic in Google Analytics is to get a quick overview of your website’s statistics.

Instructions for both Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) are below.

For Google Universal Analytics :

• Go to Reports > Acquisition > Overview

For Google Analytics 4 (GA4) :

• Go to Reports > Acquisition > Acquisition Overview

Note: If you want to see the specific keywords your website is ranking for on Google, you can visit this other guide on how to see keywords in Google Analytics that shows you how to connect your GA account with Google Search Console to automatically pull the keyword data in for each of your web pages.

Changing the Website Traffic Date Range

If you want to know how to track website traffic using Google Analytics for a specific period of time (i.e., date range), then you can do that in the GA dashboard. You can simply change the date range by clicking on the date picker in the top right-hand corner of the screen. The options for analyzing website traffic in GA include:

• Last 7 Days
• Last 30 Days
• Last 90 Days (GA4 Only)
• Last 12 Months (GA4 Only)
• Last Calendar Year (GA4 Only)
• This Year (GA4 Only)
• Custom Date Range of Your Choosing

3. Check Website Traffic Acquisition Channels

The next step for how to check website visitors in Google Analytics is to view the traffic acquisition channels. This allows you to see which digital marketing channels are sending your website the most visitors, including:

• Organic Search
• Organic Video
• Organic Shopping
• Other or Unassigned

Below are the instructions for how to check each traffic acquisition channel in GA Universal and GA4.

• Go to Reports > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels

• Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition

4. View Website Traffic on GA In Realtime

If you want to check your website traffic in realtime, Google Analytics provides that data for you. Just follow the steps below to get to this screen in the dashboard for your installed version of GA.

You can see the number of active users on the website within the last 5 to 30 minutes, top referrals, and traffic sources.

• Go to Reports > Realtime > Overview

• Go to Reports > Realtime

5. Check Website Audience Demographics

Perhaps you want to track the website traffic demographics of y our audience with Google Analytics. You can do that easily in GA by following the instructions below. Some key insights you can gather on the Audience Overview dashboards include:

• Go to Reports > Audience > Overview

On this Audience Overview screen of Google Universal Analytics, you also get a snapshot of other key metrics for your website, including:

• Number of Sessions Per User
• Pages / Session
• Average Session Duration
• Bounce Rate
• New vs Returning Users

In Google Universal Analytics, you can drill down further into specific details about your audience by clicking on the items in the lefthand menu, such as Demographics, Interests, and Geolocation.

• Go to Reports > Demographics > Demographics Overview

On this audience overview screen of GA4, you get an overview of demographic data for your website, including:

In GA4, you can drill down into specific details about your audience by clicking on the “Demographic Details” link in the lefthand menu. On this new screen, you can then click on the “Country” dropdown field that appears above the “Totals” column, and change it to report another audience metric, such as Region, City, Language, Age, Gender, or Interests.

6. Analyze Website Visitor Technology

Another important website traffic metric you can analyze in Google Analytics is the technology of your visitors. This GA report will show you how users are interacting with your web pages using the various computer and mobile technologies.

Types of technology traffic you can check in GA include:

• Operating System
• Service Provider
• Screen Resolution
• Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet
• Go to Reports > Audience > Technology or Mobile

• Go to Reports > Tech > Tech Overview

In GA4, you can drill down into specific details about your audience’s technology by clicking on the “Tech Details” link in the lefthand menu. On this new screen, you can then click on the “Browser” dropdown field that appears above the “Totals” column, and change it to report another audience metric, such as Device Model, Screen Resolution, Platform, Operating System, etc.

How to Check Page Traffic On Google Analytics

The first step for how to check page traffic on Google Analytics is to log into the dashboard.

2. Check Page Traffic Overview

The next step for checking page traffic in GA is to navigate to the Behavior or Engagement Overview screen depending on the GA version you have installed for your website. Here, you can see the top 10 web page URLs that are getting the most traffic on your website.

Below are the instructions for both Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

• Go to Reports > Behavior > Overview

• Go to Reports > Engagement > Overview

3. View Individual Page Traffic On GA

If you want to know how to check page traffic in Google Analytics for individual URLs, then this step will show you how to do that.

• Go to Reports > Behavior > Overview > Site Content > All Pages

Google Universal Analytics allows you to drill down into each URL by clicking on it so you can see daily or monthly page traffic data for individual web pages.

