track visits to site

Website Traffic Checker

See search traffic estimates for any website or webpage. Try the free version of Ahrefs’ traffic checker.

For example,

See how much traffic your competitors are getting

Explore organic and paid traffic metrics for any website using Site Explorer . Use the interactive graph to see how traffic has progressed both globally and locally in 171 countries.

Analyze your competitors’ best performing content

See which pages are driving the most traffic for competitors, and reverse-engineer what's working for them. Learn which sections of their website drive the most traffic with traffic data for subdomains or subfolders.

See which keywords are driving traffic

Learn which keywords your competitors rank for, and how much traffic each keyword sends their way. Use these insights to find new keywords to target with your site.

Spy on your competitors’ paid traffic

Explore the keywords your competitors are running search ads for, and where they're sending that traffic. Take inspiration for your search ads from their ad copy.

Bulk-check traffic for multiple websites

Check the estimated monthly search traffic for up to 200 websites at once using the Batch Analysis tool .

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Website Traffic Checker

Get useful traffic insights for your own website or analyze competitors' traffic and organic SERP positions

Free Complete Site Audit

Access a full website audit with over 300 technical insights.

Free Website SEO Checker & Audit Tool

• Scan the site for 300+ technical issues
• Monitor your site health 24/7
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What is a Website Traffic Estimator?

Importance of web traffic analysis and monitoring, how to use the tool.

• Check Your Own Website
• Check Competitors Website
• Final Thoughts on Website Traffic Checker Tool

It is an essential tool for any site owner or marketer looking to optimize their online presence. Our website traffic checker is a versatile and powerful data analysis tool designed to help you track, analyze, and optimize your website’s performance.

Key features of the domain traffic checker:

• All-in-One Dashboard: Access comprehensive data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SERP in one convenient place, saving time and effort.
• Easy-to-Use Interface: With user-friendly dashboards, our web traffic lookup makes it easier than ever to navigate between your website’s metrics smoothly and uncover opportunities for growth.
• Competitor Analysis: Stay ahead of the competition by analyzing organic traffic data , SERP visibility, and top traffic-generating keywords of your competitors. Leverage these insights to optimize your site and outrank your rivals.
• Global SEO platform features: Our global SEO platform offers much more than just traffic data analysis. Sitechecker includes a variety of functionalities such as SEO audits ( on-page & off-page), rank tracking , site monitoring, and more. With Such useful data analysis, you can easily eliminate threats and foresee opportunities.

Analyzing your website’s traffic data is crucial to promoting online presence and increasing organic search visitors and sales. Regardless of the size of your site or the number of users, regular user session audits are essential.

Our tool provides valuable information about your website visitors, including their sources (organic, direct , paid , social , referral , email etc.) and behavior, and also offers insights to optimize your site by identifying areas that need improvement. The more detailed data you process, the better and more accurate results you will get.

If you’re not monitoring your site’s performance and ranking, then you’re missing out on potential visitors and new users constantly. Every day, there are new engagement metrics to measure a site’s success, but the basics of website traffic checks remain vital.

We’ve created a video guide to help you delve deeper into traffic estimation and fully utilize all the features that our traffic finder provides.

Step 1: Input the domain for which you want to check traffic, then click the “Check traffic” button

Step 2: Specify the site for which you would like to access traffic data

Our powerful tool provides you with easy access to traffic data for both your own website and your competitors. We have also included a range of valuable features to help you gain more profound insights into both scenarios. Using those features provides you with a better understanding of your online performance and a competitive edge in your industry. By answering whether it is your website or not, you help us prepare the right dashboard for your needs.

Step 3: Access your results and take advantage of our powerful features

For your own site.

To access data for your own site, simply select ‘Yes, it is mine’ and connect your GA and GSC accounts. This fantastic feature can really come in handy for site admins, SEOs, and marketers. It allows you to monitor the website traffic from the two best analytics platforms, all in one place. We have also created custom dashboards with valuable insights.

Take a look at our general traffic dashboards that provide insights on all visitors and organic traffic from Google Analytics. The data represented in visibility is based on your top ranking keywords, while others, like impressions, clicks, click-through rates (CTR), positions, and ranking keywords are based on Google Search Console’s top metrics.

To track your website’s dynamics smoothly, our dashboards also have many other in-depth insights with a user-friendly interface. For example, if you have e-commerce data in Google Analytics, you can access sales data and correlations with traffic. This gives you a complete picture of your website’s revenue performance. Moreover, it’s easy to check data for a specific time range, whether daily, weekly, or monthly.

If you’re interested in GSC insights, check out the board that includes performance, positions, visibility, top 100 keywords, and top 100 landing pages.

A similar board is for the keywords from the rank tracker.

If you own multiple websites, work for an SEO agency, or manage a large entrepreneurial website, our tool has a specific feature you’ll appreciate. The project dashboard allows you to track traffic and other performance metrics for a bulk of sites that you or your clients own. Alternatively, you can separate a large project into specific parts or languages, for example, and track them individually.

If you need to make reports for your clients, we’ve got you covered. We’ve already created them for you, so all you need to do is download or share them.

For competitor websites’ analyze

Firstly, we recommend selecting a specific region to ensure that the data is clear, up-to-date, and provides insight into the local market situation for analysis.

Let’s take a closer look at the main elements of a website traffic estimator and consider how they help you evaluate your competitors.

Organic traffic: It is generated from the click-through rate (CTR) and search volume associated with each keyword for which the domain ranks.

Traffic Value: Represents the expense associated with driving the estimated monthly organic traffic volume through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google Search. This provides an understanding of the potential financial value of the traffic.

Organic Search Engine Results Page (SERP) positions: This metric displays the number of keywords for which a competitor ranks within various SERP positions: top 1, 2-3, 4-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-50, 51-70, and 71-100. It offers insight into the overall visibility of the competitor in search results.

Furthermore, our competitor’s traffic estimation includes an additional feature, Top Keywords. This feature allows you to examine the top 30+ keywords for which the site ranks. Each keyword is accompanied by its relevant URL in the SERP, position in the search results, average monthly search volume, cost per click (CPC) from Google Ads, and the top geographical locations where the website ranks for the keyword.

If you are interested in not only calculating competitor site visitors but also assessing their technical SEO performance, you can take advantage of our SEO audit feature.

Unlock the Power of Your Website's Performance with Our Traffic Checker Tool!

Dive deep into your website's performance and stay ahead of your competitors with our advanced traffic checker tool.

Final Thoughts on Website Visitor Checker

Our tool is a universal solution for various visitor analysis needs. You can use it to aggregate data from GA, GSC, and SERP in one place. With fully automatic set-up dashboards, you can get useful insights and focus on the data that will give you the best results. Additionally, you can use it for market analysis and competitor checks, including organic traffic estimation and price evaluation. Find out which keywords give your rivals the best visibility and traffic results to improve your own performance. It can be a great solution for controlling and analyzing traffic in one place.

Can I check website traffic for free?

How to check website traffic for my website, how to find traffic for a competitor's website, can i see the website traffic history using the tool, what is website traffic analysis, can i track website traffic, what users are saying.

The 7 Best Free Live Website Traffic Tracking Tools

Do you run your own website? See who's visiting your site right now with these real-time visitor tracking tools.

If you run your own website, it's important to know who's on your website right now. That's why you need real-time visitor tracking.

Let's have a look at why website visitor tracking is important and which tools you can use on your site.

The Benefits of Live Website Visitor Tracking

Live website visitor tracking (a sub-set of web analytics), gives you a way to instantly see what people are doing on your site in real-time.

Depending on the tool you use, some of the benefits include:

• Knowing if your new content is immediately popular.
• Information about which social media posts/networks are driving visitors.
• Insight into how a visitor travels through your site.
• See which products and sales deals are garnering the most attention.
• Real-time notifications if a particular person/company visits your site.
• Learn which pages generate the most sales leads.

Visitor Tracking on Other Sites

Before we dive into the tools, a quick note about website visitor tracking on sites you don't own.

Any tool which claims to be able to show you live data on third-party sites is not being truthful. Sites like Alexa can give you a few clues about the headline visitor numbers, but no external tool can see a site's real-time visitors without the owner's consent.

Okay, let's have a look at some web visitor tracking tools.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most well-known website visitor tracking tool. The app has many different features, but for the sake of today's rundown, we're only interested in Real-Time.

If you use Real-Time, you will be able to use event tracking to monitor the usage of your site's mobile app, watch the performance of any promotions you're running, and monitor your goals in line with site changes.

Google Analytics is entirely free to use. To get set up, you need to add a tracking code to your site. You can manually place the code after the <head> tag on each page you want to track. Some backends such as WordPress offer plugins that'll add the code automatically.

Check out our Google Analytics guide if you are a complete beginner and not sure where to start.

2. Live Traffic Feed

You might not need the complexity that Google Analytics offers. Although anyone can use it, it may be overkill if your site doesn't have huge amounts of traffic.

For a more straightforward way to check how many visitors are on your website right now, you could consider using the free Live Traffic Feed tool. It provides a live feed of people who visit your site. The data includes the visitor's location and the page they viewed.

To use Live Traffic Feed, you can either grab the HTML code and paste it into your site manually or download the WordPress plugin. There are several customization options, including color , time zone , counters , size , and more.

For the tool to work correctly, you need to make sure it is in the top 30 percent of your site's page. If it is below the 30 percent line, it will only update in real-time for three minutes. You will need to refresh the page to reactivate it.

Note: Anyone who visits your site will be able to see the live feed. Don't use the tool if that makes you uncomfortable.

3. Hitsteps

Hitsteps specializes in real-time website visitor tracking.

From the main dashboard, you can see which country the visitor is in, how they found you, what page they are looking at, which browser they are using, which operating system they are using, and a whole lot more.

And if a visitor fills out a form on your site (like a newsletter subscription, a comment, or a contact form), Hitsteps can automatically connect the visitor's identity to the person's form details. It allows you to build up a more complete picture of who is visiting your site.

Other Hitsteps features include keyword analytics, cross-device tracking, website heatmaps, a page speed analysis, and real-time ad blocker detection.

The free version of Hitsteps is available to sites with fewer than 2,000 monthly visitors. For 10,000 per month, it costs $4.99. The top plan costs $49.99 and supports up to one million visitors.

4. Whos.Amung.Us

Whos.Amung.Us is one of the best free website visitor tracking tools. Even though it's free, the tool will be enough for most users. It supports unlimited page views, unlimited visitors, and an infinite number of websites.

Different widgets are available. You can add a live map to your site or choose from a selection of visitor counters widgets. To install the widget on your site, you need to copy and paste the HTML code from the Whos.Amung.Us website.

You need to insert it onto every site that you want to track; it is not enough to only run it on your homepage. As an added bonus, the tool is ad-supported.

5. Watch Them Live

Watch Them Live is a real-time analysis and user behavior tracking tool. You get access to the basics, such as visitors, page views, sessions, referrers, and user segmentation, but can also enjoy some more powerful features that help the app stand out.

These features include session replays (so you can see a re-run of every action visitors performed on your site and their journey through your content) and heat mapping (giving you insight on which areas of your site are receiving the most clicks).

The free plan covers 5,000 page views per month, plus 5,000 visitor events tracking and 5,000 video replays. Paid plans start at $9/month.

Clicky lets you track website visitors in real-time. You can use it to track individual visitors and their per-session actions, view visitor locations on a map and see other data such as operating system, browser, ISP, language, and even the visitor's screen resolution.

There are also some non-live features such as Google Search ranking data, HTTPS tracking, website heatmaps, and an uptime monitor.

Clicky's free plan lets you track one site with a maximum of 3,000 daily page views. The pro plan increases the limit to one million views.

7. Web-Stat

The Web-Stat homepage doesn't look too impressive, but don't let that put you off. The tool can record all the visitors to your website—not just the ones who have JavaScript enabled.

In addition to the real-time stats, Web-Stat can show details of individual visitors, precisely measure the duration of visits (rather than extrapolating the data from a sample), see visitors click-paths and conversions, and measure your referrals.

Web-Stat is also worth considering if you are a privacy fanatic. Unlike services like Google Analytics—which shares your data with third parties and uses it for targeted advertising, Web-Stat does not sell or release any of your data.

Other Ways to Monitor Your Website

The seven tools we have discussed will all help you to gain a deeper understanding of how your website is performing and how your visitors interact with the content.

But these tools are just one part of the puzzle. If you would like to learn about some other options, remember you can also increase engagement with Facebook widgets and other similar tools.

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Backed by the world's most intelligent and comprehensive view of digital traffic, our platform gives you the data and insight you need to win – and win big – online.

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Browsing for Insights?

Access behind-the-scenes analytics for every site online. With the Similarweb TrafficMeter™ browser extension, you’ll have easy access to objective traffic data and other insights, as you surf.

Reflecting over 10 years of investment, Similarweb’s DigitalRank(TM) is the definitive measure of the digital world -- and is relied on daily by leaders like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Check out the world’s leading digital brands, and how they stack up:

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Looking to improve website monetization? Attract investors? Discover new partners and channels? Partner with Similarweb, so your public traffic ranking reflects your real-world success. Get your site accredited and give your online reputation a boost.

Follow the Traffic to Ultimate Insight

Expedia’s traffic decreased by more than 80% year-over-year during April 2020, the apex of the pandemic.

In the two weeks leading up to Prime Day, daily traffic was 11% higher year-over-year across Big Box retailers such as Walmart and Target.

On Black Friday, product views and purchases on Amazon increased by 8% and 18% YoY, respectively.

The pandemic drove an extraordinary amount of traffic to the real estate industry. Consumer favorite zillow.com received 31% of traffic share, a 14% lead over its closest competitor realtor.com .

The New York Post is the top news & media site in the Northeast region of the U.S., with over 1.4B visits in 2020.

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15 best website tracking tools to measure traffic, user behavior, and performance

A website tracking tool will track, measure, and report on website activity and visitor behavior including traffic, user clicks, and performance (e.g. conversion rate). Tracking tools show you what’s happening on your website so you can learn what is (and isn’t) working and optimize for improved UX and business goals.

Last updated

Reading time, 5 popular free website tracking tools.

If you’re looking for free web tracking tools, here’s a cheat sheet of the most popular ones covered in this guide:

Google Analytics : measure website traffic and find your best (and worst) performing pages

Hotjar : track user behavior and gather digital experience insights with heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and user feedback

Google Optimize : A/B test page variations to find the best-performing designs

Google Search Console : measure SEO performance and check for crawling and speed errors

Mixpanel : monitor product metrics like activation, retention, and churn

⚠️ Google is sunsetting Google Optimize in September 2023. While you can still use the tool until then, you’ll need to switch over to an alternative afterwards. We included alternatives on this page.

Whether you’re new to website tracking or looking to get deeper insights than the usual traffic stats, you’ll find the best tools here, broken down into three categories:

Traffic tracking tools

Behavior tracking tools

Performance tracking tools

💭 Understand your users with Hotjar

Use Hotjar to safely track user behavior and understand how people experience and interact with your website or app.

Website traffic tracking tools

Traffic is usually the first thing that gets tracked on a website or app, by using  web analytics tools . Traffic metrics can tell you how many site visitors you have, how they found you, how long they spend browsing different pages, and how frequently they’re converting into customers.

What traffic metrics can you track?

Bounce rate

User source and medium

Session duration or time on page

Visitor location

Device type (i.e. desktop, tablet, or mobile)

New vs returning users

Event tracking

Goal conversions

5 top website traffic tracking tools

Google Analytics

Adobe Analytics

1. Google Analytics

What it is : Google Analytics is  the veteran of the list and the most popular website analytics tool.The latest version,GA4, puts more emphasis on how visitors use your site, not just traffic.

What you can track : new and returning users, engagement, revenue, retention, demographics, conversions, and events.

Price : free (with limits); upgrade to the paid version (Google 360) for more features and unlimited traffic.

💡  Complement Google Analytics’ quantitative user data with Hotjar’s qualitative intelligence to gather even more valuable insights. Use the Hotjar and GA integration to understand the user behavior behind GA’s numbers.

2. Adobe Analytics

What it is:   Adobe Analytics  is a traffic analytics and multichannel data collection tool, designed for advanced users and enterprise companies.

What you can track:  business intelligence (BI) and traffic data from websites, emails, and apps, including pageviews, unique visitors, purchases, order attribution, segmentation, and  customer journey  analytics.

Price:  on request.

3. Matomo (formerly Piwik)

What it is:   Matomo  is an open-source web traffic analytics tool .

What you can track:  unsampled traffic metrics, ecommerce and event tracking, custom dimensions, goals, and segments.

Price:  free (self-hosted).

What it is:   Clicky  is a real-time website traffic analytics tool.

What you can track:  real-time data, including visitors, pageviews, and events.

Price:  from free for 3,000 pageviews/day.

What it is:   Fathom  is a simple,  privacy-focused  analytics tool.

What you can track:  site views, unique views, average time on site, bounce rate, goal completions, referrers, country, user device, and browser type.

Price:  from $14/month for 100,000 pageviews.

💡 Pro tip:  website tracking isn’t limited to websites you own; you can also track traffic on competitor websites with tools like SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and Semrush. The data isn't 100% accurate but should give you a relative understanding of how your  website traffic compares  to other sites.

Website behavior tracking tools

By tracking traffic, you’ll get a good idea of what’s happening on your website—the most popular pages, where people leave from, and where they spend time browsing. Now, you’re ready to track  how people interact with your pages.

