Working online isn’t like working at a physical location. You can’t see who’s coming and going by default. You have to proactively track it. That’s where user tracking tools come in.
No, I’m not talking about following people around the internet and selling their data to the highest bidder. In reality, we’re focused on understanding how our visitors are using our sites and the tweaks we can make to achieve better outcomes.
Website not converting well? Track user behavior and see where the bottlenecks are. Want to know your most popular pages? Track user behavior.
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This guide will show you 9 of the best user tracking and website analytics tools available right now.
Best user tracking tools
1. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is one of my favorite visitor tracking tools and we use it for my saas company UsefulPDF. It specifically focuses on product analytics for web, mobile, and any other platform you can think of.
To be frank, it can get complex based on all the things you can do. You can essentially track any kind of data and attach it to a user. Do you want to know how long it takes users to turn into paid customers after starting a trial? OR maybe you want to know what the most popular feature is. Conversely, you can set up tracking for entire funnels.
It’s a versatile platform that anyone building a software product (or otherwise) should at least look into. Start with figuring out what the most popular tools/features are, where people are leaving your funnel, and the characteristics of your best customers.
It has a free plan with paid plans starting at $25/m.
2. Hotjar
Hotjar is a suite of user behavior and tracking tools that lets you understand how people are interacting with your website. This is accomplished through visitor session recording, onsite surveys, heatmaps, and hosted surveys.
It has many popular integrations so you can route your data to the right place or pull in information to make the most of Hotjar. Slack, Segment, Hubspot, and more are represented.
With the user recordings, there’s a feature called ‘rage clicks’ this will let you know where people ran into problems and ended up getting frustrated. This is a goldmine of high friction areas that you can work on.
It’s free to get started with the basic features and limited usage with paid plans from $39/m.
3. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is considered the gold standard of website analytics for many. It’s used by most websites on the internet and is free for all but the largest brands.
If you know how to use it, Google Analytics can unearth many insights but users have complained time and again that it’s complex and hard to make the most of it.
Just a few of the things you can do include setting up goals, creating custom reports, understanding the demographics of your users, and seeing where they came from (organic, referral, direct, social, etc.). It can also track your funnels and help with attribution.
The benefit of using Google Analytics is that it integrates with other tools like Google Search Console and Ads Manager so that you can pull all of that data and get a holistic overview of what’s going on with your website.
It’ll take some time to learn but it’s well worth the investment.
4. Microsoft Clarity
Clarity is, in a way, Microsoft’s answer to Google Analytics. Instead of user analytics that’s more or less a few numbers showing you that people are using your site, Microsoft Clarity shows you how users are interacting with your site. User behavioral tracking.
It accomplishes this through session recording and heat maps. You’ll be able to understand how far people scroll down your page and also see what they’re doing while on the page. It’s a great supplement to whatever analytics tools you’re currently using.
For example, if you notice that many people are dropping off on certain landing pages, you can use the session recording on Microsoft clarity to understand what the issue may be. If you’re so inclined, you can integrate with Google Analytics to take your data management to the next level. It’s free to use.
5. Fullstory
Fullstory is another application that allows you to better understand what users are doing through session recording software. With that being said, it goes much further than just allowing you to watch behavior.
It provides what’s known as digital experience intelligence. In essence, it lets you track every behavior on your website, pull out the relevant insights, and make moves based on that information. Put simply, know what’s happening and can act accordingly.
It’ll help you identify and make changes to multiple elements that may be impacting conversions. These include but aren’t limited to the speed of your site, workflows that are annoying for visitors, device-specific errors, and so much more.
Additionally, it’ll track the best conversion pathways based on real user behavior and uncover patterns based on all users or even certain cohorts. These insights can work together to help you drive better results and adoption of your products.
6. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder takes a different approach to user tracking. Instead of focusing on how people are using your website, what they’re interacting with, and any bottlenecks, its aim is to tell you who’s visiting your website.
It’ll unearth the companies and individuals that have been browsing your website which will allow you to more effectively plan sales outreach.
It works by identifying IP addresses, filtering out the chaff, and then building segments that you can work with. The end result are targeted lists of potential customers that you can work with. It also maintains a global database of industry heavyweights and small businesses alike. The information can be matched against the database and enriched.
Once all the processes are finished, you’ll be able to send it to your CRM and sell like only you know how to. The platform is free to get started and paid plans begin at 79 Euros a month.
7. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a behavioral analytics platform that’s designed for SaaS and ecommerce brands. The emphasis is on identifying real humans that are using your site, understanding what they’re doing and taking action to optimize for your desired action.
This is accomplished by helping you understand key metrics in the funnel such as the number of free trials started, the number of customers that have added items to the cart, breaking information down into cohorts, tracking which cohort values which features, and much more.
One of my favorite features is full-funnel tracking. You can easily understand how people are starting and finishing the journey to becoming a customer.
In essence, it’s your one-stop-shop for customer behavior insights. With the lessons you learn, you can do things like reducing customer acquisition costs (because more people become customers), boosting retention, and more.
8. Woopra
Woopra, like many tools on this list, is a product analytics and customer tracking platform. It bills itself as end-to-end customer journey mapping. Let’s unpack what that means.
It leads with the ability to integrate your data across multiple sources. Instead of having relevant customer information siloed in your CRM, email marketing service, customer support tool, etc. it makes it possible to bring in all those pieces of data to get a holistic overview of every customer touchpoint.
From there you can analyze the data to bring out insights such as the best segments, the customer journey, retention metrics, and much more. And, of course, you can take action on what you’ve learned.
One thing that sets Woopra apart is that it has automation triggers that can help you personalize communication and reach your users in real-time. There is a free plan and pricing starts at $349/m.
9. Inspectlet
Inspectlet is a simple tracking platform that combines session recording and heatmaps to give you a better idea of what users are doing and why.
It works well with a wide range of applications like Ajax, SPA, standard websites, and more. It sets itself apart by giving you powerful filtering options that let you focus on the most important recorded sessions.
For example, instead of looking at all visitor recordings, you can focus only on the ones that stayed under one minute or those that stayed over one minute. Or you can look at sessions where the user performed specific actions like watched a video, visited a specific page, or downloaded a lead magnet. There’s a lot of versatility.
Of course, after watching recordings, you can find bottlenecks and figure out the best next steps for your brand. It has a free plan with paid pricing starting at $33/m.
Conclusion
User tracking, though it may have negative connotations in this day and age, is essential. It’s only through those interactions that you’ll be able to take the right steps to improve your products and offers.
We’ve gone through multiple tools on this list and the one you choose will depend on your needs. If you have a product like a saas the Mixpanel is a good choice – it’ll also step up to the plate for eCommerce. If you want to peek over the shoulder of customers then something like Hotjar or Fullstory are great choices. Google Analytics is a no-brainer for every site.