You can quickly find out the following metrics for each page URL in Google Universal Analytics:

• Unique Pageviews
• Average Time on Page

• Go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens

You can quickly find out the following metrics for each page URL in GA4:

• Views Per User
• Average Engagement Time
• Unique User Scrolls
• Event Count
• Conversions
• Total Revenue

4. Check the Page Source / Medium

If you’d like to analyze the Sources and Mediums that are sending traffic to your web pages, then Google Analytics has a report for that data in both Google Universal Analytics and GA4.

For Google Universal Analytics

• Click on the Secondary Dimension dropdown that’s above the “Page” column.
• Type the word “source” into the search field.
• Choose “Source / Medium” to add this secondary dimension to the table.

After those steps are completed, you’ll then get a list of each page along with the Source and Medium that is sending traffic to that URL.

If you want to know how to track website traffic using Google Analytics for all of the Sources and Mediums for a single page URL, then you can do that too. To narrow down the list of pages, just type the page URL into the search field that’s next to the “Advanced” link above the table and click enter. The page traffic table data will be filtered to only show the Sources and Mediums for that particular URL as you see in the example image below.

For Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

• Click on the + sign to bring up the Secondary Dimension menu.
• Choose Session Aquisition > Session source / medium.

5. View Page Traffic In Realtime

If you want to check your page traffic in realtime, Google Analytics provides that data for your website. Just follow the steps below to get to this screen in the dashboard for your installed version of GA.l

• Go to Reports > Realtime > Content

6. Analyze Page Audience Demographics

You can also check the audience demographics for each page on your website in Google Analytics. This allows you to find out how much page traffic is being delivered by certain demographics like country, city, language, gender, etc.

• Select a specific URL.
• Look under the “User” section to find the demographic data you want to find.
• Choose an option like “Country” to add this secondary dimension to the table.

• Choose User and then select the demographic data you want to find, like “Age”, “City”, “Country”, etc.

Now, if you want to take things a step further, then check out this other tutorial on how to check organic traffic in Google Analytics . On that page, you’ll learn how to filter your website data by individual search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to assess the impact of your organic SEO methods.

There are also step-by-step instructions for how to get Google Analytics certification if you’re looking to get GA certified.

Check Website Traffic On Google Analytics Summary

I hope you enjoyed this guide on how to check website traffic on Google Analytics.

As you discovered, there are two ways for how to check website visitors in Google Analytics and this tutorial taught you how to check page traffic on Google Analytics as well as the website as a whole. Depending on the tracking data you need, you can get various types of reports in both Google Universal Analytics (UA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to help measure and guide your digital marketing efforts for SEO and other online marketing channels.

How to Track Website Visitors: Benefits, Tools and FAQs

• August 31, 2023

Businesses spend a ton of time, money and effort into creating websites that are not only helpful and captivating, but also highly effective at converting visitors. They’ll create content, revise designs, add new pages and change forms, all in the hope of getting visitors to stay on the site and convert into leads or customers.

When you track website visitors, you can see which of your efforts are moving the needle. While many people are familiar with pageviews as a metric, website visitor tracking can be much more in-depth and insightful.

In this article, we’ll cover how website visitor tracking works, what you can track, and how this information can improve sales and marketing results. We’ll also explain global privacy concerns and how businesses can choose the right tracking software. 

What is website visitor tracking? 

Website visitor tracking uses software and applications to track and analyse how visitors interact with your website. It’s a vital tool to help businesses understand whether their website design and content are having the desired effect.

Website visitor tracking includes very broad, non-specific data, like how many times visitors have come to your site. But it can also get very specific, with personal information about the user and even recordings of their visit to your site. Site visits, which may include visiting several different pages of the same site, are often referred to as “sessions.”

Although Google Analytics is the most widely used website visitor tracking software, it isn’t the most comprehensive or powerful. Companies that want accurate data and more in-depth understanding of their website may need to consider a Google Analytics alternative like Matomo.

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As we’ll cover later, website tracking has many important business applications, but it also poses privacy and security concerns, causing some states and countries to impose strict regulations. Privacy laws and your company’s values should also impact what web analytics tool you choose.

How website tracking works

Website tracking starts with the collection of data as users interact with the website. Tracking technologies like cookies, JavaScript and pixels are embedded into web pages. These technologies then gather data about user behaviour, session details and user actions, such as pageviews, clicks, form submissions and more.