What is behavior tracking?

Behavior tracking shows you where your users  click  and how they scroll or navigate between pages. The main goal behind  user behavior  tracking is to  measure user experience , find opportunities to improve UX and, as a result, increase conversions and revenue.

What tools can you use to track user behavior?

Heatmaps : see an overview of where visitors click, tap, and scroll on a page.

Session recordings : view how each user browses across multiple pages.

A/B testing : create page design variations and test which performs better.

Surveys and  feedback widgets : get direct feedback from users and track sentiment and satisfaction over time.

User testing : interview users as they navigate your site.

4 user behavior tracking tools to improve your website

Google Optimize

UserTesting

What it is : Hotjar (that’s us, hi there! 👋) is a digital experience insights platform that helps you connect the dots between what your users do—and why—all in one place, so you can confidently create and optimize user experiences that convert..

What you can track : product experience insights like aggregated visitor clicks, scrolls, and mouse movement with heatmaps ; individual user browsing behavior with session recordings ; and user feedback with on-site surveys , a feedback widget, and user interviews .

Price : get started for free .

💡Pro tip: Hotjar isn’t technically a single website visitor tracking software, it’s five tools in one, all available on our free plan : Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, Feedback, and Engage. 

And you can get even more out of the platform with features like Funnels and integrations with popular tools like HubSpot , Slack , Microsoft Teams , Mixpanel , Unbounce , and more !

3 ways to track and analyze user behavior with Hotjar

1. Visualize interaction patterns with Heatmaps Engagement zones

What is it : Heatmaps Engagement zones measure aggregated clicks, taps, scrolls, and mouse movement data on any page (from a website or single-page application).

When to use it : use Engagement zones to optimize the layout, content, or usability of any page based on user engagement patterns. See where users interact the most (or least) and get a visual overview of what content is getting seen and what’s being ignored. Use this insight to make changes to your pages and improve UX .

💡 Pro tip : complement Engagement zone data with rage click maps to identify points of frustration, then reduce friction on your key pages.

Example of a rage click map

2. Watch session recordings of frustrated users

What is it : the Frustration score filter in Recordings lets you cut through the noise and surface only the recordings with the most valuable insights for you. 

When to use it : use Frustration sorting to experience your frustrated users’ sessions from their eyes and understand exactly what went wrong, so you can fix it.

💡Pro tip: use Funnels to identify where your users drop off , then watch recordings of users who didn’t convert to understand why.

From Funnels to Recordings in just one click

3. Gather insights directly from your users with Surveys and Feedback

What is it : Hotjar Surveys and Feedback are voice-of-the-customer (VoC) tools that give you insight directly from the best source of data: your users. Collect in-the-moment feedback with floating or embedded widgets, or trigger surveys as popups, screen takeovers, buttons, or send them by email.

When to use it : use surveys to track customer satisfaction ( CSAT surveys ), how easy (or hard) it is to use your site or product ( CES surveys ), how likely they are to recommend your products or brand ( NPS surveys ) over time, and more, with 30+ survey templates .

💡Pro tip: with AI in Surveys, fast-track the creation of surveys. Whether you have user research experience or not, let artificial intelligence do the legwork: simply enter your goal and let AI create the survey questions for you.

2. Google Optimize

What it is : Google Optimize is a website experiment platform that integrates with Google Analytics .

What you can track : using A/B testing , split testing , and multivariate testing ( MVT ), you can test variations of different web pages and measure how they perform.

Price:  free (with limits), upgrade to the paid version (Optimize 360) for more features.

⚠️ Google Optimize is sunsetting in September 2023! Here are some alternatives . But in the meantime…

Hotjar + Google Optimize = 🔥

Hotjar automatically integrates with Google Optimize so you can  filter Hotjar Session Recordings by Optimize experiment ID  and see exactly how visitors browse, click, and scroll on each test page.

3. Optimizely

What it is:   Optimizely  is a  website optimization tool  that allows you to run website experiments.

What you can track:  A/B, MVT, and  split testing  results to test variations of different landing pages and optimize performance.

💡 Get more from Optimizely: Hotjar integrates with Optimizely so you can filter Session Recordings and trigger Surveys by page variant, giving you more data to understand why some pages outperform others.

4. UserTesting

What it is:  UserTesting is a usability testing platform that recruits people to test your website.

What you can track:  measure qualitative user experience by watching test participants use your app, product, or website and answer questions.

Use Hotjar Engage to run user tests

Interview users as they navigate your site in real time

Hotjar Engage is a user interview platform that lets you recruit and schedule interviews with users from a pool of 175,000+ participants (or you can bring your own). Engage records and transcribes your calls, automatically.

Use Engage to run user interviews and moderated usability tests to gauge the functionality of your site or product and get direct user feedback.

Website performance tracking tools

Once you’re tracking website traffic and user behavior, the only thing left is to measure how your website is performing in relation to your business goals.

Tracking website performance is about  measuring the metrics that matter most to your business . For an SEO team, that might be website speed or keyword rankings; for a product team, it’s likely customer churn or  retention .

Whatever metrics matter to your business, there’s a tool to track them.

What performance metrics can you track?

Keyword rankings

Ecommerce sales

Social media shares

6 website and product performance tracking tools

Google Search Console

Kissmetrics

1. Mixpanel

What it is:   Mixpanel  is a product analytics tool that tracks performance on mobile and web applications.

What you can track:  product metrics like activation, retention, and churn.

Price:  free for up to 100k monthly users.

💡Connect the what to the why with the Hotjar and Mixpanel integration : filter recordings, heatmaps, trends, funnels, and dashboard data by specific Mixpanel events —or trigger surveys when they happen. 

Get a more detailed understanding of user behavior with combined insights that show you what’s happening behind the numbers by bringing Mixpanel events into Hotjar and using them as filters.

2. Google Search Console

What it is:   Search Console  is a free search optimization tool from Google.

What you can track:  measure SEO performance, view keyword impressions and clicks, see your backlinks, and check for crawling and speed errors.

Price:  free.

3. ChartMogul

What it is:   ChartMogul  is subscription and revenue tracking software designed for SaaS companies.

What you can track:  MRR, ARR, CLV, churn, revenue, sales, and subscriber numbers.

Price:  from free for up to $10k MRR.

What it is:   Ahrefs  is a suite of SEO tools to monitor and grow website traffic from search engines. (We're big fans of Ahrefs, ourselves!)

What you can track:  keyword rankings, backlinks, website speed, and broken links for your own and competitor websites.

Price:  from $99/month.

5. Kissmetrics

What it is:   Kissmetrics  is product and marketing analytics software for SaaS and ecommerce websites.

What you can track:  product metrics like sign-ups, churn, and MRR; ecommerce metrics like sales, revenue, and cart-to-purchase conversion rate.

Price:  from $299/month.

6. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

What it is:   Salesforce Marketing Cloud  is an enterprise-level CRM (customer relationship management) analytics platform for marketers with several add-on tools, including Customer 360 Audiences, Loyalty Management, Social Studio, and Advertising Studio.

What you can track:   email and ad campaign performance, key customer journey touchpoints, and website engagement.

FAQs about website tracking tools

What is the best tool for website visitor tracking.

There’s no single ‘best’ option, but we recommend pairing Google Analytics (the most popular website visitor tracking tool, used by 74% of analytics professionals), with Hotjar (used on over 1,1M websites) to track what’s happening on your website and why.

How do I track clicks on a website?

You can track clicks on a website by setting up a heatmap with a tool like Hotjar. A click map displays the most (and least) popular areas on which users click (on desktop) or tap (on mobile and tablet).

How do I track user activity on a website?

You can track user activity on single-page applications (SPAs) with most popular website tracking tools, like Google Analytics or Hotjar. Some tracking tools, such as Mixpanel and Adobe Analytics, can also track user activity on Android or iOS mobile apps.

How do I track user activity on an app?

You can track user activity on single-page applications (SPAs) with most popular website tracking tools, like Google Analytics or Hotjar. Some tracking tools, such as MixPanel and Adobe Analytics, can also track user activity on Android or iOS mobile apps.

How to improve your web analytics setup?

Start by running a web analytics audit to identify your needs, verify data accuracy, and review both security and privacy.

Based on the audit, you'll be able to create a web analytics strategy suited to your needs, and act on it with the right tools .

How to track user activity

Previous chapter

Compare website traffic

Next chapter

Website Visitor Tracking: How to Do It + 10 Tools [Free & Paid]

What is website visitor tracking, why is a website visitor tracking important, how to track website visitors, what are the benefits of website visitor tracking, are there any drawbacks of website visitor tracking software, what features should visitor tracking software include, our evaluation parameters for website visitor tracking tools, the best website visitor tracking software in 2022, 8. adobe analytics, visitor tracking tools: a short overview, website visitor tracking software: our verdict, faqs about website visitor tracking tools.

Website visitor tracking is an essential piece in the puzzle of optimizing your website and increasing conversions. It allows you to learn more about who visits your site, where they come from, what websites refer traffic to yours, and other important information.

Website visitor tracking also helps you discover if people can find the information they need or get confused at any point in the process.

Many tools available on the market can help you with website visitor tracking. However, not all of them are useful or affordable.

We recommend you start using FullSession, our web analytics tool, which helps you build a seamless customer experience with features like session recording and replay tools , website heatmap , and customer feedback tools .

You can sign up for a 14-day free trial to test our features and use them to gather and analyze user behavioral data. To learn more, you can book a demo .

In this blog post, we will discuss the essentials of website visitor tracking and focus on free and paid tools to help you choose the right one for your needs. Let’s start with some elementary information.

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14 Best Website Visitor Tracking Software Tools (By Category)

The term website visitor tracking can mean several different things. Specifically:

• It can mean tracking visitor behavior   on the site: Where people click, how long they spend on certain pages, and how that behavior differs by user type, demographic, referring source, and other user attributes.
• It can mean understanding visitor identity : Most tools can’t identify individuals, but they can identify companies, regions, and other vital information about website visitors that helps B2B companies market better to their prospects.
• It can mean measuring website analytics : This includes traditional website analytics tools and more advanced ones that can track the behavior of user cohorts, funnel analytics, and more.

These are very different use cases and they require entirely different visitor tracking software stacks. So, instead of listing a bunch of tools in one long list (like many other articles do), we thought it would be more useful to break our list down into these 3 buckets—so you can find the tool you need for your  specific use case.

If you want to understand the behavior of users on individual web pages,  look at the first section .

If you’re a B2B company  interested in tracking repeat visits from specific companies or target accounts, check out the second section .

If you want to  track stats and KPIs on your site  (similar to Google Analytics) or take a more advanced look at those metrics through the lens of funnels and cohorts, jump down to the   third section .

Note:  Want to better understand your website visitors  and their behavior on your website? Sign up and try Crazy Egg free for 30 days  to get access to visitor behavior tracking software that’s built to help you optimize your site.

Website Visitor Behavior Tracking Software

Purpose: When you want to know what visitors are doing on your website .

In order to optimize your website for KPIs like user experience (UX) and conversions, you need to understand how visitors behave on your site — and how changes to your website affect that behavior. The tools below help you understand anonymous website visitor behavior from a few different angles.

1. Crazy Egg

• Price:  Starts at $24/month
• G2  rating : 4.2 out of 5

We started Crazy Egg in 2006 with the goal of helping companies understand and track the behavior  of their website visitors. We’ve been focused on this exact use case for 15 years, and we’ve spent that time building detailed features to help marketers better understand website behavior.

Our tool includes five different kinds of Snapshots  (that’s what we call heatmaps and clickmaps ) that help you dig into and better understand the visitor behavior that drives other website metrics.

Our five different visitor tracking reports include:

• Heatmaps : show you where, and at what frequency, visitors are clicking on a given web page.
• Scrollmaps : show you how far down the page users typically scroll before they leave the page.
• Confetti Report : enables you to dig into your click data, showing how it varies across up to 22 different visitor characteristics.
• Overlay Report : shows that same breakdown of user behavior across 22 dimensions (including custom dimensions) for each clickable element on a given page.
• List Reports : emphasizes numbers over visuals — you’ll see a breakdown of how many website visitors click on a given page element (including pop-ups and other moving elements).

Taken together or individually, each of our Snapshots gives marketers access to valuable visitor tracking information you can use to optimize your website for UX and conversions.

• You can identify whether or not website visitors are tracking with your ideal website or customer journey.
• You’ll know which elements on a given web page your website visitors interact with, plus how that changes across different segments of visitors.
• You can tease out how engaged visitors to a particular page are and learn key details about where they came from and which visitor characteristics they share.

2. Mixpanel

• Price:  Free plan; paid plans start at $89/month
• G2 rating: 4.2 out of 5

Mixpanel  is a full-featured user behavior tracking tool that helps marketing and product teams better understand their users. It includes features to help you gauge the success of new feature launches and quickly visualize key data. Plus, with their User Profiles feature, you can get in-depth information on users — including who they are, and where they may be hitting roadblocks with your product.

3. VWO Insights

• Price:  Starts at $169/month

VWO  is the  enterprise solution for tracking visitor behavior and optimizing your website. The VWO Insights product includes features like conversion funnels, on-page surveys, and session recordings that can help you get to the heart of visitor behavior and the why  behind it. Plus, you can use Insights together with VWO’s other products for an end-to-end experience optimization tool.

4. UserTesting

• Price:  Contact UserTesting for pricing details
• G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5

UserTesting  is one of the tools we recommend when marketers are looking for more qualitative website visitor tracking. With UserTesting, you can connect with your actual audience and get complete session recordings as they navigate your website and perform specific tasks — meaning you can get at more of the why  behind visitor behavior.

5. FullStory

• Price:  Free plan; contact FullStory for paid pricing details
• G2 rating:  4.4 out of 5

FullStory  is one of the best visitor behavior tracking tools for support and product teams. The software automatically detects areas where your customers are struggling inside your product or app. Then it helps you identify high-impact areas that have a larger effect on your revenue and retention — so you can pinpoint and prioritize the most impactful changes.

Website Visitor Identification Tools

Purpose:   When you want to understand who your website visitors  are.

For B2B companies in particular, figuring out who  is visiting your website is just as important as knowing how they behave on your site. The tools below help marketers and salespeople alike identify the companies that are visiting their website (usually by IP address) and get access to key visitor information. Plus, they help you tie behavior (such as pages visited, number of visits and page views, and time spent) to each company.

6. Leadfeeder

• Price:  Free plan; paid plan starts at $55/month
• G2 rating:  4.7 out of 5

Leadfeeder ’s identification and visitor tracking software helps marketing and sales teams identify and convert more leads. With account-level visitor identification, every visit from an employee is tied back to the company name. Plus, with integrations for popular CRMs (such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive) and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, sales reps can add identified website visitors right into their outreach process.

• Price:  Starts at $900/month
• G2 rating:  4.1 out of 5

Act-On  includes tons of features that make it a full and capable marketing automation tool. Within that, their account-based marketing (ABM) features help salespeople with prospecting by identifying website visits from key target accounts. Plus, with Activity Roll-up, reps can get a full picture of how an account is interacting with the website, other marketing campaigns, and sales outreach.

8. Lead Forensics

• Price:  Contact Lead Forensics for pricing details
• G2 rating:  3.6 out of 5

With Lead Forensics , B2B companies can identify new sales leads in real time as they visit your website — you can even get access to key details such as company size, contact information (such as phone numbers and social media), and search behavior. Lead Forensics also includes automatic lead scoring based on multiple criteria that triggers instant notifications to flag your ideal customers.

• Price:  Starts at $39/month
• G2 rating:  4.8 out of 5

Leady  takes the visitor identification game to a different level than the rest by identifying company and  individual visitors, too. They’re also one of the few web visitor tracking tools that provide support for B2B lead generation  and  in-app product behavior. So you can track visitors as they become users and beyond — from end to end.

10. netFactor VisitorTrack

• Price:  Contact netFactor for pricing details

netFactor’s VisitorTrack  software brings in more buyer intent details from across the web than any of the other identification and visitor tracking software on our list. Their Company Surge feature tracks your website visitors across the web — so you can pinpoint those with the highest buying intent and reach out with the right message at the right time.

Website Analytics Tools

Purpose:  When you want to zoom out and get an aggregate view of your website’s performance.

When it comes to visitor and website traffic tracking, there’s actually a lot you can learn from traditional website analytics tools — if you choose the right software and know how to use it. The tools below offer a broad range of website analytics with some visitor tracking features thrown in.

11. Google Analytics

• Price:  Free
• G2 rating:  4.5 out of 5

The free version of Google Analytics  offers key audience and behavior website metrics as well as segments such as audience demographics, devices used, and new versus returning visitors. With more advanced features such as the Behavior Flow report, you can actually learn a lot more about who your website visitors are and how they behave on your site, which many Google Analytics users may not realize.

12. Kissmetrics

• Price:  Contact Kissmetrics for pricing details
• Capterra  rating: 4.3 out of 5

Kissmetrics  offers more advanced cohort analytics, built specifically for ecommerce and SaaS businesses. The tool enables marketers and product teams to tie all website behavior to a real person and see their entire journey, even across devices. Plus, with cohort analysis, you can use the behavior of real users to identify and target your most valuable customers and quality leads.

• Price:  Free plan; paid plans start at $999/month

With features for optimizing your web, mobile, and product experiences, Woopra  is one of the most comprehensive web analytics and visitor tracking tools on our list. Their People Profiles enable you to take a closer look at real users and website visitors and get to know them on a deeper, more qualitative level.

