What Are Some of the Best Alternatives to Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a great tool and can be an extremely handy resource in understanding your businesses marketing efforts. There are, however, other analytics tools on the market – so here we will outline five alternatives.

Some are free tools, some are paid, and they each have slightly different unique selling points; so read through the options and gain a better understanding of which one will best suit your business’s needs.

Free Tools

StatCounter

StatCounter is a tool that has been around for quite a while, but despite that the user interface has remained very simplistic. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad product; it simply looks a little more ‘old school’ than some other tools. The top-level data you need is all there, providing insights into visits, visitor paths, popular pages, entrance- and exit-pages, incoming keywords, and more.​

In terms of segmentation, goals, campaign tracking, and slightly more advanced features, StatCounter lags behind the competition.

Key Features: StatCounter has a tool called Growth Plan that converts your web traffic data into actionable insights and helps you focus on key areas to achieve an increase in revenue. The problem is that Growth Plan is an upgrade, and you must pay per month to use it.

Industry Rankings lets you see how your site stacks up against your competitors for traffic, social media, mobile traffic, and user experience, and the tool has a huge library of content such as videos, articles, and e-books that will help you get the most out of your site.

Overview: StatCounter is not as useful as some other analytics tools, and doesn’t provide as many features – but its main saving grace is the fact that it’s free to use.

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics (OWA) is a free, open source web stats solution. Its user interface, in terms of appearance and general navigation, is reminiscent of the Google Analytics interface from around 2013.

Even though OWA is free to use it is feature-rich; it can track goals along several steps of a conversion funnel, offers stats filtered by multiple factors, and even displays heatmaps and mouse-tracking.

Key Features: With Custom Variables it is possible to set and store up to five custom properties on all tracking events (for example, page views, sessions, clicks, or action events). Custom Variables can be set for a single tracking request, across all requests that make up a single session/visit, or across all visits for a single visitor.

Overview: OWA is a solid and feature-rich analytics solution. Unfortunately, it has the same bounce rate and time on site weakness of most analytics tools. It also looks like it’s not being updated very frequently.

Paid Tools

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg lets you see what your customers are doing in real time. Thanks to its Heatmap tool, you can see exactly where your customers are clicking – it’s like a spy kit that helps you detect the most popular sections of your web pages. It also monitors scroll depth to provide insight regarding which section of your page is being read the most.

Key Features: Unlike other data tools that produce figures and trends, with Crazy Egg the experience is completely visual. This visual representation of results allows you to make better decisions on the positioning of page content, and on which areas to optimize. The page editor gives you the power to change whatever you want on the site in a very simple and user-friendly manner, meaning you can get in, change whatever you want, and get back out.

Crazy Egg also allows you to carry out A/B testing; and what’s more, the winner of the A/B test will be seamlessly pushed into the live version. You simply pick a goal based on a URL, form submission, or a clicked link/button, and then as soon as the platform detects a winning variant it will automatically send more traffic to the winner. This gives you as many conversions as possible without having to waste any traffic.

Overview: From the moment a visitor comes to your site, to the end of their session, you’ll see every movement of their cursor and everything they click on.

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is a great analytics tool that helps you to acquire, keep, and grow your customer base, especially through its Customer Engagement Automation feature. From prospects to advocates, it allows for a deep understanding of – and unique engagement with – different customer profiles. You can identify which visitors are most likely to convert, for example, and focus your marketing efforts on the source of traffic that brings in the most conversions. And if people drop out of the sales funnel, you can also generate a list of those users and target them through other campaigns.

Key Features: A particularly handy feature is Kissmetrics’ Click to Track tool, which makes creating goals and events hassle free. You don’t need to write any code to set up analytics; with Click to Track you can simply use your mouse to add events by clicking on key elements of your website.

Overview: When you need to implement a Conversion Rate Optimization campaign and make sure that your sales funnels are performing optimally, Kissmetrics can help you achieve your CRO goals.

Adobe Analytics

This heavyweight piece of software aims to bring a high level of attribution across multiple channels and devices. Adobe Analytics use Success events to measure conversions and takes data from multiple digital sources including voice, video, connected car, CRM, and the internet of things, to name but a few. Furthermore, it integrates with offline and enterprise data like loyalty programs to really get a full picture of the consumer journey towards a success event.

Key features: Multichannel online and offline data sources and custom variables which make data collection more robust and relevant to your own particular business. Adobe Analytics also offers integrated tag management so you can collect and share data across marketing systems without altering your website’s HTML code. It’s also possible to unlock the details of your marketing activity with advanced attribution modelling using multiple rules-based algorithms which can help you apply the most suitable model to your marketing activities when understood in terms of your audience insights. A further benefit of this aspect of Adobe Analytics is that it also helps detect anomalies in website interaction.

Overview: Adobe Analytics is best suited to large enterprise level organizations with a strong digital presence. Its five figure price tag means it’s generally out of reach for most organizations, but its incredible channel integrations both offline and online are something most analysts can dream of.

Heap

​Heap analytics is one of the more impressive Google Analytics alternatives, and its main focus is on user friendliness. The idea is that you can easily set up tracking for all the important events on your site without needing major technical skills.

Heap’s set up actively encourages you to create the tracking and reports that are actually useful for you. It doesn’t overwhelm you with endless stats and screens. Instead, it guides you through the process of building your own reports, based on your particular business needs.

Key Features: Beyond installing tracking code on your website, everything in Heap is done with a point-and-click interface, somewhat similar to Kissmetrics. What sets it apart is that you can define custom events by clicking directly on buttons and forms on your site and telling Heap what you want it to track in relation to them.

In addition, Heap automatically tracks events on your websites and shows you a list of the most commonly performed events, which you can then label and classify. It even does this retroactively. So, if you decide to track a new event today, it will give you stats for this from the past, all the way back to the moment you installed the Heap tracking code.

Overview: The result of all this is that Heap is incredibly easy to set up and use. In terms of user friendliness, Heap is the opposite of Google Analytics. In fact, Heap is an absolute joy to set up and use.

Related

• Walkthrough: Google Analytics with Cathal Melinn
• Improve Your Campaigns With These Critical KPIs
• Presentation: Google Analytics - A Practical Guide to the Main Features
• Should you be concerned about Google Managing your PPC Campaign?