More advanced tracking systems assign unique identifiers (such as cookies or visitor IDs) to individual users. This enables tracking of user journeys across multiple sessions and pages. These detailed journeys can often tell a different story and provide different insights than aggregated numbers do. 

All this collected data is transmitted from the user’s browser to a centralised tracking system, which can be a third-party web analytics tool or a self-hosted solution. The collected data is stored in databases and processed to generate meaningful insights. This process involves organising the data, aggregating metrics, and creating reports.

Analytics tools process the collected data to generate reports and visualisations that provide insights into user behaviour. Metrics such as pageviews, bounce rates, conversion rates and user paths are analysed. Good web analytics tools are able to present these insights in a user-friendly way. Analysts and marketing professionals then use this knowledge to make informed decisions to improve the user experience (UX).

Advanced tracking systems allow data segmentation and filtering based on various criteria, such as user demographics, traffic sources, devices and more. This enables deeper analysis of specific user groups. For example, you might find that your conversion rate is much lower when your website is viewed on a mobile device. You can then dig deeper into that segment of data to find out why and experiment with changes that might increase mobile conversions.

3 types of website tracking and their benefits

There are three main categories of website tracking, and they each provide different information that can be used by sales, marketing, engineering and others. Here, we cover those three types and how businesses use them to understand customers and create better experiences.

Website analytics 

Website analytics is all about understanding the traffic your website receives. This type of tracking allows you to learn how the website performs based on pageviews, real-time traffic, bounce rate and conversions. 

For example, you would use website analytics to determine how effectively your homepage drives people toward a product or pricing page. You can use pageviews and previous page statistics to learn how many people who land on your homepage read your blog posts. From there, you could use web analytics to determine the conversion rate of the call to action at the end of each article.

User behaviour

While website analytics focuses on the website’s performance, user behaviour tracking is about monitoring and quantifying user behaviour. One of the most obvious aspects of user behaviour is what they click on, but there are many other actions you can track. 

The time a user spends on a page can help you determine whether the content on the page is engaging. Some tracking tools can also measure how far down the page a user scrolls, which reveals whether some content is even being seen. 

Session recordings are another popular tool for analysing user behaviour. They not only show concrete actions, like clicks, but can also show how the user moves throughout the page. Where do they stop? What do they scroll right past? This is one example of how user behaviour data can be quantitative or qualitative.

Visitor information

Tracking can also include gathering or uncovering information about visitors to your site. This might include demographic information, such as language and location, or details like what device a website visitor is using and on which browser they view your website. 

This type of data helps your web and marketing teams make better decisions about how to design and format the site. If you know, for example, that the website for your business-to-business (B2B) software is overwhelmingly viewed on desktop computers, that will affect how you structure your pages and choose images. 

Similarly, if visitor information tells you that you have a significant audience in France, your marketing team might develop new content to appeal to those potential customers.

Use website visitor tracking to improve marketing, sales and UX 

Website visitor tracking has various applications for different parts of your business, from marketing to sales and much more. When you understand the impact tracking has on different teams, you can better evaluate your company’s needs and build buy-in among stakeholders.

At many companies, the marketing team owns and determines what kind of content is on your website. From landing pages to blog posts to the navigation bar, you want to create an experience that drives people toward making a purchase. When marketers can track website visitors, they can get a real look at how visitors respond to and engage with their marketing efforts. Pageviews, conversion rates and time spent on pages help them better understand what your customers care about and what messaging resonates.

But web analytics can even help marketing teams better understand how their external marketing campaigns are performing. Tracking tools like Matomo reveal your most important traffic sources. The term “traffic source” refers to the content or web property from which someone arrives at your site. 

For instance, you might notice that an older page got a big boost in traffic this month. You can then check the traffic sources, where you find that an influential LinkedIn user posted a link to the page. This presents an opportunity to adjust the influencer or social media aspects of your marketing strategy.

Beyond traffic sources, Matomo can provide a visual user journey (also known as User Flow ), showing which pages visitors tend to view in a session and even in what order they progress. This gives you a bird’s-eye view of the customer journey.