14. SimilarWeb

• Price:  Free plan; contact SimilarWeb for paid pricing details

SimilarWeb  approached website visitor tracking from a different angle than the rest of the solutions we’ve mentioned so far — by looking at your competitor’s website . With SimilarWeb’s Research solution, you can benchmark the makeup of your customer base and website visitors against competitive websites. Plus, you can identify the content and websites your visitors (and your competitors’ visitors) find most engaging across the web.

The Right Website Visitor Tracking Software for You

When it comes to website visitor tracking, the software tools that work best for you will very likely be different than the visitor tracking stack any other company uses — because they should be tailored to your  unique needs and the gaps in your existing stack.

Whatever those needs are, the tools above can help you better understand who your website visitors are and how they behave across your site and the rest of the web. Then, you can get to optimizing your website and marketing to boost conversions and create a better experience for visitors.

Note:  Ready to better understand your website visitors  and their behavior on your website? Sign up and try Crazy Egg free for 30 days  to get access to visitor behavior tracking software that’s built to help you optimize your site.

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9 Free Tools to Check Any Site’s Website Traffic

These are the best website traffic checker tools to find out how much traffic a website gets.

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Top 9 Free Website Traffic Checker Tools

How do website traffic checkers work, important website traffic metrics to analyze, how to analyze your website’s traffic, key learnings.

Do you want to know how many visitors a website gets? Website traffic checkers are tools that allow you to analyze the traffic of any website around the world.

These are the best tools to check website traffic for any site for free.

• SEO PowerSuite
• Sitechecker Pro
• UberSuggest

Semrush is a comprehensive suite of marketing solutions for online businesses. The platform offers a robust set of tools for everything from backlink analysis and content planning to SEO audits and ranking tracking.

One such tool is their Traffic Analytics solution, which can be used to check competitor website traffic.

Semrush has both paid and free versions. With the free version of Semrush’s Traffic Analytics , you can view up to 10 traffic overview reports a day.

The overview tab will provide important metrics for the website you are analyzing, including:

• Total visits
• Unique visitors
• Pages per visit
• Average visit duration
• Bounce rate

There is a feature called Bulk Traffic Analysis that enables you to check the traffic for multiple websites at once. You can add up to 200 websites to compile data into a single report, which can then be exported to .csv.

You can gain even more insights from additional traffic reports, including:

• Audience Insights: See which websites the users of a competitor’s site also visit to better understand their audience.
• Traffic Journey: Discover how competitors gain their website visitors and see who their top referring sites are. You can also see the top destinations visitors progress after leaving the competitor’s website.
• Top Pages: Gain insights into what is working best for a website with a report of its top-performing pages. You can also see which products or services the business is promoting and the channels it is using for promotions.
• Geo Distribution: See the geographic locations driving the majority of a website’s traffic and analyze how user behavior varies between countries.

With the free version of Semrush, you can only see a sample of the data in the report. For example, in the Top Pages tab, you can only see the first 10 results for the website you are analyzing.

You’ll get started by providing your email, phone number, and password to create an account. Next, you’ll provide your billing information, which will be used to set up your recurring payments. You won’t be charged when you submit the information, and your trial will begin.

For 14 days you’ll have access to Semrush full suite of 50 marketing tools to help grow your business. If you don’t wish to continue your plan once the trial has ended you can simply cancel your plan at any time during the 14-day period.

Check Website Traffic with Semrush

2. SERanking

SERanking is an all-in-one SEO solution that allows users to research keywords, track rankings, and check the website traffic of sites around the world.

When you search for a website you’ll get a quick overview of the site’s total organic and paid traffic per month as well as the total number of keywords the site is ranking for.

Further down the results page, you will find line graphs showing the trend of total traffic and ranking keywords and how they progress over time.

SERanking also provides a list of all the website’s ranking keywords, top-performing pages, and a breakdown of its main organic and paid competitors.

Like other solutions on this list, the amount of data you can view in the free version is limited.

For example, with the organic keywords and top-page reports, only the top ten results are visible.

SERanking has three paid plans starting at $39 per month.

There is no credit card required for sign-up, as users only need to provide their name, email, phone number, and password to get started.

Check Website Traffic with SERanking

3. SerpStat

Serpstat is a suite of SEO solutions that has grown from a simple keyword research tool to now provide users with a more comprehensive set of features to understand their website’s performance.

This includes backlink analysis, rank tracking, site auditing, and traffic checking for other websites.

The platform comes in both free and paid versions. Before using the free version of SerpStat you must create an account by providing an email address, phone number, and password.

After creating your account, you can use the search field on the homepage to enter any website and begin analyzing its traffic.

The results page will give many valuable insights, including:

• Keywords: A list of the paid and SEO keywords that are driving traffic to the site. For the organic keywords, you can see how many queries are new, how many have been lost, and how many have improved their ranking.
• Visibility: An index that measures how often the website appears in search results for the keywords that it is ranking for. Higher visibility tends to indicate a higher level of traffic.
• Traffic Trend: A line graph showing the number of visitors the website receives per month. You can toggle the graph to show the year-to-date or all-time statistics.
• Keywords Trend: A line graph showing how users’ interest in the site’s ranking keywords has changed over time.
• Top Pages: A list of the pages driving the most traffic to the website from organic search results. For each page, you can see all the keywords for which that page ranks in the top 50 of Google’s search results.

The results provided by the free version are only a sample of the available data. The free version also does not allow for searching and filtering of the results.

Serpstat does not offer a free trial upon signing up for any of its plans.

That being said, the free version provides enough functionality for you to get a good feel for the solution before committing to a paid plan.

Check Website Traffic With SerpStat

4. SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is a comprehensive SEO software suite that provides various tools to help improve website rankings. The suite comprises four distinct tools, namely Rank Tracker, WebSite Auditor, SEO SpyGlass, and LinkAssistant.

Rank Tracker enables users to track their website’s search engine rankings across multiple keywords and search engines. The tool generates detailed reports on keyword rankings and offers insights into competitors’ keyword and traffic data.

To access organic traffic statistics in Rank Tracker, click on the Competitor Research module and select Domain Competitors. Then, enter any URL to view its keywords and traffic, as well as the top 100 search competitors.

WebSite Auditor provides a comprehensive on-page SEO analysis, including meta tags and header tags, and recommends ways to enhance website performance.

SEO SpyGlass offers insights into a website’s backlink profile, enabling users to identify link-building opportunities and enhance their website’s overall search engine performance.

LinkAssistant helps users find relevant websites for link building and provides recommendations for outreach opportunities.

SEO PowerSuite offers various pricing plans, with the cheapest starting at $299 per year. The software also provides a free version with some feature limitations. Sign-up does not require a credit card, as users only need their name and email to get started.

Check Website Traffic with SEO PowerSuite

5. Sitechecker Pro

Sitechecker is an SEO solution with various tools designed to help businesses improve their search performance.

The platform’s most prominent features are the Website Audit, Site Monitoring, Rank Tracker, and Backlink Tracker tools, which are all part of its paid pricing plans.

However, it provides several free tools, including its Traffic Checker, which can be used to check the website traffic of any domain you provide.

To use the tool, simply visit SiteChecker and type the name of the website you want to analyze. You’ll be asked to provide an email address to start your 14-day free trial.

After registering, you will find plenty of useful insights to gauge the site’s performance and better understand its strategy.

Some of the helpful traffic reports include:

• Traffic overview: A graph showing the total traffic volume over the past 6 months.
• Engagement: Important metrics for measuring site performance, including overall visits per month, average visit duration, average page visits, and bounce rate.
• Traffic by countries: A breakdown of how much and what percentage of traffic comes from different countries.
• Traffic by sources: See how much traffic comes from each channel along with its percentage of total traffic.
• Top keywords: A list of the top five paid and organic keywords that lead visitors to the site.

You also have the option to connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts and get the data about your site traffic and sales (if you have E-Commerce in GA) in the same dashboard.

Unlike some of the other solutions on this list, all the data from Sitechecker’s Traffic Checker is available for free. If, however, you want to take advantage of the other tools offered by Sitechecker, plans start at $41 per month.

Check Website Traffic with SiteChecker

6. Similar Web

Similar Web is a traffic intelligence solution built to provide users with a detailed analysis of any website’s visitors.

While some of the other companies on this list offer a range of SEO and marketing tools, Similar Web focuses singularly on website traffic analysis.

When you search for a website, you’ll get insights broken into the following sections:

• Traffic Overview: The Traffic Overview shows the global, country, and category rank for the website’s traffic. It also provides basic engagement stats such as average visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate as well as a geographic breakdown of the website’s traffic along with its top traffic sources.
• Referrals: See which websites are sending traffic to the site as well as the most popular exit destination when visitors leave the site.
• Search: A detailed analysis of the website’s top-performing paid and organic keywords
• Social: See which social channels are driving the most traffic to the website.
• Display Advertising: A list of the publishers and ad networks the website uses for display advertising.
• Audience: Find out which other categories the website’s audience is interested in. Audience Insights also gives a list of the other websites most visited by the site’s users.
• Competitors: A list of the website’s close competitors and other similar sites.

Similar provides both free and paid versions of its platform.

If you want access to the full data set, SimilarWeb offers plans centered around search, display, and affiliate marketing. There is also an enterprise plan fully equipped with all the features from each plan.

There is a free trial available, but it is only for 7 days, so I recommend that you plan how you want to test the solution in advance to be able to make the most of it.

Check Website Traffic With SimilarWeb

WebCEO is a robust suite of SEO tools designed for agencies and individuals looking to manage multiple projects in a single solution.

WebCEO is different from the other tools on this list in that it does not allow you to search for another website’s traffic data directly.

Instead, users create a project with their own website and then use the Competitor Metrics tool to analyze the traffic of related sites.

The platform pulls data from Alexa to provide traffic statistics from your website’s closest competitors.

This enables you to see these websites’ traffic over time, average ranking position, and shared keywords.

There isn’t a free version of the service and you will have to sign up for a plan to be able to use it.

A credit card is not required to sign up as you can simply provide your personal information and get started right away.

The free trial provides access to all 21 of WebCEO’s SEO tools.

Check Website Traffic with WebCEO

8. UberSuggest

Ubersuggest is an SEO solution designed to help users perform keyword research, plan their content marketing, and check competitor website traffic.

The platform comes in both free and paid versions.

The free version of Ubersuggest allows you to search for three websites a day.

To see a website’s traffic, type the domain into the search field on the Ubersuggest homepage.

The results page will show a quick overview of the website’s traffic, including the total number of organic keywords the site ranks for as well as its total monthly organic traffic.

You will also find a list of the website’s top SEO pages and keywords.

Other modules, including a historical view of the site’s traffic and keyword ranking data, are only accessible with a paid plan.

Three paid plans are designed for individuals, small businesses, and agencies.

Prices start at $29 a month however, there is the potential to save considerably by signing up for a lifetime plan with a one-time fee.

The trial grants full access to all of Ubersugest’s features, and a credit card is required at signup.

Check Website Traffic with UberSuggest

Ahrefs is another popular option to check website traffic for free. Visit the Ahrefs website traffic checker page and enter the domain you want to analyze. You don’t have to register or create an account. The service is completely free.

Entering a domain will give you a nice compact report showing the total organic traffic, the traffic value, top countries, top organic keywords, and the top pages.

Ahrefs is a great SEO marketing tool but to get more traffic insights, you need to register for a paid plan. Pricing starts at $99 monthly for the ‘Lite’ plan and extends to $179 for the ‘Standard Plan’.

Check Website Traffic with Ahrefs

Website traffic checkers use a variety of sources to collect data, including web crawlers, ISPs, and browser extensions, among others.

A lot of data is needed to give an accurate picture of a website’s performance which is why you may find that smaller sites do not show up when you search for them in a traffic checker.

But for websites with a steady amount of traffic, site checker tools can prove an essential asset for planning and growing your business.

So, what should you look for when analyzing a website’s traffic?

There are several important metrics that give great insight into a website’s performance and the strategies the business is using.

Important website traffic metrics to analyze include:

• Unique visitors: The number of people who visited a website at least once in a given period.
• Pageviews : The total number of pages viewed on a website within a given period.
• Organic search traffic : The number of people who arrive at a website from a search engine search.
• Average visit duration: The average amount of time each visitor spends on a website.
• Bounce Rate : The percentage of visitors that leave a website without viewing a second page.
• Top traffic sources: The online channels that drive the most visitors to the site.

The tools we have covered answer the question of how to check the website traffic of competitors. However, it is just as important to increase your website traffic , and the first step is to monitor it continually.

There are several free solutions available to analyze your website’s traffic.

Google Analytics

One of the most popular among them is Google Analytics. The platform provides extensive reports that you can use to track traffic sources and user behavior on your site.

It lets you see your visitors’ demographic characteristics like age and gender, where they live, and how they found your website.

To use Google Analytics, you must add a simple tracking code to your website. If you have a WordPress site, there are several plugins available to simplify the process.

Google Analytics can integrate with some of the tools mentioned on this list, allowing you to connect your website data to a more comprehensive solution to view alongside competitors.

Google Search Console

Another helpful free tool to analyze your website’s traffic is Google Search Console .

Google Search Console is essentially a hub for managing how the search engine treats your website. You can see which pages are included in the index and if Google’s crawlers have any errors when finding your site .

The platform provides a comprehensive list of the keywords your site ranks for, and you can track performance over time to see how your rankings are changing and which pages drive the most traffic to your website.

Checking another website’s traffic is a great way to learn what works for them and can be useful in growing your business.

When checking a website’s traffic, it is important to analyze the following metrics:

• Organic search traffic
• Average visit duration:
• Top traffic sources

Website traffic checkers are tools that allow you to analyze the traffic of any website.

There are plenty of free site checker tools available to analyze a website’s performance. My top solutions include:

Some of these tools also have paid versions and will limit the amount of information you can see with the free version. Most offer some form of free trial for you to test the solution before committing to a paid plan.

While it is important to analyze your competitors’ traffic, it is also essential to analyze your own. You can use free tools like Google Analytics to monitor your website’s traffic and understand user behavior.

Overall, checking other websites’ traffic is an important part of building effective strategies for your business.

Take a look at the tools we’ve discussed in this post and see how they work for you.

Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn .

December 15, 2020 at 8:09 pm

TY! great resources.

April 28, 2022 at 3:39 pm

Thanks a lot Halina!

December 20, 2020 at 1:27 pm

The tools we have covered answer the question of how to check the website traffic of competitors. However, it is just as important to continually monitor your own website’s traffic.

April 28, 2022 at 3:40 pm

Yes, that’s true. To check the traffic of your own website, the best tools are Google Analytics and Google Search Console (as explained in the article).

Thanks a lot Alex

April 9, 2022 at 9:38 am

SemRush is my favorite. I think it’s the best tool vs pricing to compare with other like Similar web.

April 28, 2022 at 3:42 pm

I agree, Semrush is a great tool for checking a website’s traffic and for a lot of other functions.

Thanks for commenting. Alex

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A beginner’s guide to tracking website visits + the 7 best tools to use

Today’s website users have a short attention span, and most leave without engaging with the business. Even the most effective landing pages barely crack a five percent conversion rate .

If you’re one of the many businesses that fall below that rate, there may be a problem with your website copy, traffic sources, or the prospects you’re targeting—but you won’t know for sure without tracking website visits.

When a company tracks its website visitors, it can reveal who is browsing the site and for how long, which goes a long way toward understanding traffic and evaluating the business’s content and UX.

In this article, we will go over the basics of tracking website visits, covering why you should be doing it, the seven best tools to use, and how Clearbit can help in uncovering the customer behind the cursor.

Why should a business be tracking website visits?

A business should track its website visits because it can reveal who is browsing the  site and how these prospects are interacting with the business’s content. This gives marketing and sales departments the information they need to optimize outreach, website design, and conversion rates.

Tracking website visits is especially important if your website is an integral part of your lead generation engine. Nearly seven in ten B2B visitors leave after viewing just a single page, and more than half of all website visitors never fill out a form. Without tracking visitors, you may be losing valuable prospects every day without the information or ability to re-engage with them.

What visitor activity is important to track?

Website visitor data can shine a spotlight on a host of valuable information. Which metrics you deem important is dependent on your specific business goals, but a few of the top data points to track include:

• Page traffic: When you understand your page traffic, you understand which pages on your website are most popular and which ones need improvement. This paints a picture of what content your audience prefers.
• Bounce rate: Just as important as the traffic itself is how quickly visitors are leaving pages on your website. High bounce rates indicate a serious problem with the on-page content, like if the content itself was not what the visitor was expecting.
• Traffic source: Where are your visitors coming from? When you know what sources bring in the most traffic, you can double down on those efforts, or work to improve underperforming sources.
• Firmographic and technographic attributes: Both firmographic and technographic attributes are used in website tracking to identify the website visitor. This information helps you to better understand if your content resonates with the right people. Firmographic data includes information on the company the visitor represents, such as industry, company size, location, annual revenue, and more. Technographic data includes the technology they use, their current infrastructure, and other tech-based capabilities and attributes.

How to take advantage of website visitor tracking in your operations

It’s not enough to be mindful of the website traffic metrics to be looking for—you need to have a concrete plan to implement these insights into your daily operations. Below are three ways you can take advantage of website visitor tracking to improve your outreach.