Get the marketing insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

Just like your marketing team, your sales team can benefit from tracking and analysing website visitor information. Data about user behaviour and visitor demographics helps sales representatives better understand the people they’re talking to. Segmented visitor tracking data can even provide clues as to how to appeal to different buyer personas.

Sales leadership can use web analytics to gauge interest over time, tie visitors to revenue and develop more accurate sales forecasts and goals. 

And it’s not just aggregated website tracking data that your sales team can use to better serve customers. They can also use insights about an individual visitor to tailor their approach. Matomo’s Visits Log report and Visitor Profiles allow you to see which pages a prospect has viewed. This tells your sales team which products and features the prospect is most interested in, leading to more relevant interactions and more effective sales efforts.

User experience and web development

The way users interact with and experience your website has a big impact on their impression of your brand and, ultimately, whether they become customers. While marketing often controls much of a website’s content, the backend and technical operation of the site usually falls to a web development or engineering team. Website analytics and tracking inform their work, too.

Along with data about website traffic and conversion rates, web development teams often monitor bounce rates (the percentage of people who leave your website entirely after landing on a page) and page load time (the time it takes for an individual web page to load for a user). Besides the fact that slow loading times inconvenience visitors, they can also negatively affect your search engine optimization (SEO) .

Along with session recordings, user experience teams and web developers may use heatmaps to find out what parts of a page draw a visitor’s attention and where they are most likely to convert or take some other action. They can then use these insights to make a web page more intuitive and useful.

Visitor tracking and privacy regulations 

There are different data privacy standards in other parts of the world, which are designed to ensure that businesses collect and use consumer data ethically. The most-discussed of these privacy standards is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) , which was instituted by the European Union (EU) but affects businesses worldwide. However, it’s important to note that individual countries or states can have different privacy laws.

Many privacy laws govern how websites can use cookies to track visitors. With a user’s consent, cookies can help websites identify and remember visitors. However, many web visitors will reject cookie consent banners . When this happens, analysts and marketers can’t collect information from these visitors and have to work with incomplete tracking data. Incomplete data leads to poor decision-making. What’s more, cookie consent banners can create a poor user experience and often annoy web visitors.

With Matomo’s industry-leading measures to protect user privacy, France’s data protection agency (CNIL) has confirmed that Matomo is exempt from tracking consent in France . Matomo users have peace of mind knowing they can uphold the GDPR and collect data without needing to collect and track cookie consent. Only in Germany and the UK are cookie consent banners still required.

Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

Choosing user tracking software

The benefits and value of tracking website visitors are enormous, but not all tracking software is equal. Different tools have different core functionalities. For instance, some focus on user behaviour over traditional web analytics. Others offer detailed website performance data but offer little in the way of visitor information. It’s a good idea to start by identifying your company’s most important tracking goals.

Along with core features, look for useful tools to experiment with and optimise your website with. For example, Matomo enables A/B testing while many other tools do not.

Along with users of your website, you also need to think about the employees who will be using the tracking software. The interface can have a big impact on the value you get from a tool. Matomo’s session recording functionality, for example, not only provides you with video but with a colour-coded timeline identifying important user actions.

Privacy standards and compliance should also be a part of the conversation. Different tools use different tracking methods, impacting accuracy and security and can even cause legal trouble. You should consider which data privacy laws you are subject to, as well as the privacy expectations of your users.

Some industries have especially high data security standards. Government and healthcare organisations, for example, may require visitor tracking software that is hosted on their premises. While there are many purely cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) tracking tools, Matomo is available both On-Premise (also known as self-hosted) and in the Cloud .

Frequently asked questions

Here are answers to some of people’s most common questions about tracking website visitors.

Can you track who visited your website?

In most cases, tracking your website’s traffic is possible. Still, the extent of the tracking depends on the visitor-tracking technology you use and the privacy settings and precautions the visitor uses. For example, some technologies can pinpoint users by IP address. In other cases, you may only have access to anonymized data.

Is it legal to track someone’s IP address?

It is legal for websites and businesses to track someone’s IP address in the sense that they can identify that someone from the same IP address is visiting a page repeatedly. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) , IP addresses are considered personally identifiable information (PII) . The GDPR mandates that websites only log and store a user’s IP address with the user’s consent.

How do you find where visitors are clicking the most?

Heatmap tools are among the most common tools for learning where visitors click the most on your website. Heatmaps use colour-coding to show what parts of a web page users either click on or hover over the most.