Enlist visitor tracking tools

If you aren’t actively using a visitor tracking tool, you have no way of reliably tracking your website data. You need a platform that can give you analysis day after day so you can spot trends and rectify any inefficiencies before your business loses too many prospects.

If you are unsure about what tool to use, we have included seven of the best website visitor tracking tools just below this section.

Understand your traffic

Having a complete understanding of your traffic can lead to better conversions.

All website tracking tools will give you insight into where visitors are coming from, the website pages they visit most, and the pages they bounce from or completely avoid. This information—paired with an ideal customer profile (ICP) , which every business should have—will give you a deeper understanding of what matters to your prospects. This, in turn, can improve the messaging on your website and your outreach as a whole.

Going further, some website tracking tools—like we offer with Clearbit Reveal —allow you to identify your website visitors in real time, giving you firmographic and technographic insights into exactly who they are. The fact is that not all prospects are created equal, and if you can identify when your ICP is on your website, you can enact real-time strategies to help you win more clients than the competition.

Determine which website pages are most and least effective

A result of understanding your traffic is understanding which pages are working—and which aren’t.

If you have certain pieces of content such as blogs, landing pages, or other pages on your website that are showing abnormally low traffic or a higher bounce rate than other assets, it could indicate a UX problem. The user experience is paramount for a successful website design, and tracking visitors can alert you to those problems. Some tools even offer heatmaps to show where your visitors are clicking and the areas they are most focused on.

Additionally, you can use tools like our free weekly visitor report to understand what types of content and marketing initiatives are attracting your ICP. By looking at the shared attributes of your most engaged visitors, you can create content plans around them and alter any strategies if necessary.

7 best website visitor tracking tools

Now that we’ve covered why it’s important to track website visits, we’ll explore seven of the best tools on the market to help you do so.

1. Clearbit

Clearbit is a data activation platform that enables marketers to discover and engage ideal customers at scale. We offer a number of essential features to create demand, capture intent , and engage ideal customers throughout the outreach process. Our solution for tracking website visits is called Clearbit Reveal .

With Reveal, you can understand the buyer journey clearer than ever before. Our platform allows you to see who is browsing your website in real time, gathering valuable insights such as the company they are affiliated with, the actions they are taking, and which of your solutions they care most about.

When you uncover the people and companies behind anonymous website visits, you can engage them the right way at the right time.

Key features:

• Understand how your target market engages with your business.
• Reach out to valuable prospects in real time as they are browsing your website.
• Ensure your prospect records are always accurate with automatically refreshed data.

Best for: Businesses looking to de-anonymize and understand their website traffic

Pricing: Contact us today for pricing and additional product features

2. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a behavioral analytics tool that allows you to discover how your product is being used, where and why your visitors drop off, and which type of visitors stick around the longest. All of this paints a valuable picture of customer experience, so you can update your website and buyer journey accordingly.

Featuring three main areas of focus—convert, engage, and retain—Mixpanel enables you to achieve a deeper understanding of your most important prospects, and when and how they perform certain actions on your website. In addition to improving your site, you can also use this information to improve conversions and prospect onboarding.

• Find the root cause of user drop-off.
• Measure active usage to determine where your visitors are going and for how long.
• Understand the types of customers you retain and why.

Best for: Understanding visitor behavior

Pricing: Plans start at a free trial, up to $1,667/mo for enterprise-level features

Hotjar is a UX tool that helps you understand user behaviors through visual heatmaps. Through this software, businesses can find bottlenecks and other suboptimal portions of their website to alter what isn’t working and double down on what is.

In addition to heatmaps, Hotjar also offers video recording features that can play back website visitor clicks and mouse movements. This places a business in the eyes of a first-time visitor, and affords the ability to understand what areas of your website are most and least effective—leading to an improved prospect journey, a better website design, and more conversions.

• Track prospect activity with heatmaps and recordings.
• Easily test new website features and design.
• Uncover UX issues quickly.

Best for: Understanding website design

Pricing: Plans start at a free trial, up to $139/mo

4. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the typical starting point for businesses across the globe to understand their website traffic. This free tool gives users a complete visitor overview to better understand the performance of their website design, content, product placement, and more.

As Analytics is a free tool, it does come with its limitations, including the inability to identify and de-anonymize visitors. That said, the platform does come with a number of useful features, and the ability to integrate with other Google applications such as Ads makes it a great starting point for businesses that are just starting to learn about their website traffic.

• Understand and monitor the traffic to your website or app.
• Enable full integration with other Google software such as Ads.
• Learn the ropes of website tracking and what metrics are important.

Best for: Businesses that are new to tracking their website visitors

Pricing: Free

Woopra is a customer journey and product analytics tool that gives businesses access to advanced analytics in order to understand user behavior. By providing features for product, marketing, sales, and support teams, businesses can equip their personnel with the features they need to be successful in their roles.

With three main principles—unify, analyze, and engage—Woopra promises to track and unify prospect data, provide reports on the customer journey and overarching trends, and engage with prospects in real time via predetermined triggers. Overall, this app allows users to optimize every touchpoint in the consumer experience.

• Sync and export existing prospect data.
• Allow team-wide access and decision-making capabilities.
• Automate actions to instantly trigger emails, Slack messages, and more based on prospect behavior.

Best for: Analytics across the customer journey

Pricing: Plans start at a free trial, up to $999/mo

6. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a website visitor tracking tool that promises to improve on what’s working for a business, fix inefficient touchpoints, and easily test new ideas and layouts. Primarily relying on heatmaps, this software allows users to get a complete picture of how visitors are interacting with their website.

The data doesn’t end with heatmaps, however, as Crazy Egg also boasts features such as page recordings, customer surveys, A/B testing, analytics, and site error messages. Providing solutions for agencies, e-commerce, education, and lead generation, this tool can give businesses the information they need to track and improve their website activity.

• Use heatmaps to see how visitors are interacting with your website.
• Compare and analyze traffic sources and behavior.
• Discover unresolved errors.

Best for: Businesses that want to understand how visitors interact with their site

Pricing: Pricing ranges from $29/mo to $249/mo

Matomo is an analytics tool that gives businesses insight into their website traffic while also protecting their data and the privacy of their customers. Positioned as an alternative to Google Analytics, this platform advocates for users to take back control of their data with 100 percent data ownership.

Self-described as a tool with no limitations, businesses can track more data points than Analytics in regard to the total number of websites you can monitor, users, customer segments, and more. The open-source software comes with enhanced insights, support, and easy-to-use features that make tracking website visitors a breeze.

• Enure 100 percent accurate visitor tracking data in a secure interface.
• Enable endless customization and tracking options.
• Import data from Google Analytics.

Best for: Businesses that want more out of Google Analytics

Pricing: Plans start at a free trial, up to $23/mo

Capitalize on your website traffic with Clearbit

Tracking website visits is an important step to gaining a deeper understanding of your site traffic and ideal prospects. With visitor tracking tools, you can take some of the guesswork out of UX and content planning to hone in on what’s working and cast aside what’s not.

That said, you don’t just need a tracking tool—you need the right tracking tool or combination of tools. With capabilities such as data enrichment to acquire prospect information and the use of Reveal to identify website visitors in real time, Clearbit can be the partner you need to expertly capitalize on your website traffic.

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The Standard in B2B Data

Now reinvented with Artificial Intelligence—Clearbit is the first AI Native Data Provider. Enrich your records, reveal buying intent, and connect with your ideal customers.

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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What Is Website Visitor Tracking?

Table of Contents

Website visitor tracking offers valuable, in-depth information that marketing and sales teams can use to refine their efforts and obtain quality leads. It also helps drive user experience (UX) efficiency because tracking visitor activity can reveal strengths and weaknesses on any given web page.

Examining website traffic behavior and demographics can help companies improve conversion rates, make the most of their digital ad spend, and consistently grow visitor numbers. Read ahead for a guide on what information is most important to track and some advice for choosing the right website tracking analytics software. 

Why is it important to track your website visits?

Web visitor tracking offers businesses a more nuanced understanding of their potential customers, as well as how their audience reacts to their content. Teams can retain detailed information about visitors. Depending on the exact modality deployed, they may even be able to obtain company names and contact information, which sets up warm leads for sales teams to follow up on. This provides incredible value because sales reps can strategize accordingly as opposed to relying on cold calling.

On the marketing and UX side, website tracking lets companies know if their approaches and content are working and to what extent. For example, media platforms can discover who clicks on what content (and what’s left behind), while online stores can identify the exact moment customers abandon their carts or experience issues during checkout.

Many website tracking tools offer user flows, which illustrate the way most visitors engage with your website and how they move from page to page. This data indicates the current success rate of a website and can highlight areas that need improvement or a complete overhaul.

Every type of business with a website can benefit from tracking visitor data. These are some of the most common goals associated with website visitor tracking:

• Gathering contact information from prospects to produce stronger leads
• Encouraging better engagement and ad clicks
• Increasing conversions
• Offering a more user-friendly website experience

Additionally, marketers can reduce reliance on media spend and build on what’s currently working. Sales teams can start their days with leads they know are ready to take the next step. Even product development can be improved by harnessing data about how current customers are interacting with the company. 

Tracking website visitors enables businesses to gather contact information for other marketing campaigns and improve user experience, which drives more conversions.

What visitor activity should you be tracking?

Several types of data can be obtained through website visitor tracking, including identifying information, user behavior and overall performance analytics. Depending on your company’s core goals, you may want to consider gathering the following types of information:

• Visitors’ locations, demographics , and depending on the software, the companies they represent and their contact information
• Click rates and user flow
• Overall page traffic
• Bounce rates
• Source of web traffic

Businesses can develop more effective strategies when they understand these categories. Marketers can find out which ads are the most enticing, while sales teams can discover exactly who is browsing their catalogs.

To inform your marketing efforts, you may want to track user locations and demographics, user flow, click rates on various elements, bounce rates and sources of web traffic.

What is website visitor tracking software?

Website visitor tracking software typically focuses on three categories of data: website analytics, user behavior and visitor identity. These areas offer unique value depending on the goals of the business deploying the software, providing easy-to-understand reports with actionable information that can be disseminated between departments to maximize ROI.

While some provide high-level overviews of traffic, others are capable of providing in-depth user insights using advanced technology. Many also integrate with CRM platforms for a seamless experience.

Website visitor tracking software helps gather and contextualize web traffic data into insightful reports that can improve marketing efforts.

How does website visitor tracking software work?

Most tracking software uses a reverse domain name system (rDNS) and/or a website script to gather data.

Businesses can stack current software solutions with website visitor tracking software to create a suite of tools accessible across departments. Those already storing lead data in CRMs may learn even more about prospects due to the additional data tracking software can provide, for example. Many major tracking software providers integrate with leading CRM platforms and may even alert clients when a dream customer is currently browsing their site. [Read related article: Best CRM Software ]

Here’s how visitor tracking technology works:

Reverse domain name system

Every device connected to the internet has a unique internet protocol (IP) address, and most also have a reverse DNS record. Website visitor tracking software that uses an rDNS analyzes a user’s IP address to collect information, which is then supplied to the appropriate teams. It’s similar to searching for a phone number in a Rolodex, but with internet traffic instead.

Website visitor tracking software may also install a script on a website that collects user data automatically. The software then analyzes this data to determine which companies are visiting, turning them into warm leads. This publicly available information may include the following about the company:

• Social media accounts
• Relevant contacts, including phone numbers and email addresses

Website visitor tracking software relies on a reverse domain name system and/or script methods to capture visitor information.

Is website visitor tracking software GDPR-compliant?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) prevents website tracking in the European Union (EU) without the visitor’s express consent. Businesses that receive web traffic from EU users must follow the GDPR’s guidelines; otherwise, they risk incurring extremely large fines. Many website visitor tracking software providers offer tips on how to comply with the GDPR. This includes displaying a policy on privacy, terms of use and cookies that is clearly visible to users and outlines how their information is being collected and for what purpose.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission recommends that companies disclose data collection to website visitors, especially data used for targeted marketing. Consumers have the right to deploy “do not track” settings on their web browsers, but there is no federal law addressing website tracking in the United States. Some individual states have enacted laws about consumer privacy, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Virginia. 

To avoid potential GDPR or U.S. state privacy law violations, be sure to have the appropriate policies in place. Obtain user consent before using website visitor tracking software.

What is the most popular visitor tracking software?

When trying to decide which website visitor tracking software to use, consider what type of data your business would like to gather and how you plan to organize that data. Budget may also play a factor, since the scope of services and prices vary among providers.

Here are some of the most popular tracking software options, broken down by whether they primarily collect analytics, user behavior or visitor identity. Website analytics break down traffic, while user behavior data analyzes what visitors do once they’re on a site. Visitor identity outlines who is engaging with a website by demographics.

• Google Analytics: Google Analytics provides basic audience and behavior metrics. It can segment users’ demographics , the devices they used to access your site, and whether they have visited your site before. It can also track a website’s advertising performance and overall traffic numbers. For many small businesses, the complimentary version of the service works well, but for big companies, the $150,000 annual fee for Google Analytics 360 is well worth the advanced capabilities and massive data capacity increase. The free version allows up to 10 million hits per month, while premium subscribers get 500 million hits per month. (Price: Free; advanced features are available at an additional cost.)
• Kissmetrics: This tracking software is suited for businesses offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) or e-commerce platforms. Kissmetrics provides a full “journey” for each user’s time spent on a website, even across different devices. This information can help teams determine what their best leads are and where to focus future efforts with the most efficiency. Whether you’re looking for behavioral analytics or customer conversion processes, this software offers complex, yet easy-to-digest data that can drive sales and streamline marketing strategies. (Price: Starter plans begin at $299 per month. )
• Woopra: One of the most powerful alternatives to Google Analytics 360, Woopra provides a qualitative and quantitative view of the people visiting your site. With tools for product, marketing, sales and support teams, this platform aims to “optimize every touchpoint in the customer experience.” Its retention feature also allows for companies to continue engaging with clients even after they convert, an attractive benefit given the fact that repeat business is always easier (and more cost-effective) to win versus new business. Woopra highlights the entire life cycle of a user, allowing companies to see where they shine and where they need to improve. This bridges a gap between sales, marketing, product development, and other critical departments of a business to improve practices throughout the organization. (Price: A basic free plan is available, with plans up to $999 per month for the full suite. Contact Woopra for custom enterprise pricing.)
• Crazy Egg: This trusted source of website visitor tracking provides intuitive snapshots of user behavior. Crazy Egg reports include heatmaps of website clicks, scroll times and bounce rates combined with rich visitor information designed to offer a full picture of each unique experience and the ways users interact with the content on your site. (Price: Starts at $29 per month.)
• Mixpanel: Offering powerful yet intuitive reports, Mixpanel’s goal is to help companies “build better products.” With attractive and seamless user data reporting and the ability to define the successes of new site features, this software is popular with Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. (Price: Free plans available; paid subscriptions start at $20 per month.)
• UserTesting: Another option for those seeking truly qualitative insights, UserTesting allows businesses to interact with website visitors in real time. Its human insight platform aims to close the empathy gap and allow companies to demonstrate their customer-centric approach with regards to UX. (Price: UserTesting offers three plan options. Contact the company for details.)

Visitor identity

• Leadfeeder: Leadfeeder provides identification and visitor tracking software to assist marketing and sales departments with determining and converting the best leads. Its account-level visitor identification technology ties every website visitor back to a company. Reports, which can be integrated with many major CRM platforms, indicate whether leads are “warm” and to what extent. (Price: Free plans available; paid subscriptions start at $199 per month.)
• Lead Forensics: Focused on B2B companies, Lead Forensics allows their clients to discover new leads in real time as they visit a site, providing contact information for sales teams. Lead Forensics can also provide automatic lead scoring to determine how likely a user is to convert based on criteria such as their behavior, with a fully customizable “dream customer” portal to assist your sales efforts. (Price: Contact company for details.)
• Act-On: Act-On is a full-powered growth-marketing platform meant to automate and enhance customer journeys. Its account-based marketing solutions capture website visits from key target accounts and can pinpoint how visitors engage. Businesses can leverage data to improve overall efforts in marketing, business development and product innovation. (Price: Starting at $900 per month)

Many different types of website visitor tracking software are available, each suited for different purposes and objectives.

Track your way to success 

Website visitor tracking is an important tool if you want better insight into your customers’ behavior and preferences. The data you acquire from website visitor tracking can help you make improvements on all levels, such as your marketing and product teams. As long as your organization’s visitor tracking processes comply with local and international laws, they can help you boost engagement and better understand your customers. 

Natalie Hamingson contributed to this article. 

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9 Essential Website Visitor Tracking Tools in 2024

Key takeaways:

• Comprehensive Data Collection : Website visitor tracking encompasses monitoring visited pages, time spent on each page, and links clicked. This data is vital for understanding customer retention and engagement, as well as identifying potential content issues that may cause users to leave, enabling continuous optimization of the website.
• Improved website user experience : By analyzing visitor's paths, bounce rates, and conversions, website visitor tracking provides insights into the digital journey . This information is crucial for creating a more intuitive and satisfying user experience, which can lead to increased engagement and loyalty.
• Informed Marketing Strategy : Understanding your audience's behavior and demographic data through visitor tracking allows for more targeted and effective marketing campaigns. It helps ensure that efforts are concentrated on the prospects most likely to be interested and convert, maximizing the return on marketing investments.
• Optimization for Conversions : Sales and marketing teams use visitor tracking data to refine the customer digital journey , reducing drop-off points and enhancing key elements like call-to-action (CTA) visibility. This can significantly improve visitor-to-lead conversion rates and, as a result, increase revenue.
• SEO and Retargeting Advantages : Website visitor tracking tools aid SEO specialists in aligning their strategies with actual user behavior, which can lead to better search engine rankings and more organic traffic. For advertisers, the insights gained can drive more personalized and effective retargeting campaigns, increasing the likelihood of converting previous visitors.