Unique tracking URLs are another way to determine what part of your website gets the most clicks. For example, if you have three links on a page that all go to the same destination, you can use tracking links to determine how many clicks each link generates.

Matomo also offers a Tag Manager within the platform that lets you manage and unify all your tracking and marketing tags to find out where visitors are clicking.

What is the best tool for website visitor tracking?

Like most tools, the best website visitor tracking tool depends on your needs. Each tool offers different functionalities, user interfaces and different levels of accuracy and privacy. Matomo is a good choice for companies that value privacy, compliance and accuracy.

Tracking for powerful insights and better performance

Tracking website visitors is now a well-ingrained part of business operations. From sales reps seeking to understand their leads to marketers honing their ad spend, tracking helps teams do their jobs better.

Take the time to consider what you want to learn from website tracking and let those priorities guide your choice of visitor tracking software. Whatever your industry or needs, user privacy and compliance must be a priority.

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How to Track Visits to Website (The EASY Way)

Starting your own website journey is a challenge, and analytics play a fundamental role in it.

However, understanding what’s happening on your site is not always that easy.

But traffic analysis doesn’t have to be rocket science. In this in-detail guide, I will show you how to track visits to website using a simple yet powerful tool: Fathom Analytics.

What is The Easiest Way to Track Visitors to Website?

There are different website analytics tools that website owners can use depending on their needs.

Two common problems with most web visitor tracking tools out there (including widely used Google Analytics) are:

• They are complex to use: many website visitor tracking tools have messy interfaces that often require a learning curve.
• They are not privacy-focused: they do not comply with international regulations regarding visitor’s privacy and data collection.

Meet Fathom Analytics

This is why we made Fathom Analytics - a simple web analytics tool .

We make things simple for you - you will be able to make the best out of your key performance indicators and web analytics in a simple and straight-to-the-point interface.

We collect traffic data responsibly - “tracking” is a rather intrusive term; we don’t “track” your visitors. Instead, we collect data on your site’s traffic in a responsible and legal way.

We care about privacy - our website tracking tool comes with EU Isolation , and that’s something enabled by default.

Collecting visitor data with Fathom Analytics will help you focus on the important web analytics metrics , and let you:

• Understand visitor behaviour: comprehend how visitors interact with your website to have a clear understanding of how your site is being perceived online.
• Powerful insights to focus your sales and marketing efforts: gathering data about your entire customer journey can help your marketing and product teams to improve marketing campaigns with the purpose of gaining more quality leads and increasing conversion.
• See what’s working and what isn’t: website tracking tools help you understand what’s working and what's not on your website so you can leverage data to improve customer journeys, increase web traffic, or achieve success with your website.

How to Track Visits to Website: Step-by-step

Comprehending how visitor tracking software work is not always that easy for newcomers to the world of website analytics.

But having a clear understanding of your traffic stats is not optional if you want to be one step ahead of your competitors.

To start tracking website activity and visitors with Fathom , follow these simple three steps.

1. Create a Fathom Analytics Account

First and foremost, create a brand-new Fathom Analytics account . Every account comes with a 30-day free trial - this is enough time to let you get familiar with the tool and its capabilities .

There are monthly and yearly paid options, so you can choose what’s most convenient for you.

Enter your billing details, and then proceed to the following step.

2. Create Your First Site And Install Fathom Analytics Code

You will be prompted to add your first site to Fathom Analytics - your journey is about to start!

Click on "create a new site" , and the following screen will show:

Here, you must add your site name to get started. Then, it will be necessary to add FA’s tracking code into your site to install our website visitor tracking software successfully.

The installation instructions will vary depending on your website type . Fathom Analytics will generate a single Site ID that will subsequently be connected to your site to start collecting data on website visits.

Your Site ID will be an alphabetic code with the format “ABCDEFG.”

You can embed your website code by adding it to the head section of your website, as shown in the following screenshot:

Or, if you have a WordPress Site, you can download the Fathom Analytics WP plugin from your WordPress dashboard and include the information of your unique Site ID.

After installing your FA code, click on “ Verify Site Code ” so the tool can verify that the code has been correctly installed on your site. If you don’t want to verify your site code now, you can click “Close”.

Load your site to test the installation, and check that the code has been implemented as expected.

Congratulations - you have started to track visits to your website with Fathom!

3. See Website Visitor Tracking Data On the Fathom Dashboard

Once your FA code has been successfully implemented on your site, Fathom’s multiple tools and features will start to display web traffic on the main dashboard.

From now on, you can use this information to gather data (in a privacy-focused way), generate a tailored traffic report, and more.

Fathom Analytics Dashboard is extremely easy to understand and use.

First, you will see a graph that shows the evolution of your website visitors over time. You can change this graph to hide or show certain values.

Each parameter above the graph has a meaning:

| --- | --- | | Parameter Name | Explanation | | People on your site | Current number of people actively viewing your site right now. | | Visitors | Total number of people who have visited your time over a certain period of time. | | Views | Total number of website pages loaded by visitors. If 2 visitors load 2 pages each, then Fathom will show you 4 views. | | Average time on site | Average time spent by a visitor on website pages. | | Bounce rate | Percentage of people who visit your site and leave without engaging with other pages. | | Event completions | Total number of conversions tracked through events on your website. |

If you scroll down a little bit, you will see the following parameters on the dashboard:

This is what each one of these parameters means:

You can also check out our Fathom Dashboard Video Walkthrough to get precise insights on dashboard terminology and other factors.

How Can You Make The Most Out of Fathom Analytics?

As you can see above, Fathom Analytics makes collecting data from your website visitors a fairly simple process that anyone can perform.

But one thing is to check how many visitors you receive on your site, and another thing is to make the best out of our tools and features to improve your marketing efforts in a data-driven way.

Fathom is more than a simple website visitor tracking software, and you’ll learn this quickly by using the following features.

1. Setup Events

Event Tracking is possible through Fathom Analytics Events . It’s possible to collect website traffic data about certain parameters on your site by going to the Event Management Tab.

Events can be everything you want: button clicks, form submissions, file downloads, clicks on links, and more.

Go to the Event Management Tab to set up Event Tracking on Fathom:

Events have three important parameters to consider: Event Name, which is the name of the event, Event ID , which is the ID tag related to the event; and Event Currency , which is an optional parameter for events with monetary values.

For instance, you can track website visitors to a single page by adding an event script as a page loads:

Replace “Your-Event-ID” with your customised Event ID created on FA’s dashboard, and Fathom will start collecting event data and reflect it in your dashboard.

2. Enable Email Reports

One of the most useful features of Fathom Analytics is the Email Reports feature. With Email reports, you can get exclusive traffic reports directly into your email inbox. You can set up email reports like this:

• Go to Settings, and select Emails.
• Select “Send Me Weekly Reports” or “Send Me Monthly Reports” - it is up to you.
• Click “Create New,” and you’ll receive powerful summarised reports in your email on a weekly or monthly basis.
• Remember that you can select the sites that you want to send in reports (provided that you have multiple sites instead of only one).
• It is also possible to send reports to your marketing teams by scrolling down to “ Add additional email report ” and adding your team’s emails manually.

3. See Data From Multiple Websites in a Unified Dashboard

Fathom Analytics allows its customers to add or delete up to 50 different websites for free - that’s a lot!

You can see traffic data from multiple websites simultaneously by toggling the “All Sites” feature on your main dashboard.

4. Share Analytics Dashboard with Your Team or Customers

It is possible to share dashboards with your Search Engine Optimization, Marketing and Sales Teams at the same time.

By default, dashboards will not be shared unless you decide to do so manually. This is how you share dashboards on Fathom Analytics.

• Go to Settings and select Site Settings on the dashboard you want to share.
• There are three options related to dashboard sharing: None, Shared (Password Protected), and Shared (No Password).
• Click on the option you prefer. If you select Shared (No Password), copy the link of the dashboard and send it over.
• If you select Shared (Password Protected), generate the Share Password, click “Save,” and send the Share URL of your dashboard.

This feature is especially useful if you want other people in your team to use website visitor data in their strategies.

For example, a sales team can check the Event Completion parameter on FA’s dashboard to determine the best course of action to improve conversion rates.

5. Exclude Your Own Visits and Certain Pages

If you want to have a more accurate representation of website visit data, you can exclude visits, so your and your team's visits don’t count towards pageviews and visitors metrics.