Ever felt like a detective trying to crack the case of "Who's visiting my website?" Well, you're not alone. Website visitor tracking might sound like tech wizardry, but it's really about understanding people.

Website visitor tracking is the key to unlocking this knowledge, providing insights into who your visitors are and how they interact with your site. This article is for anyone looking to gain a clearer picture of their online audience, and identify what draws them in and what might be turning them away.

We'll explore essential tools that make tracking visitor behavior straightforward and actionable. These tools are not just about gathering data; they're about improving your website's effectiveness and your audience's experience.

By the end of this article, you'll better understand what software to apply for visitor tracking to engage and retain visitors more effectively.

Let's crack the website tracking.

What is website visitor tracking?

Visitor tracking is a method you can use to observe and analyze the behavior of visitors on your website . This process gathers a range of data about how visitors interact with your website. When you implement visitor tracking, you collect information on:

• Pages Visited : The specific pages that a user views on your site
• Time Spent : The duration a visitor spends on each page
• Links Clicked : Which links visitors are clicking on within your site

This data is invaluable because it helps you understand what content is engaging or might be causing users to leave. With visitor tracking, you also gain insights into:

• User Paths : Follow the journey of a visitor through your website
• Bounce Rates : Track how many visitors leave after viewing just one page
• Conversions : Monitor the success of a page or campaign in convincing a visitor to take action

Leveraging website visitor tracking is instrumental for tailoring your marketing efforts and enhancing user experience . By evaluating this data, you create opportunities for optimization, making sure your website serves your visitors as effectively as possible. Visitor tracking serves as a foundation for data-driven decisions in website design, content creation, and strategy refinement.

Why is website visitor tracking important?

Website visitor tracking is a fundamental aspect of digital marketing and web analytics that allows businesses to understand their audience's behavior deeply. By implementing website visitor tracking, you can collect a wealth of data that is crucial for optimizing your online presence and enhancing the user experience.

Understanding your audience

For marketing teams, website visitor tracking tools are invaluable for demographic analysis. By understanding who visits your site, you can tailor content to match your target audience's interests, behaviors, and needs. This data-driven approach ensures that marketing efforts are not wasted on uninterested parties but are instead focused on prospects most likely to convert.

Analyzing user behavior

Content creators and web designers rely on visitor tracking software to craft engaging experiences. Tracking how visitors interact with your site reveals what content captures attention and which design elements work best. This enables teams to continually refine the user experience, ensuring the website remains compelling and relevant to the audience's evolving preferences.

Conversion rate optimization

Marketing and sales teams use visitor tracking tools to improve the customer journey. By identifying where visitors drop off, these teams can make informed changes to the sales process, such as streamlining the checkout process or enhancing CTA visibility, ultimately driving up conversion rates and boosting revenue.

SEO enhancement

SEO specialists depend on website visitor tracking tools to align their strategies with user behavior. Search engines favor URLs that provide a superior user experience. By optimizing them based on website visitor interactions, SEO teams can achieve higher rankings, attract more organic traffic, and increase the site's online presence.

Targeted advertising and retargeting

Advertising teams leverage visitor tracking tools for creating targeted marketing campaigns. With detailed insights into visitor preferences and behaviors, ads can be customized to resonate more deeply with potential customers. Additionally, retargeting efforts become more effective as teams can re-engage visitors who have already expressed interest, increasing the chances of conversion.

Analyzing visitor data

When it comes to understanding your audience, analyzing visitor data is key. This information allows you to gain insights into visitor demographics, behavior, and fine-tune your website's performance using traditional web analytics tools.

Website visitor tracking tools for behavioral analysis

By monitoring how individuals interact with your site, you can optimize the user experience. Under this category, you can track:

• Pages visited: Which web pages are most popular among users
• Time on page: The average amount of time visitors spend on a specific page
• Clicks: Where users are clicking, including buttons and links
• Navigation path: The journey visitors take through your website

Focus on patterns that suggest user preferences and roadblocks in the user journey to improve your website's design and flow.

Website visitor tracking software for user identification

Understanding who visits your site can help tailor content and marketing strategies. Here's what this tracking can reveal:

• Repeat website visitors: Distinguish between new and returning visitors
• Geo-location: Track visitors to see where in the world they are accessing your site from
• Device type: Identify whether your website's visitors use mobile devices, desktops, or tablets

Concentrate on demographic trends to customize your content, and ensure your website is optimized for the most common devices.

Visitor tracking software for website analytics

These tools give an overarching view of your website's performance. Key metrics include:

• Traffic sources: Understand where your website's visitors come from, such as search engines or social media.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who navigate away after viewing only one page.
• Conversion rate: The ratio of website visitors who take a desired action, like filling out a form

By focusing on these metrics, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts and identify areas for improvement.

Optimizing user experience

When tracking website visitors' activity, the primary goal is to improve user experience (UX). Stellar UX equates to higher engagement, better conversion rates, and customer loyalty . Here's how you can use visitor tracking to optimize UX:

• Identify Popular Pages : Recognize which pages attract the most views and use this data to inform your content strategy.
• Understand Navigation Paths : Learn how website visitors move through your site to streamline pathways and reduce friction. Use the click tracking metric to improve calls-to-action and the time-on-page metric to tailor content length to engagement.
• Gauge User Engagement: Understand what content keeps users on your page longer, implying relevance and interest.
• A/B Testing: Implement A/B tests to compare user experiences and decide the most effective.

Remember, protecting user privacy is crucial. Ensure you're compliant with laws like GDPR when tracking user behavior. By analyzing user behavior, you create a feedback loop that continuously sharpens your website's user experience. Keep an eye on metrics, but always prioritize user privacy and trust.

3 Tools to track user behavior data

Visitor behavior tracking tools are essential for understanding how users interact with your website. They give you insights into user behavior patterns and what pain points they may have. This can drive improvements in user experience and conversions.

Smartlook is a website visitor tracking tool that offers a comprehensive solution for monitoring user behavior. It provides qualitative analytics, such as session recordings and heatmaps, which allow you to see exactly how visitors navigate your site. This tool helps you identify usability issues so that you can make targeted enhancements.

Key Features:

• Session recordings: Watch how users interact with your website in real-time.
• Heatmaps: Visual representations of clicks, mouse movements, and scrolls.
• Events tracking: Monitor specific actions on your site.
• Funnels: Analyze the user journey and identify drop-off points.
• Native integration with Survicate .
• Product managers and UX/UI designers looking to improve website usability.
• Digital marketers who aim to understand customer behavior.
• E-commerce businesses that want to optimize the shopping experience.
• Smartlook's pricing starts at $55 per month for the most basic plan, with more advanced features available in higher-tier plans. They also offer a free plan with limited features.

Mixpanel stands out for its ability to track events and create detailed funnels. Event tracking allows you to measure specific actions taken by your visitors, while funnels help you understand the conversion process. This level of detail enables precise tweaks to optimize your website's performance.

• Event tracking: Measure and analyze specific user interactions
• Funnels: Create and analyze conversion funnels to improve user flow
• Retention analysis: Understand how often users return and engage with your site
• User segmentation: Break down data by attributes to understand different user groups
• Native integration with Survicate
• Data analysts and product teams who need detailed insights into user behavior
• Marketing teams looking to optimize campaigns through event tracking
• SaaS and mobile app developers focused on user engagement and retention
• Mixpanel offers a free tier with limited data history and data points. Their paid plans provide more comprehensive access to features and data, and start with $20 monthly.

An expert in A/B testing and personalization, Optimizely focuses on improving visitor experiences through experimentation. It lets you test variations of your website to determine which changes lead to better user engagement and higher conversion rates. With Optimizely, you can implement data-driven decisions that resonate with your audience.

• A/B testing: Test different versions of your website to see which performs better
• Multivariate testing: Test multiple variables simultaneously to see which combination works best
• Personalization: Tailor the user experience based on visitor data
• Experimentation: Run experiments to optimize conversion rates and other key metrics
• Marketing professionals and product managers who want to experiment with website features
• Companies with a focus on conversion rate optimization
• Large enterprises looking for robust experimentation platforms.
• Optimizely does not publicly list specific pricing plans on its website. The company offers customized pricing based on the scale and needs of the business, so interested users must contact them directly for a quote

3 Website analytics tools

When optimizing your website, leveraging website analytic tools that offer comprehensive insights into user behavior and site performance is crucial. Below are three prominent tools that you can use to gather and analyze your web data effectively.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service. It allows you to track and understand your website's traffic deeply.

• Real-time data reporting
• User demographic and acquisition insights
• Conversion tracking
• Digital marketers and business owners who need insights into website traffic and user behavior
• SEO specialists who track the performance of their campaigns
• Small to large businesses looking for a robust and free analytics solution
• Google Analytics offers a free version that is quite comprehensive and suitable for many businesses.
• Google Analytics 360 is the premium version, which provides advanced features and support, with pricing that is customizable based on the business's needs and scale. You need to contact Google for a quote

Matomo , previously known as Piwik, is a privacy-focused analytics platform. It provides comprehensive tracking capabilities while giving you full ownership of your analytics data.

• On-premise or cloud hosting for your data
• Customizable dashboard
• E-commerce tracking
• Businesses and organizations that prioritize data privacy and want to host their analytics platform
• Companies that require a customizable analytics solution with a variety of plugins
• Users looking for an alternative to Google Analytics with similar functionalities

Pricing Information:

• Matomo On-Premise is free to use; you can install it on your own server
• Matomo Cloud has different pricing tiers, starting from €19 (approximately $21 USD) per month for the Essential plan, and increases based on the number of page views and additional features

Clicky is known for its real-time analytics. It offers a straightforward interface and detailed information on your site's individual visitors and actions.

• Heatmaps for visualizing user activity
• Uptime monitoring
• Individual visitor's clickstream tracking
• Webmasters and bloggers who want real-time analytics and a simple user interface
• Small to medium-sized businesses that need detailed insights into individual visitor behavior
• Users who prefer a straightforward tool for monitoring website performance and user engagement
• Clicky offers a free version for websites with up to 3,000 daily page views
• Premium plans start at $9.99 per month for the Pro plan, with additional plans for larger sites and more features. There's also a Pro Platinum plan and a Custom plan for very high-traffic websites

3 Tools for website visitor recognition

When managing a modern website, you need to understand who your visitors are and what they do on your site. Reliable recognition tools provide you with actionable insights to enhance your marketing strategies and lead-generation efforts.

Leadfeeder is a visitor identification tool that recognizes companies that enter your website by linking their IP addresses to a database of organizations. After identifying a visitor, it provides you with detailed information, such as the visitor's journey on your site and potential contact points.

• Visitor identification using IP address matching
• Visitor's journey tracking
• CRM integrations
• Lead scoring
• B2B companies and sales teams identifying potential business customers
• Marketing professionals tracking and engaging with site visitors
• Organizations enhancing lead generation and nurturing
• Free Lite version with limited features
• Premium version is $139 per month (billed annually)

Lead Forensics

Focused on pinpointing business visitors, Lead Forensics is a website visitor identification tool that goes beyond standard analytics. It not only tracks visitor behavior such as page views and session duration but also helps in identifying prospects by providing contact information for targeted follow-ups, thus offering a comprehensive approach to B2B lead generation.

• Business visitor identification and company information
• Behavioral tracking of page views and session duration
• Contact information for potential leads
• Real-time alerts for targeted company visits
• Businesses increasing B2B sales and marketing effectiveness
• Sales teams needing quality leads for outreach
• Marketing teams optimizing campaigns based on visitor insights
• Pricing is not listed publicly and requires direct contact for a personalized quote

Salespanel is a lead scoring and identification platform that integrates with your marketing stack. By tracking individual users and leads, Salespanel helps you understand how specific users interact with your website's content, enabling you to segment visitors accurately and focus your marketing efforts on the most promising leads.

• Lead identification and tracking on your website
• Lead qualification based on content interaction
• Integration with a marketing technology stack
• Visitor segmentation for personalized marketing
• Marketing teams that track, segment, and qualify leads in real time
• B2B companies requiring detailed insights into individual leads
• Free plan with basic features
• Paid plans start at $99 per month, billed annually

How Survicate helps in the visitor tracking process

While website visitor tracking tools offer a wealth of data about user behavior, sometimes numbers and graphs aren't enough to paint the full picture. That's where a tool like Survicate can enhance your audience's understanding.

Survicate complements traditional analytics by enabling you to collect qualitative data directly from your visitors through targeted website surveys. This way, you see what visitors are doing and gain insights into why they're doing it. It's the perfect partner for quantitative research , adding depth to your data and helping you to make more informed decisions about your website and content.

If you're looking to round out your visitor tracking with rich, actionable feedback, give Survicate a try. See how Survicate can add value to your analytics arsenal with a free 10-day trial of all the Business Plan features. Sign up for the free trial today and begin your journey to deeper insights.

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Different types of tracking tools

Guide to tracking website visitors & top 6 tools for 2023.

A website without a visitor tracking tool is like a ship lost on the horizon.

Let’s look at why you need web visitor tracking and which tools are the best in 2023.

What is website visitor tracking, and how does it work?

Website visitor tracking is collecting data on the actions and behavior of visitors on a website.

This data is typically collected by placing a piece of code, known as a "tracking code" or "web analytics code," on the pages of a website.

This code, when executed, sends information about the visitor's actions to a server, where it is stored and analyzed.

The data collected through website visitor tracking can include the number of website visitors, the visited pages, how long they spent on the site, and which links they clicked on.

This data can be used to understand how visitors interact with a website and identify areas for improvement.

Here is what Kas Szatylowics has to say about tracking users’ behaviors.

There are a few different methods that can be used for website visitor tracking, including:

• Server log file analysis: This method involves analyzing the log files generated by a web server to identify which pages were visited, by whom, and when.
• JavaScript-based tracking: This method uses JavaScript code to track the visitor's behavior on the website and send this data to a server.
• Cookies: Websites can place a small text file called a "cookie" on the visitor's computer. These cookies can track visitors' behavior on the website and store information about their preferences.

Many web analytics tools are available, like Google Analytics, Usermaven, Adobe Analytics, Piwik, etc. These tools help business owners to understand how visitors interact with their website and make data-driven decisions to improve the user experience and drive conversions.

How to choose the right web tracking tools for your business?

Choosing the right web tracking tools for your business can be difficult, as many options are available, each with its features and capabilities.

Here are a few key considerations to keep in mind when selecting a web tracking tool for your business:

Goals and Metrics: Understand what data you want to collect and analyze. Some common metrics include website traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, time on site, and pages per visit.

Scalability: Consider the size and complexity of your website and your business's expected growth. Choose a tool that can accommodate your current needs and scale as your business grows.

Integration: Look for a tool that can integrate with other systems you already use, such as your CRM or marketing automation platform.

User-Friendliness: Look for an easy tool to use and understand the data it provides.

Cost: Compare the costs of different tools, and be sure to factor in additional costs such as training or support.

Data Privacy: Check the vendor's data protection and privacy policy and ensure it complies with regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA.

Support : Look for a tool with good customer support and a helpful community.

Customization: Consider if the tool can customize metrics, dashboards, and reports and if it gives the ability to create custom events, goals, and segments to understand visitor behavior better.

Ultimately, your business's best web tracking tool depends on your needs, budget, and website size.

Tracking website visitors with Usermaven

Signup for Usermaven, and you will be redirected to the onboarding process.

1. Add pixels tracking

The first step is important for all types of businesses. You will be asked to install a tracking script. You have four different ways of tracking script installation.

• Javascript snippet
• Google tag manager

You further get two options in the Javascript snippet

• Capture all fronted events such as button or link click, form submissions
• Cookieless tracking

Once you decide on the mode of tracking script and install tracking pixels, you can enjoy privacy-friendly website analytics by clicking “check installation.”

But for SaaS companies, you must perform two additional steps to track user and company levels.

2. Send users companies-based attributes

You will fill out customer data to track company-level and customer analytics. You can track every action performed by the user and company.

3. Send important events

You can send all information about signup/subscribe/book a demo/ free trial. You can also associate these events with people in your workspace.

Usermaven is a user-friendly SaaS tool to track web analytics and product insights. Once you signup for the tool, a fine tutorial will be waiting for you to start your journey without any hurdles.

1.Traffic tracking tools

Website traffic tracking tools provide insights into how users interact with a website and help you measure key performance indicators (KPIs). They also give insights about all sources your traffic is coming from.

Here are a few leverages you can enjoy with website traffic tracking tools.

• Help you understand users’ behaviors. They offer detailed insight into areas of the website that are popular and those that need improvements.
• Help you measure KPIs such as bounce rate, page views, and conversion rate. Website traffic tracking analytics gives insight into your website's performance and where improvements can be made.
• Identifying referral sources for all traffic. This information can help you optimize your marketing efforts and target your audience more effectively.
• Conduct A/B testing and allows users to test different versions of their website and compare the results. You can make data-driven decisions by identifying the most effective elements of your website.
• Optimize conversions by identifying trends and patterns. This includes identifying pages with higher bounce rates and making changes to improve user experience.