You must add the following Fathom script to your browser console in order to exclude your own traffic:

The process varies depending on the browser you use (Safari, Opera, Mozilla, etc.), so you can get more detailed information about excluding visits here. You can also exclude your own visits by adding your IP address to your site’s exclusion list .

By default, Fathom’s tracking code acts on all pages of your website, but if you want to exclude certain pages , you can do it by using a script.

In this case, “/secret-page” is the pathname of the page you want to exclude . Modify this script and add it to the logic of the web page.

Wrapping Up: The Power of Using a Visitor Tracking Tool

Website visitor tracking tools are here to provide us with the insights we need to improve and adapt to the constant changes of the online world.

Most analytics tools out there overcomplicate some processes that should be easy to complete.

If you are looking for a Google Analytics Alternative , then look no more - Fathom Analytics does not violate your user’s privacy as it collects data on your website: it’s a win-win situation for everyone.

What Visitor Tracking Software is GDPR Compliant?

Fathom Analytics is a GDPR Compliant website tracking tool. We protect the digital privacy of our visitors by showing data in aggregate while protecting the identity of your website visitors at all times.

Does Replacing Google Analytics with Fathom Hurt My SEO?

No - there will be no negative SEO impact if you replace Google Analytics with Fathom Analytics. In fact, your site will load faster (among other advantages), which represents a quite positive impact on SEO.

BIO Paul Jarvis, author + designer

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Enrich your core statistics with:

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See how your website visitors behave on-page, with all their clicks, hovers, and scrolls converted into easy-to-understand heatmaps.

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In nearly every sector, companies are seeking skilled leaders to transform troves of data into profit.

About the program.

Pacific’s Eberhardt School of Business launched its STEM-designated Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) in Fall 2021. Open to students with a bachelor’s degree in any major, this unique 9-month* plus internship** program allows entry-level students to gain experience in the field using the vast industry network of the Eberhardt Career Management Center. The hybrid program blends online learning with on-campus classes at Pacific’s Stockton campus. With a curriculum built to align with the International Institute of Business Analytics standards, students will gain the essential skills and knowledge required to be successful leaders of data-informed business strategy.

* 9-month schedule is only available for full-time students starting in the fall semester. Full-time students must take 16 units in the fall and 15 units in the spring semesters. Conditionally accepted students may not be eligible for the 9-month schedule.

** Internship requirement: 120 hours of work related to business analytics in a qualified business or non-profit organization. An internship is not required for students with full-time employment at the completion of course works.

Surging Demand

Graduates with an analytics degree in business will be met with one of the fastest-growing and most versatile employment fields in the country. The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor states that “employment growth will be driven by an increasing use of data and market research across many industries.” Whether it is analytics applied to market research, operations research, or financial research, employment growth is projected to range from 14% to 25% from 2020 to 2030 in business analytics fields, which is must faster than the average job growth rate for all occupations. The increase in the collection and analyses of “big data”— extremely large sets of information in every industry — will provide the need for individuals who can gather, interpret, and analyze data to optimize decision-making.  

Courses offered in a Hybrid of online and classroom learning

Built-in real-world internships, finish the curriculum in just 9 months*.

For students who seek to work full-time, the program can flex to meet your needs. Take a reduced course load with the option to take courses over two academic years and complete a capstone experience at your place of work in lieu of the required internship.

Connect with the University of the Pacific

If you have any questions about the application or admission requirements, set up a meeting to speak with our Recruitment and Outreach Manager.

The Eberhardt School of Business develops knowledgeable, innovative business leaders in a personalized, experience-based learning environment and produces scholarship that contributes to disciplinary knowledge, informs teaching, and advances the practice of business.

We share a set of underlying principles that govern our behaviors and our ability to achieve our mission:

• Maintaining a student-centered learning environment
• Educating the whole person
• Stimulating intellectual growth
• Maintaining a mutually supportive community of faculty, staff, and students
• Engaging external stakeholders
• Promoting excellence
• Being socially responsible
• Behaving ethically and with integrity
• Providing service to the university, community, and profession  

Program Learning Objectives

Graduates of the MS in Business Analytics program will be able to:

• Demonstrate technical proficiency in mathematics, statistics, programming, and software tools for business analytics
• Effectively communicate in oral and written forms at a high level of professional expectations
• Translate and analyze data into presentable and actionable business/managerial solutions with an awareness of ethical issues in the field

Admission Requirements

The admission process involves a holistic review of each applicant’s background and experiences. The following are required for admission:

• Applicants with a GPA between 2.65-2.99 may be considered if they have relevant work experience or certificate coursework completed that speaks to their ability to be successful in the program.
• Official transcripts* 
• Personal statement
• Two letters of recommendation
• Applicants may demonstrate their quantitative capabilities through successful undergraduate coursework in statistics (MATH 37 or equivalent), relevant work experience, a minimum GMAT Quantitative Reasoning Score of 40, or a minimum GRE Quantitative Reasoning Score of 152. If the applicant’s quantitative abilities are not demonstrated in the application, the applicant will be asked to enroll in a pre-approved course and successfully complete it with a minimum course grade of "B."

Official transcripts should be sent directly to the Office of Graduate Admission, located at:

University of the Pacific Office of Graduate Admission Knoles Hall Room 204 3601 Pacific Avenue Stockton CA 9521

NOTE: Students are required to have their own portable computers with the following minimum hardware requirement: Processor: i7 or equivalent; RAM: 16 GB; Hard Disk: 512 GB; OS: Microsoft Windows. Instruction will be given on the Windows platform. 

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: Please visit the  International Graduate Applicants  site to learn more about the additional application requirements. 

Course Sequence

Full-Time 9-Month Course Sequence Fall Semester (16 units) MSBA 210 — Business Analytics (3) MSBA 220 — Business Concepts and Applications of Analytics (3) MSBA 230 — Database Management with SQL and R (3) MSBA 232 — Programming for Data Science (Online) (1) MSBA 235 — Research Methods & Ethics (3) MSBA 285 — Capstone Project I (3)

Spring Semester (15) MSBA 240 — Advanced Business Analytics (3) MSBA 250 — Applied Business Analytics (3) MSBA 260 — Leading the Analytics Organization (3) MSBA 265 — Special Analytics Topics (3) MSBA 286 — Capstone Project II (3)

Part-Time 2-Year Course Sequence 

Fall Semester Year 1 (9) MSBA 210 — Business Analytics (3) MSBA 220 — Business Concepts and Applications of Analytics (3) MSBA 235 — Research Methods & Ethics (3)

Spring Semester Year 1 (6) MSBA 240 — Advanced Business Analytics (3) MSBA 265 — Special Analytics Topics (3)

Fall Semester Year 2 (7) MSBA 232 — Programming for Data Science (Online) (1) MSBA 230 — Database Management with SQL and R (3) MSBA 285 — Capstone Project I (3)

Spring Semester Year 2 (9) MSBA 250 — Applied Business Analytics  MSBA 260 — Leading the Analytics Organization MSBA 286 — Capstone Project II

  Part-Time 3-Year Course Sequence

Fall Semester Year 1 (6) MSBA 210 — Business Analytics (3) MSBA 220 — Business Concepts and Applications of Analytics (3)

Spring Semester Year 1 (3) MSBA 240 — Advanced Business Analytics (3)

Fall Semester Year 2 (6) MSBA 230 — Database Management with SQL and R (3) MSBA 235 — Research Methods & Ethics (3)

Spring Semester Year 2 (6) MSBA 265 — Special Analytics Topics (3) MSBA 250 — Applied Business Analytics (3)

Fall Semester Year 3 (4) MSBA 232 — Programming for Data Science (Online) (1) MSBA 285 — Capstone Project I (3)

Spring Semester Year 3 (6) MSBA 260 — Leading the Analytics Organization (3) MSBA 286 — Capstone Project II (3)

* All courses are either hybrid or online unless otherwise noted.  ** Program, course offerings, and schedule are subject to change.

Tuition and Fees

Master of Science in Business Analytics

We strongly encourage anyone interested in joining the program to attend an information session to learn more.

“The Master of Science in Business Analytics develops graduate students with the essential abilities to use data effectively and strategically for business people regardless of industries or job functions.”

Business programs offered by the Eberhardt School of Business are accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International, the premier business school accrediting organization in the world. The five-year continuous review process ensures students and employers of the most current and high-quality programs. Learn more about the AACSB and the continuous review accreditation process. Learn more about what it means for you to attend an AACSB accredited school.

We take a hands-on approach with our students. This means we want to get to know you throughout your discovery and application process. Help us connect with you by taking the next step.

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