2. Behavior tracking tools

Behavioral tracking tools allow you to track and analyze customer behavior on your website, such as which pages they visit, how long they stay, and what actions they take. This information can help you understand your customers' needs and preferences and tailor your website and marketing efforts to meet those needs better.

Here are a few other benefits of using behavior-tracking tools:

• Improve user experience by tracking and analyzing customer behavior; you can identify areas of your website that are causing confusion or frustration for users. This can help you improve your website's user interface, navigation, and overall design to enhance the user experience.
• Personalize marketing efforts by identifying customer segments and tailoring your message and offers to specific groups. This can help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and increase conversions.
• Optimize website content by tracking customer behavior; you can identify which pages and content on your website are most popular and which are not. This can help you optimize your website content to better meet your customer's needs and interests and improve your website's overall performance.

3. Performance tracking tools

Performance tracking tools provide various benefits, including:

• Track user engagement, page views, clicks, and other metrics to gain insights into how users interact with your platform.
• Identifying areas of improvement, such as slow-loading pages or high bounce rates.
• Measure conversion rates and identify the factors that influence them, such as the placement of calls to action or the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
• Segment users based on demographics, behavior, and other characteristics to understand their unique needs and tailor your platform to serve them better.
• Compare your performance against industry standards and competitors to understand your strengths and weaknesses.
• Measure the impact of your marketing campaigns on website traffic and conversions to understand their return on investment (ROI).
• Monitor website and application performance to identify and resolve technical issues such as server errors and slow loading times.
• Many tracking tools provide real-time data and alerting, so you can quickly respond to any issues or changes in user behavior.

Best website visitor tracking tools

Certainly, there are several tools to track website visitors, but only some are user-friendly, simple, and effective. The right tool helps you make an informed decision about optimizing your website and improving the user experience.

Below are our few recommended tools to choose from (on the preference of analytics experts).

1. Usermaven

Usermaven is a simple, intuitive, and privacy-friendly website analytics tool. It offers real-time website traffic metrics. You can get the metrics on a single page to make data-backed decisions.

It is hosted in the EU and complies with privacy regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, and PECR. With its no-code event tracking, you can track important website actions such as button & link clicks and form submissions.

Like Google Analytics, it provides event tracking and goal conversion analysis with its auto-capture technology.

Usermaven Key Features:

• Funnel analysis
• Marketing Attribution
• Engagement metrics
• Feature audit reports
• Audience segmentation

You don't have to annoy your website visitors with cookie consent banners. Usermaven collects the data anonymously without using cookies or personally identifiable information.

You can empower your team with dashboard access and regular analytics reports delivered automatically via email and other channels.

Usermaven offers three pricing packages.

• The starter pack is for small businesses & free of cost .
• The pro package is for all online businesses, starting from $14/mo.
• The premium package is for web analytics & product insights for SaaS business & starts from $99/mo .

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking new and returning users, revenue, retention, engagement, events, demographics, and conversions. It offers a complete understanding of your customers across devices and platforms.

The paid version is called Google Analytics 360 for large enterprises.

You can also enjoy data collection, analysis, reports, and management features. It can track and measure specific goals and events, such as the pages a visitor clicks on, the length of their visit, and their actions.

You have to insert the Google Analytics code into the HTML of your website.

However, Google Analytics is not fully GDPR compliant and collects the user's data, which can be challenging when maintaining user privacy.

Pricing: One plan is free, while the other charges $150k for up to 1 billion hits/month.

3. Crazyegg

Crazyegg is a website optimization tool that helps you track how visitors interact with it. You can visualize where users come from and what part of the page they click, read, or interact with most. It also helps you visualize the least-performing sections of your website.

This tool is easy-to-use and simple to set up. Other features include heat maps, scroll maps, and click reports.

The heat mapping feature analyzes the effectiveness of your CTAs along with email and ad campaigns.

Crazyegg is your best bet for implementing design changes on your web pages.

It also records individual sessions and allows you to run A/B testing on your website to help you decide what works best.

Pricing: Crazyegg has a 30-day free trial for five different paid plans. Plans start from $29 / month with 30K tracked pageviews/ month. You can get a custom plan based on your needs if you require more than the paid plans offer.

Hojtar tracks aggregated visitors' clicks, mouse movements with heatmap, scrolls, individual using browser behaviors with session recordings, feedback widgets, and user feedback with on-site surveys.

It offers four packages: Free package, plus ($32), Business ($80), and scale.

5. ChartMogul

ChartMogul is revenue and subscription tracking software designed for SaaS companies. It helps to track ARR, CLV, MRR, revenue, churn sales, and subscriber numbers.

This performance-tracking tool helps businesses maximize the value of their subscription billing data. Any employee inside a company can execute studies and derive insightful conclusions from their customer and revenue KPIs. It also transforms raw data from numerous sources into stunning and simple-to-understand visuals.

Pricing. ChartMogul Offers three pricing packages: Launch ($0), Scale ($100), and Volume ($150k)

6. Kissmetrics

It is a person-based analytics product that helps you understand, identify, and improve the metrics that drive your online business. Kissmetrics makes it simple to get the information you require to make better marketing decisions.

You can track product matrices like sign-up, MRR, churn rate, e-commerce metrics like revenue and sales, and cart-to-purchase conversion.

Pricing: $299/mo.

Which tool is best for website visitor tracking: final verdict?

There is no definite answer to this question. According to the survey, 74% of analytical professionals use Google analytics along with Usermaven.

With the help of Usermaven, you can track, measure, and report every user’s activity which will eventually help you optimize for improved UX and business goals.

With its privacy-friendly analytics, you can track all data anonymously. The extensive features retention analysis, onboarding analysis, and product management metrics help marketing and sales.

You can also enjoy 360 profile view, team collaboration, and end-to-end data security.

FAQs about website tracking tools

What are the benefits of website visitor tracking?

The key benefits of website visitor tracking are the following:

• Help you know your visitors
• Track where traffic is coming from
• Know exactly what your customers are looking for
• See where you are losing customers
• Find out how to optimize your website
• Use value proposition and additional data to target prospects

Is website visitor tracking GDPR compliant?

Website tracking pixels can collect personal data from users without their knowledge or agreement. According to the GDPR, tracking pixels can only be used with the user's consent. A website must figure out a mechanism to disable the pixel if it is being used without the user's permission or if the user rejects using pixels.

Can websites know who visits them?

In a word no, tracking tools can collect and analyze your web data and do many things. It can tell you where a user abandons a particular page. But it can’t identify a specific individual.

Can someone find out what websites I visit?

Unfortunately, anyone can see your search history and browsing history. Many websites use cookies that track your activity and provide recommendations based on your search history. Governments may be able to locate you if you take action to notify them. Additionally, hackers can infiltrate your computers.

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Your Complete Guide to Website Visitor Tracking

Learn how to keep track of website visitors coming into your marketing and sales funnel.

Those statistics can be disheartening for sales and marketing teams when you’re working so hard to drive eyeballs to your website, in the first place.

You’ll need to make sure the people you’re working so hard to attract are actually converting, and maximize the value you’re able to extract from the 98% of website traffic that doesn’t.

If you’re able to understand your traffic and get more value from the people already visiting, your marketing department instantly becomes more efficient. Why? Because they know where to focus their efforts.

Sales teams, on the other hand, will have more quality leads coming from your current lead generation efforts. They won’t need to constantly invest in new channels to drive new leads; they’ll be able to nurture potential customers they already have.

So, how do you stop missing sales opportunities, and nudge people visiting your site towards making a purchase?

Website visitor tracking software will shine a light on the anonymous 98% of non-converting website traffic. It’s the best way to find (and close) opportunities you never realized you had.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• Exactly what website visitor tracking is, and how it works.
• How to use the software to build on existing growth, sales and marketing strategies.
• The step-by-step process two companies have used to close more deals using website tracking.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

What is website visitor tracking?

The people visiting your website don’t have to be a mystery.

Sure, you can look in your Google Analytics dashboard, but don’t you want to know who is behind each pageview? Who they really are, where they work, and, more importantly, whether they’re a potential lead you should follow-up with?

Website visitor analytics tools makes that possible.

The software used to track website visitors reveals information about the people visiting your website that isn’t easily available in analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics. You’re able to view company names and contact information for key people at the company, which enables sales and marketing teams to build accurate profiles of customers.

That, in turn, gives you the ammunition you’ll need to generate and convert more high-quality leads.

Why? Because:

• Marketing teams have data to build a stronger strategy. They can view which content their top prospects are engaging with and learn which traffic sources bring more ideal customers to the site while also generating more leads from current traffic, and implementing more robust ABM campaigns.
• Sales teams are given company names of people browsing, enabling them to find warm leads that are already looking for the product or service you provide. This reduces the need for aggressive sales tactics (like cold calling), and slashes the time they’ll spend finding their own leads to reach out to. Instead, they’re more efficient with their time–and able to focus on leads that are going to improve revenue.

(And, truth is, companies, where sales and marketing teams work together , see 36% higher customer retention, and 38% higher sales win rates.)

What does that mean for your company?

Well, your marketing team can generate quality leads without the need for increasing media spend. By fine-tuning your process with feedback from your sales department, you’ll just need to refine your marketing strategy and focus more on channels that bring those dream customers to your site.

That’s bound to help shorten the gap between the 2% of website visitors who convert, and the 98% who don’t.

How does website visitor tracking work?

So, how exactly does website visitor tracking find the names of companies browsing your website?

Spoiler alert: You don’t need to be hugely tech-savvy to understand.

Reverse Domain Name System (rDNS)

All Internet connected devices have an IP address and the majority have what’s called a reverse DNS record.

Website visitor tracking, like Leadfeeder, uses reverse DNS to find which companies are visiting your website based on their IP address.

The best part? Visitor tracking software can also filter out ISPs, bots, and spammy traffic, leaving you with a neat list of real companies that are visiting your website.

For example: If you type an IP address of “8-8-8-8-8” into a rDNS tool, it’ll feedback the location–and therefore, the company using it. It’s essentially the same as looking-up a phone number in an address book, but for websites.

Website visitor tracking software works by installing a script on your website which collects the webisite visitor data directly.

Your software will then connect the dots, and reveal which companies are browsing your site.

Then, the data collected is typically enriched with information already publicly available on the company, such as:

• Employee numbers
• Social media profiles
• Company contacts

…allowing you to get a detailed profile of companies visiting your website.

Syncing your tool stack

Do you store data about current leads? Whether it’s from your CRM, marketing automation software or communication tool you use to speak with potential customers, you can integrate your tool stack to get more information on the people browsing your website.

For example: If you’ve noticed a dream customer visiting your website (“Company A”), you’ve got two options:

• Create a new organization in your CRM, where your sales team can begin monitoring them and marketers can use this data to build better ABM campaigns.
• Sync the website browsing data you’ve collected with the organization in your CRM if they are already listed in there, giving a more detailed profile of the lead you’re nurturing.

You’ve got a better understanding of the organizations visiting your website, and a plan of action to convert them directly from your CRM–even if they haven’t got a profile in there, yet.

Is it GDPR compliant?

A very valid question to ask–especially when not meeting GDPR rules could land you a hefty fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of your company’s annual turnover .

GDPR, introduced on 25th May 2018, protects someone’s privacy (specifically online). It means businesses will need to be transparent with the data they hold on their EU-based audience and be willing to safely delete it at their request.

How does that work with tracking software, when you’re essentially gathering data on your website visitors?

Good news: the way Leadfeeder processes data is compliant with GDPR legislation – so as long as you’ve got a clear privacy, terms, and cookies policy visible on your website that:

• Is easy for visitors to access (with links from your footer and email opt-ins)
• Includes how the data your tracking is used

How can visitor tracking drive growth?

Great! You’re able to track the people visiting your website, put company names to website clicks, and learn more about individual activity taking place on your site. But how exactly do you use that data in your growth marketing strategy?

Lead generation

Outbound leads cost 39% more than inbound leads, so it’s no surprise marketers are looking to improve their lead generation efforts and attract customers who’re likely to convert.

However, you’re probably relying on CRO tactics, content marketing, and paid media to generate leads from your website. That’s a great place to start.

But you can supercharge the ROI from each lead generation tactic when you add website visitor tracking into the mix because you’re able to:

• See the exact profile of companies browsing your website–including key details like industry, employee size, location, and the names of employees who can be targeted.
• View typical pre-purchase behaviors, and prioritize nurturing new site visitors who demonstrate the same behaviors.
• Analyze the companies clicking on your PPC campaigns, and track exactly what they do on your website.
• Locate the exact page a target lead converts (or exits) on your website.

In short: With website tracking, you can identify high-value potential leads who’re passing through your funnel, sync them to your CRM, and pass them along for sales teams to nurture.

The best part? It can be done even if they don’t actively fill-in a lead capture form (such as an eBook download) on your website.

By using Leadfeeder for online lead generation we’ve increased the amount of qualified sales leads by 34%. We send website leads directly to our Pipedrive using Leadfeeder’s Pipedrive integration. Steve Jackson, CEO, Quru

The marketing funnel

Unfortunately, it’s tough to convince a first-time visitor to convert.

People go through a journey before handing over their hard-earned cash in return for a product or service, which is why you’ve likely got a marketing funnel to nurture each lead as they flow throughout various stages.

But where does website visitor tracking software fit into the mix?

The answer: From “awareness” to “conversion”.

Collecting data on your customers’ website activity at each key stage of the marketing funnel before making a purchase, means you can use it to your advantage.

By knowing the exact companies who are progressing through your marketing funnel (as opposed to generalized traffic numbers and conversion rates) can help you plug holes. You’ll know where previous leads drop-off, and fix those issues to move them through the entire funnel much faster.

Here’s how I might use that if I’m a B2B SaaS company , and want to understand how people travel through my website on their journey from anonymous visitor to customer:

• Awareness: I’ve just published a new blog post on my website, and it’s already driving a decent amount of traffic via organic search. But I want to understand which companies are viewing it, so I use visitor tracking. Based on the data being fed back, I can see the industry and company size of each visitor, and build up a more accurate profile of the type of company suffering with the pain point my blog post targets.
• Consideration: I’ve built a landing page that explains how my SaaS solution solves the pain problem discussed in my blog post. Now, I’m able to create an ABM advertising campaign on LinkedIn , targeting the exact companies who viewed the initial blog post, and push them towards the landing page. Based on my data, I can also build a list of similar sized companies in the same industry, and target them–giving me a large pool of high-value potential prospects to target.
• Conversion: I set-up custom feeds and alerts in my visitor tracking software to send my sales team an email (or Slack message) when each target company visits the landing page. Then, they’ll check the lead’s previous website activity, sync the data to our CRM, and find the best person to contact. It’s only a matter of time before we make the sale!

Regardless of how you’re using data shown within website visitor tracking software, your overall growth strategy becomes less of a numbers game based on anonymous traffic. You’re shining a light on people already browsing your website and using their activity to target them with personalized campaigns.

That enables you to align your sales and marketing departments, and effectively take each target prospect right the way through the funnel.

My role is to generate leads that fill up our sales funnel—or the top of the marketing funnel. The way that we use Leadfeeder is really to figure out which prospects are visiting our website and figuring out the best way to reach out to them. Maybe they haven't yet reached out to us either, but now we can be proactive in marketing to them and getting them into our sales funnel. Julie Huval, Head of Marketing, Beck Technology Ltd

Account-based marketing (ABM)

You’re already one step ahead if you’ve started to implement ABM into your marketing strategy.

87% of B2B marketers have agreed that ABM delivers a higher return on their investment than other marketing activities, and companies already using ABM generate 200% more revenue for their marketing efforts.

You’re able to use the data inside your website tracking report to improve your ABM campaigns even further by:

• Building more accurate profiles of your ideal companies, and targeting them through ABM campaigns, based on the types of companies visiting key pages on your website.
• Assessing the performance of your current strategies by identifying the companies browsing your site from various campaigns.
• Powering ABM campaign targeting across several platforms, such as LinkedIn and display advertising, using the data you’ve collected on each company.

Let’s say you want to get started with ABM, but you’re not entirely sure who your ideal target should be. You use visitor tracking to view which companies are visiting the pricing and product pages on your website since those are pages people view when they’re closer to a conversion.

You build a profile for each company visiting those pages and begin targeting similar companies with the same qualities (such as industry, company size or location) through your marketing.

Two weeks pass, and you check the data in your visitor tracking software again. Boom! You can see which companies have engaged with your campaign and visited your website.

You know your ABM campaign is paying off because Company A has visited your pricing page, so your sales team reaches out to the decision-maker at Company A via LinkedIn. They already know the content and campaigns their target has engaged with, so the sales reps can personalize their outreach.edIn. They already know the content and campaigns their target has engaged with, so the sales reps can personalize their outreach.

Then, after warming up the prospect, they send a personalized pricing plan for a company of their size and book a software demo–with the intention of converting them into a customer.

We use the data from Leadfeeder to build ABM campaigns across LinkedIn and Google. By targeting job functions within the company, and not just the individual website visitor, we get the opportunity to influence multiple stakeholders in the buying process. We automate the process via Leadfeeder’s Zapier integration. So far we've reduced the length of our sales process by 20% and the marketing team is generating substantially more targeted leads for sales than before. Casper Rouchmann, Traffic Manager, Templafy

6 practical uses for marketing departments

Earlier, we talked about how the data provided by website visitor tracking software can help you generate more leads and drive growth for your company. But if you’re looking for some more actionable takeaways that you can implement straight away to assist your marketing campaigns, here are six practical uses.

1. Build accurate buyer personas

Read any good “marketing guide” and you’ll find buyer personas make their way onto the list.

Buyer personas are documents that define your ideal customer. They include key traits like their age, job title, interests, location, and pain points, and allow you to understand exactly who you’re targeting.

(Not convinced? Consider this: Buyer personas make websites 2-5 times more effective , and helped one company to increase the volume of leads sent to sales by 10%, while also reducing their lead conversion time by 72%.)

You should have buyer personas for each “type” of ideal customer that you’re looking to attract. If you have multiple–like agency owners and in-house marketers, for example–create a different buyer persona document for each one. Over 90% of a company’s sales come from 3-4 buyer personas, so don’t be afraid of creating more than one.

But where does website visitor tracking fit into buyer personas?

The answer: When you’re creating them. All buyer personas you’re creating should be data-driven–not based on guesswork.

Presuming that your target customers have a certain quality is dangerous because you might spend hours targeting people that fit the mould, but don’t actually end up converting. That won’t do any favors for your conversion rates (nor make sales departments very happy).

Instead, use data to get your facts straight.

Adding website tracking into the mix will strengthen your buyer personas even more. Why? Because you’re able to view the characteristics (such as industry, employee count, and location) of each company visiting your website, and learn how they move through the buyer journey to conversion. Start by taking a look at the people who’re visiting your website and give them a lead score .

For example:

• Company A has a lead score of 8: They work for LinkedIn (one of your dream customers), have visited your services page, and read three relevant blog posts.
• Company B has a lead score of 1: They work for a smaller company with three employees, and only read one blog post before hitting the exit button of their browser tab.

You’re more likely to focus your lead generation efforts on Company A, right?

If you find a similar pattern across the board (such as content consumption, company size and referral website), build them into your buyer persona documents. Your marketing team will then have a better understanding of the leads they’re trying to bring in–and focus on strategies that’ll make it happen.

2. Map the buyer’s journey

Do you know the process a person takes to go from “stranger” to “customer”?

If not, website visitor tracking software can help.

You’re able to view both company and individual browsing data to understand how people flow through their journey to purchasing and answer key questions like:

• How many pages do my customers view before purchasing?
• Which pages do they spend the most time on?
• Which marketing channels are driving leads to our website at each stage of the buyer journey?

That data is invaluable for marketers because it helps you boost conversion rates through improving buyer journeys for your potential customers.

Let’s put it into practice using the questions above:

• 95% of my converting website traffic views 5+ pages before purchasing, so I’ll add more internal links in my content and improve my navigation bar to make that easier for future visitors.
• People who convert spend a lot of time viewing my About page (2.5 minutes), so I’ll improve the overall design and use storytelling on that page to build relationships.
• 30% of my conversions come directly from Google AdWords, but only 3% come from Facebook Ads. However, 20% of conversions clicked on one of my Facebook Ads earlier in their journey, but the lack of conversions shows they’re not ready to purchase yet. So, I’ll change the focus (and content) of my Facebook ads to educate buyers in the middle of their journey, as opposed to trying to drive a direct sign-up.

Remember: Each conclusion is based on facts and hard data, not guesswork. That’s the aim with any new marketing strategy.

3. Support your content strategy

Content marketing is a strategy you’ll need to bed-into your overall marketing plan–that’s no secret.

But with website visitor tracking and data from Google Analytics, you can make your entire process more streamlined by understanding exactly which content you should be focusing on.

For example: Look at how the companies you’d love to work with are engaging with your current content, and ask yourself the following questions for each target lead:

• Who’s reading what content? Focus on whether certain types of companies are reading particular types of content–whether that’s listicles, long-form content or text based around infographics. Then, create more of the content your target companies are reading.
• How long do they typically spend on a piece of content? If it’s not much time, consider shortening the length or formatting the page so it’s scannable.
• How do they find these blog posts? If a huge chunk of them arrive from organic search, focus on SEO and put more effort into optimizing each page for a highly-converting keyword.
• How many blog posts do they typically read before converting? If it’s more than one, add internal links to other assets in your library to encourage further reading for new website visitors.

4. Assist lead generation

Because website visitor tracking shows you which companies or individuals are visiting your website, you can sync them to your CRM dashboard and track their likelihood of converting.

Again, that gives tons of meaningful data you can use to help with lead generation.

For example: You know the type of companies downloading your lead generation content, but do you know the ones that aren’t engaging–and you wish were?

Figure out the type of companies coming to your website and not becoming leads, then search for a way to start turning those companies into leads. That could include:

• Creating downloadable content, such as eBooks or whitepapers, more specifically tailored to those companies’ industries, interests or pain points.
• Adding more specific calls to action on your website that speak to those companies pain points, rather than generic buttons like “sign-up”.
• Building different landing pages for each stage of those companies’ buyer journeys, and experimenting with other lead generation tactics –such as using live chat software to open a conversation when they’re actively browsing your website.

The same concept applies for driving initial traffic.

If your target customer is similar to QuickBooks (who’ve already visited your website), take a look at where they arrived from. Was it organic search, from a LinkedIn ad, or from an external blog post you were mentioned in?

Alternatively, if a company hasn’t downloaded a lead generation asset, but fits your target customer and is showing a high level of intent (such as visiting a product or pricing page multiple times), send them directly to your sales team. They’ll be able to source the ideal contact at the company using data in your visitor tracking platform and reach out to them directly, with the hopes of bringing them on as a customer.

5. Build stronger ABM campaigns

Account-based marketing happens when you’re taking an uber-personalized approach to bring your target on as a customer. It provides each target customer (or “account”) with marketing material that’s tailored to their budget, company and individual requirements.

Let’s say you’re attempting to get an ABM program off the ground, for example. You aren’t entirely sure where to start, or you’re looking for a way to improve the ABM strategy you’ve had in place for a while that isn’t getting as many results as you’d hoped.

You can use website visitor tracking to:

• Analyze the companies visiting your website, including how they browse it and what channels they use to find you, to help build profiles of your ideal accounts. With this data, you can evaluate which methods are likely to be most effective when connecting with them. For example: If your dream customer arrives through a LinkedIn post, send a direct message through LinkedIn to your contact.
• Create lists in your visitor tracking platform of specific companies you’re already targeting, and understand how your current efforts are performing. For example: You can analyze the content and campaigns they engage with, and even set-up alerts to be notified when they visit certain content on your website. That way, you’re able to strike while the iron’s hot and your brand is fresh in their mind!

Almost 85% of marketers that measured their ROI said their ABM initiatives outperformed some of their other marketing investments, with 50% of those saying the difference was significant.

Fancy even better news? You can use website visitor tracking to power your paid ABM campaigns on several advertising platforms.

By creating Custom Feeds (filtered lists of companies who perform a set of actions) in your visitor tracking software, you can identify specific companies that view certain content, or engaged with specific campaigns. This will then give you the chance to target anyone who works at those companies by:

• Downloading a CSV file of those companies
• Uploading it to LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences feature
• Targeting anyone who works at those companies with a LinkedIn advert

This works incredibly well for several reasons.

Firstly, unlike generic website retargeting, you’re not wasting money to advertise to website visitors that don’t fit your ideal customer profile (and are unlikely to convert).

Secondly, you can target anyone from the company who’s visited your website–not just the individual user who actually visited. That’s fantastic when multiple people are involved in the average B2B buying process ( 6.8 people , on average).

Finally, you can get more personal with the accounts you’re targeting, and display advertising messages based on their on-site behavior. Speak to specific industry pain points and opportunities with your messaging to guide your target account to the next stage in their buyer journey.

It’s not just LinkedIn’s advertising platform that can take advantage of your visitor tracking data though. By uploading your data to a Data Management Platform (DMP), you can target people working across those companies across many other advertising platforms–such as Twitter, Facebook or Display ads–for an omnichannel approach.

6. Track campaigns from click to sale

You’re likely already using UTM parameters on your URLs. They’re a fantastic way to pinpoint exactly which campaign a website visitor is arriving on a specific page from in Google Analytics, and you guessed it: Website visitor tracking is the missing piece to the puzzle.

Let’s say you want to know the exact route your current customer (Customer A) has taken from being a stranger to making a purchase.

In Google Analytics, we can see 50 visitors came from a LinkedIn PPC campaign. Using the source/medium filters to create a custom feed of those visitors, you can view the actual companies browsing your website from that exact LinkedIn campaign.

Customer A clicked that ad campaign and went on to make a purchase three days later.

In short: UTM parameters allow you to dive deeper into which companies are interacting with which marketing campaign. Then it’s your marketing department’s job to create similar, high-converting campaigns to attract (and convert) other, similar customers.

How Triuvare identified (and contacted) ready-to-convert leads

It’s all well and good for us to explain how you can use website visitor tracking in marketing, but you want to know how other marketing teams have used it successfully, right?

Enter: Triuvare, an agency who provide IT-specialist services for small and medium-sized organizations, and use Leadfeeder’s data to improve their content marketing strategy and convert more website visitors. Johanna Rytkonen, their Marketing and Communications Manager, sums up perfectly the need for personalized content:

Not all content is created equal. If you are implementing content marketing, some of your content is for people who are closer to the buying decision and some for people who are in early stages.

Triuvare identified their ICT Tendering Guide was a key piece of content read by target customers who were much closer to making a final purchasing decision.

So, they used Leadfeeder to collect the company names of people viewing that page, and prioritized contacting them since they understand “it is very important to contact them as soon as possible, as that has proven impact on which provider the customer will choose.”

The result?

Triuvare was able to build a more refined content creation and promotion process by understanding what content attracted their best customers, improving the ROI of their entire content marketing strategy.

7 practical uses for sales teams

Now we’ve covered how your marketing team can use website visitor tracking, let’s move onto sales teams.

(After all, they’re the people who will be reaching out to the companies you identify!)

From identifying high-quality leads to pitching your services to them, here are seven practical tips for sales reps to make the most out of website visitor tracking.

1. Identify sales leads

How many times do you create a list of target customers or dream accounts you’d love to provide your products or services to?

According to one report, 61% of B2B marketers find generating high-quality leads as their biggest challenge. But with website visitor tracking, you can use data to identify hot leads you never knew you had–and follow-up with them much sooner.

Timing is of the essence, right?

For example Your sales representatives might know that your ideal customer works for a mid-size company. They know your customer base is usually a company with 100-200 employees, and are based in the U.S.

But it’s almost impossible to find and target every company that fits that criteria–unless you spend hours upon hours trawling through the internet.

You can actually get every piece of vital information on each company directly from your website tracking platform, including the number of employees and their industry. There’s no need to leave and head to Google, spending hours manually scraping information about them from several sources.

From there, you can start to identify key contacts your sales team should be targeting. Do they fit your “high-quality lead” or “target customer” criteria? Add them to the list or sync them directly to your CRM–even if you’ve never heard of them before–and prioritize contacting them to start nurturing your lead!

2. Connect with decision-makers

Along with viewing the actual companies visiting your website, you can begin your search for your ideal target at each company through your visitor tracking platform.

Long gone are the days of searching high and low to find employees at a company, and therefore, which contact is best to follow-up with.

By using website visitor tracking, you’re able to:

• Find the exact company browsing your site.
• Sync them to your CRM, and see whether you already have existing connections working there–whether that’s a director, CMO, CFO, or other.
• View a list of key contacts, and their details at the company, who you can reach out to. This data is typically provided by a data partner and is based on publicly available information.

Sales reps can spend up to 40% of their time looking for somebody to call. But with website visitor tracking integrated with your CRM, you can slash that time in half.

3. “Warm-up” cold outreach

If you’re able to find the people and companies browsing your website, whittle them down to the people you’d love to bring-on as a customer. These people will be your top leads and those you’ll nurture, but before diving in with a cold email, use the information you have to warm them up, pre-outreach.

For each company you have on my nurturing list, you could warm them up by:

• Replying to their tweets
• Commenting on their blog posts
• Responding to posts shared by decision makers you’ve identified on LinkedIn
• Using them as examples in your blog post, and sending a message to let them know

By making your first contact with them less sales-y, you can get on their radar before pitching. Then, when you do make the ask for a sale, they already know who you are.

Ditch the cold calls (which, on average, take eight attempts to get through ), and build relationships with the companies you’ve identified as a potential lead, first.

By going the extra mile to engage with them on a non-promotional level first, they’re also more likely to trust you than they would a stranger. And we all know how important trust is in purchasing decisions.

4. Ask for an introduction

Now you’re able to identify which companies are visiting your website and find a decision maker through LinkedIn, why not use LinkedIn’s contact features to ask a mutual connection for an introduction?

That could be as simple as this LinkedIn message to your shared connection:

“Hey! I noticed you’re connected with [prospect name]. Someone from [company] recently viewed our website, and I really think they’d benefit from our [product/service]. I’d really appreciate an intro to [prospect name], if you have the time. Thanks!”

90% of decision makers say they never respond to cold outreach emails.

But by reducing the “stranger” feeling that your leads associate with a cold outreach email, and swapping that with an introduction from someone they trust, it’s a surefire way to make sure your pitch is opened–leaving potential for a conversion.

5. Create lead scores

Similar to defining buyer personas, sales representatives can use website tracking data to determine which leads are worth following-up with.

This happens by creating lead scores: A system that places leads on a scale of priority to non-priority.

A lead scoring model for a B2B marketing software company who’re targeting businesses in the legal sector might look like this:

• 3-5 employees
• HQ located in an urban area of the USA
• View the pricing on our website at least once
• View view blog posts in the “accounting tips” category at least three times
• Visit your website three times within 2 weeks

If a company or individual only meets two of that criteria, they might not work their way onto the lead priority list. However, if a company or individual meets them all, their lead score would be 5–and sales departments should try and engage with them, fast.

6. Automate alerts to capitalize on dream clients visiting your website

If you already know who your target customers are, you’re able to set-up automatic alerts and be notified when those leads visit your website.

That way, you know exactly when to reach out to them.

Create alerts via email, Slack or your CRM. When a perfect lead visits your website, aim to reach out within a few days so they don’t forget about you. Keep your brand fresh in their mind.

But should you follow-up with every dream customer, no matter the content they’ve viewed?

A company who’ve only visited one page on your website might not be ready to purchase, but a company who are further along (and have browsed your service, product and about pages) might be.

That doesn’t mean you should only focus on the latter.

You should follow-up with every dream customer who visits your website. It’s the approach that matters–not whether or not you make the effort.

For example: If Company A only visits one page on your website, reach out to them via LinkedIn without the intention of selling. They aren’t likely to be far in their purchasing decision after only viewing one page, but getting yourself on their radar is a great way to drive them back to your site to learn more.

Company B (who view your product, about and service pages), on the other hand, might be worth outreaching to via email. They’re much further along in their purchasing decision, and could be more prone to opening a pitch if they recognize the brand behind the email address.

7. Personalize sales messages

Personalization is a fantastic way to build trust with sales prospects–a feeling they’ll need to experience towards your brand before making a purchase.

Don’t believe us? A report by Deloitte found 36% of consumers want to purchase personalized products or services, and 48% said they’d be willing to wait longer in order to receive a personalized product or service. Website visitor tracking is a fantastic way to personalize your sales pitch, with the hopes of closing more deals with your leads.

That’s because you’re able to understand the problems individual prospects are facing (through browsing which company has viewed which piece of content), and tailor your outreach for that pain point.

Let’s put that into practice, and say Business A has viewed these three pieces of content:

• Buyer Persona 101: How to Research Your Ideal Customers
• How to Identify Your Target Customer
• 7 Ways to Find Where Your Customers Hang Out

A shared pain point (or the problem those blog posts solve) relate to understanding their customers. So, my sales reps personalize their outreach messages for Business A, and include “struggling to understand your customers?” as their email subject line.

This works because we’re solving a pain point they’ve explicitly searched for a solution for (or expressed an interest in), and tailoring our messages to each lead. That proves we’ve taken time to understand them, and guarantees a personalized solution.

In a nutshell: Think less “spray and pray”, and spend more time using data you already have to personalize your outreach emails to boost both open and conversion rates.

How AlertOps increased sales demo rates by 700% using Leadfeeder

Prior to using Leadfeeder, AlertOps–an IT alert management platform built for enterprise DevOps teams–were doing some cold outreach with very little success. They struggled to connect with the leads their sales department were working, mainly because they didn’t have a process in place to guide website visitors through their sales pipeline.

So, they started using website visitor tracking to view what their customers were doing on-site, and personalized their outreach approach accordingly.

AlertOps sent information on prospects identified by Leadfeeder to their CRM (Pipedrive). That allowed them to personalize their approach to prospects.

Now when we reach out to prospects, we are able to frame the conversation around their interests and provide value up front based on their behavior on our website.

That solved the sales pipeline issues, and subsequently improved their connection rates.

So much so, that within just 30 days of using Leadfeeder’s Pipedrive integration, they were able to increase their sales demo rate by 700%–and even booked a sales demo with a Fortune 500 company.

…Not bad for a bit of personalization and extra effort, right?

Consumers are being bombarded with more marketing messages than ever. The result? They’re getting savvier. They can see a marketing campaign or sales pitch from a mile off and you have to do more than ever to get them to convert.

So, what’s the answer? To start with—get more out of what you’re currently doing.

Website visitor tracking is a reimagining of how you can understand your current marketing and sales efforts. As a marketer, it helps you more deeply understand what you’re currently doing, as a sales team, it enables you to get out ahead of your prospects and understand their needs before they’ve even initiated contact.

Use this data in our guide to refine current marketing strategies, provide your sales team with warm leads, and power more accurate account-based marketing campaigns.

Generate quality leads from website traffic

10 Web Analytics Tools For Tracking Your Visitors

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3. Google Analytics

4. shinystat, 5. sitemeter, 6. statcounter, 7. w3counter, 9. webalizer, frequently asked questions (faqs) about web analytics packages.

What are the key features to look for in a web analytics package?

When choosing a web analytics package, there are several key features to consider. First, the package should provide detailed traffic data, including the number of visitors, page views, and unique visitors. It should also offer information about visitor behavior, such as the pages they visit, the time they spend on your site, and their navigation path. Other important features include conversion tracking, which shows how many visitors complete a desired action, and segmentation, which allows you to analyze data from specific groups of visitors. Finally, the package should offer real-time reporting and customizable reports.

How can web analytics packages help improve my website?

Web analytics packages provide valuable insights that can help you improve your website. By tracking visitor behavior, you can identify which parts of your site are performing well and which areas need improvement. For example, if you notice that visitors are leaving your site from a particular page, you might need to improve the content or design of that page. Additionally, web analytics can help you understand your audience better, enabling you to tailor your content to their needs and preferences.

Are there free web analytics packages available?

Yes, there are several free web analytics packages available. These packages often offer basic features such as traffic data and visitor behavior analysis. However, they may lack advanced features such as conversion tracking and segmentation. If you’re just starting out or have a small website, a free package might be sufficient. But as your site grows, you may need to upgrade to a paid package to access more advanced features.

How do I install a web analytics package on my website?

Installing a web analytics package typically involves adding a piece of code to your website. This code is usually provided by the analytics provider and should be placed in the header or footer of your site. Some packages also offer plugins or extensions that make installation easier. Once the code is installed, the package will start collecting data about your visitors and their behavior.

Can I use more than one web analytics package on my website?

Yes, it’s possible to use more than one web analytics package on your website. This can be beneficial if you want to compare data from different sources or if you need features that are not available in a single package. However, using multiple packages can also make data analysis more complex and may slow down your site.

How can I ensure the privacy of my visitors when using web analytics?

When using web analytics, it’s important to respect the privacy of your visitors. This means informing visitors that you’re collecting data, explaining what data you’re collecting and why, and offering them the option to opt out. You should also ensure that the data is stored securely and that it’s not shared with third parties without the visitor’s consent.

What is the difference between web analytics and website visitor tracking?

While both web analytics and website visitor tracking provide insights into your website’s performance, they focus on different aspects. Web analytics generally provides aggregate data about your visitors, such as the number of visitors and page views. On the other hand, website visitor tracking focuses on the behavior of individual visitors, tracking their actions on your site in real-time.

How can I use web analytics to increase conversions?

Web analytics can help you increase conversions by providing insights into how visitors interact with your site. For example, you can use analytics to identify which pages are most effective at driving conversions and which ones are causing visitors to leave your site. You can also use analytics to test different versions of your pages to see which one performs better.

Can web analytics help with SEO?

Yes, web analytics can be a valuable tool for SEO. By providing data on keywords, referral sources, and visitor behavior, analytics can help you understand how visitors are finding your site and what they do once they arrive. This information can guide your SEO strategy, helping you optimize your site for the keywords that are driving traffic and improve the pages that are not performing well.

How often should I check my web analytics?

The frequency with which you should check your web analytics depends on your specific needs and goals. If you’re actively testing new strategies or changes to your site, you might want to check your analytics daily or even several times a day. If your site is more stable, checking your analytics weekly or monthly might be sufficient. Regardless of the frequency, it’s important to regularly review your analytics to stay informed about your site’s performance and make necessary adjustments.

The Complete Guide to Website Visitor Tracking and Top 12 Tracking Tools

Suppose you know your target audience well, and you created a professional website with your customers in mind. Then, you started to market your online business with various strategies and techniques to get visitors to your site. Now what? 

Next, you need to find out whether your website really meets your visitors’ expectations. It’s essential that you understand where they are and how they interact with your site. Do they find what they need? If they do, how long does it take? If they don’t, how can you help them? (So many questions with no answers, right?)

The good news is, specialized analytical tools can help you find answers to these and many other questions and deeply understand your online prospects and customers. But if you search for website visitor tracking, you’ll find a lot of website visitor tracking software. This guide will help you choose the proper one for your needs and budgets. 

There are several categories for you to find the right one for your specific use case. But first, what exactly is website visitor tracking and how can it benefit your business?

By the way, if you still don’t have a website, build one with the Boxmode website builder and start tracking your visitors today. 

What Is Website Visitor Tracking And How Does It Work?

Website visitor tracking is a process of identifying your website users and analyzing their activity across one or several website pages. You can use the data collected in the process of website visitor tracking to learn more about your users’ behavior and adjust your digital marketing campaigns.

Sounds too general to you? Then, read on to discover how exactly the tracking works.

The most common online tracking technologies are: 

IP tracking

IP address (internet protocol address) is an identifying number associated with a specific computer or computer network.

Most website analytic tools use website visitors’ IP addresses to identify their approximate locations, which can help you understand where your audience is geographically.

For example, Google Analytics can give you a real-time geographical overview of the users on your site in the past 30 minutes. 

Device tracking

Analytic tools usually help you track the type of device visitors use to access your site (PC, tablet, or mobile). You can even track the specific devices (Samsung Galaxy X1234, iPhone, iPad, etc.), brands (Samsung, LG, Apple, etc.), input selector (touchscreen, etc.), and operating system (Windows, Android, iOS, etc.).

Knowing this can help you focus your site development and testing on the most popular devices to give visitors the best possible experience.

Pixel tracking

Marketing pixels, also known as tracking pixels, are snippets of code added to a site to create a small transparent 1×1 pixel image. They allow for monitoring user behavior, site conversions, web traffic, and other metrics. Pixels are usually hidden and can be encoded in everything from banner ads to emails to track users’ interaction with them.

For example, when you use tracking pixels, website visitor tracking software can report whether users have opened your email newsletter or visited your page.

Speaking of pixels, the Boxmode website builder allows you to add a Facebook Pixel to your Boxmode-based website in just a few clicks. 

Tracking cookies

Cookies are one of the most well-known tools of browser tracking. A cookie is a tiny text file placed in your users’ browsers that activates when they visit a website. 

The most well-known website cookies are: 

Session cookies — short-term cookies that store data of a single session. They help sites recognize users as they move from page to page within one domain. This means sites don’t treat users as new visitors every time they click on a new internal link. 

First-party cookies — permanent cookies that publishers or website owners place on their sites to store website visitors’ browsing information within their sites only. These cookies keep users signed in and remember their site preferences such as menu settings, language selection, themes, and more. 

Third-party cookies — generated by a third-party website (someone other than the owner), these cookies can track users across multiple domains. The tracking can take many forms: browsing history, demographics, online behavior, spending habits, and so on. Marketers usually use these cookies for online advertising purposes.

Digital fingerprinting

Unlike cookies, fingerprinting identifies the users not by special tags stored on their computers but by the unique features and settings of their browser, system, and device. Fingerprinting is a powerful tool for marketers in reaching potential customers since it enables tracking within multiple domains.

Any identifier can be a part of a web fingerprint, including the user’s operating system, software and add-ons, screen resolution, installed fonts, as well as browser version and settings they use. 

You can track not only visitors’ interactions with your own website but also their generic behavior on the internet. Pretty awesome, huh? But is it legal? Let’s find out in the next section.

Website Visitor Tracking Laws

In the past five years, governments have enacted massive amounts of data privacy legislation. Virtually every country in the world has implemented some sort of data protection laws to regulate how personal data is collected, stored, and transferred. 

Not only the government pays attention to data privacy but also the users themselves. According to the survey by Statista released in March 2021, more than half of the respondents claimed to be more concerned about their online privacy compared to last year. 

So, if you’re using any tracking tools on your website or product, you’ll have to comply with relevant web tracking laws, such as: 

• The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) controls European Union citizens data tracking, no matter where the company is geographically. If your site has web traffic from EU users, you must follow the GDPR’s guidelines. Otherwise, you risk incurring extremely high fines .
• Though the U.S. doesn’t have a comprehensive federal law that governs data privacy, there are some state data privacy laws you should know about, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act ( CCPA ), Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act ( CDPA ), the Colorado Privacy Act ( CPA ), and the New York SHIELD Act ( view text ).
• The LGPD ( Brazil’s General Law for the Protection of Personal Data ) regulates the collecting and tracking of personal data of Brazilian residents.

For more data protection laws in different countries, you can visit Cyberlaw Tracker that offers the newest information on data protection and privacy legislation worldwide.

These laws give site visitors the right to receive specific, up-to-date information on what data is collected at all times, for what purpose, and where it is sent in the world (along with the possibility of preventing it from happening). So whenever you use any website visitor tracking tool, your website’s privacy policy (general document regarding all the data processes on a site) and cookie policy (a document that deals specifically with the use of cookies on your site) needs to reflect all this information. 

You can find many templates and examples of cookie policies on the web. And if you want to check whether your website’s use of cookies and online tracking is GDPR compliant, you can do it with a free Cookiebot CMP tool.

Though there is no legal requirement to involve a lawyer when writing your privacy policy, you still might need legal advice on this matter. The article “ Do I Need a Lawyer to Write a Privacy Policy? ” can help you make an informed decision. You can also read Boxmode’s helpful article, “ How to Write Privacy Policy for My Website .”

Data privacy legislation isn’t something you should ignore when creating a website or setting up a marketing campaign. And choosing lawful website visitor tracking tools is essential for your success. But before we dive into the best examples of the website visitor tracking software, let’s check what benefits visitor tracking can bring to the business.

Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking 

New companies emerge every day, and they come up with new digital marketing techniques to get their share of the market. This is why measuring your website performance and improving it equals staying competitive. 

But website visitor tracking can give you much more than simply improving your site. Let’s take a moment to better understand the benefits of website visitor tracking.

Knowing your visitors

To create a website that connects with your prospects and customers, you must understand who they are and what they search for. Knowing your website visitors’ location, gender, age, language, occupation, and interests can help you specify buyer personas and target them based on their needs. 

Saving your time

Collecting relevant information without using tracking tools takes ages. Of course, you can go old fashioned and set up user queries or polls or simply speak directly to your customers. This may take months or even years to discover your target audience and matching marketing strategies, and the data might not be that accurate. Also, the audience can change by the time you finish the footwork, and you’ll have to start over again. 

Website visitor tracking tools help you collect the necessary data in a matter of weeks and let you adapt your marketing strategy accordingly. Moreover, in most cases, you control the tracking process, and if you see that results are not satisfying, you can adjust your settings and get relevant data — saving valuable time.

Increasing your marketing productivity

Companies spend time, budgets, and resources driving traffic to their websites through various sources, such as SEO, pay-per-click advertising, email campaigns, sales efforts, and more. A 2019 survey shows that customer acquisition cost increases significantly from year to year, both in B2B and B2C segments. 

And though it’s a little bit lower in the B2C segment, where it is up roughly 60% compared to five years ago, companies still need to choose the most effective channels to invest in to save their budgets. And using website visitor tracking is the way to discover the best referrer channels. 

Helping you optimize your sales effort

Studies say businesses that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. With website visitor tracking data, understanding how a visitor turns into a prospect and then to a lead is easy and helps you craft a personalized consumer’s journey. In turn, knowing your leads’ motivation and when they are ready for closing is essential for improving your sales. 

Tracking web visitors allows companies to maximize their opportunities and remain competitive. Ignoring tracking technologies can lead to loss of profit and customers. Nobody wants that, right? So, what is some of the  website visitor tracking software that can help you stay competitive?

Website Visitor Tracking Software 

Many different things can refer to website visitor tracking. Also, every business has its own needs for various use cases that require specific visitor tracking software stacks.

Here are the three main purposes of visitor tracking: 

• Measuring website analytics. This includes tracking the users’ behavior such as number of users visiting, number of pages they visit, bounce rate, and many more.

So, if you want to track statistics and your website performance, follow the link to the Website Analytics Tools section.

• Tracking visitor behavior. This involves tracking the length of visitors’ stay on the web page, where they click, and how their behavior differs by demographics, user type, referring source, and other attributes.

If you aim to understand your visitors’ behavior on your website pages, look at the Website Visitor Behavior Tracking Tools section.

• Website visitor identification. Due to users’ data privacy settings, most tracking tools can’t identify individuals. What they can do is identify companies where users work, their regions, and other important information about website visitors. This can significantly help B2B companies market to their prospects.

If you’re working in the B2B sector and interested in tracking repeat visits from specific companies or target accounts, check out the Website Visitor Identification Tools section.

Now, what are the most popular website tracking programs? 

We’ve carefully selected these tools based on their features, price, and user testimonials from the most reputable review platforms such as G2, Capterra, and TrustPilot. Every category has both small business and enterprise solutions. Categories also include at least one free tool so you can test the waters before spending your budget on visitor tracking. 

Website Analytics Tools 

Before you dive into details, here’s a quick summary of the tools from this section. You can scroll down for the information about each solution. 

Google Analytics (GA)

Description : A web analytics service that provides basic statistical and analytical data for search engine optimization and marketing purposes.

G2 rating : 4.5 out of 5 stars (according to 5000+ reviews)

Pricing : Free (with limits); the premium version Google Analytics 360 has tier-based pricing.

Compliance : GA is not GDPR-compliant by default, though its latest version, Google Analytics 4, is much more GDPR-friendly. 

Integrations : With a tracking code generated automatically in the tool, you can integrate GA to any website, including those created with website builders like Boxmode. It also integrates with all Google products, such as Google Ads, Google Ad Manager, Google Data Studio, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Google Optimize 360, Google Search Ads 360, Google Display & Video 360, Google AdSense, and Google Search Console.

Main features : Data collection and analysis, monitoring and visualization (including dashboards, motion charts, and scorecards that display changes over time), and reporting (including custom reports for advertising, audience behavior, acquisition, and conversion).

The most popular GA metrics include: 

• Unique users tracking
• Bounce rate
• The percentage of visitors who viewed only a single page
• User sessions tracking
• Average session duration
• Percentage of new sessions
• Pages per session
• Goal completions/conversion

Possible pitfalls : Some users claim Google Analytics is hard to use due to its confusing interface. This is fixable by taking a free intro course. A more serious issue, though, is that the free version is not 100% reliable; Google even says so itself in its privacy policy . While you can fix a couple of accuracy issues , some of them, like one visitor showing up as two or more users, still can’t be mended.

Description : Mixpanel is tracking software that helps companies measure what matters, make decisions, and build better products through data.

G2 rating : 4.4 out of 5 stars (according to 580+ reviews)

Pricing : Free (with limits); paid version starts at $25/month.

Compliance : GDPR and CCPA

Integrations : Integrates with a code to any website. Integrates with numerous A/B testing and advertising tools, various CRMs, and more .   

Main features : With Mixpanel, you can measure active usage, analyze conversion and drop-off, and find retention drivers. 

The most popular Mixpanel metrics include:

• Entry and exit pages
• Standard and custom events
• Conversions

Possible pitfalls : Some users claimed the dashboard usage is confusing, and the UI is difficult. Some customers complained about slow support (can take a few days to get back to you). However, the most significant issue in terms of analytics is that sometimes you get duplicated users or problems trying to track some custom events. 

StatCounter

Description : Cloud-based software that helps businesses of all sizes with web analytics, data exports, fraud detection, and more. 

G2 rating : 4.3 out of 5 stars (according to 100+ reviews)

Pricing : Free 30 day trial; plans from €9/month (around $10.41)

Compliance : Not fully GDPR-compliant

Integrations : Integrates with a code to any website. No third-party integrations available.

Main features : StatCounter helps you analyze traffic trends over time, track your paid traffic, and detect click fraud. 

The most popular features are: 

• Activity monitoring
• Pageview tracking
• Time on site tracking
• User interaction tracking
• Site search tracking
• Keyword tracking
• IP address monitoring

Possible pitfalls : StatCounter users mainly speak well of the tool. However, some of them find its free version’s functionality limited and slow, compared to its major competitor, Google Analytics.

Adobe Analytics

Description : Adobe Analytics is an analytics and multichannel data collection tool that is perfect for advanced users and larger companies. It helps you create a comprehensive view of your business by turning customer interactions into actionable insights.

G2 rating : 4.0 out of 5 stars (according to 770+ reviews)

Pricing : On request

Integrations : There is an opportunity to integrate source information from almost every channel for analysis. You can use Adobe Analytics for IoT, apps, social media, and much more . 

Main features : Adobe Analytics enables you to collect and measure data from multiple sources (web, email, campaigns, mobile devices, client-server applications, and most applications connected to the Internet), explore and understand this data with the help of advanced metrics, segmentation, and cross-device analytics; and get insights and predict users’ behavior; and much more. 

The most popular Adobe Analytics metrics are:

• Sessions — digital analytics
• Standard and custom event tracking

Possible pitfalls : The tool is one of the most expensive on the market. Also, some customers complained about its slow load speed, clunky UI, and not very timely and helpful support. Some users claimed it to be “a complicated platform that might be hard to use,” so this might not be the best choice for some small businesses and marketers that are not ready to devote much time to mastering complex tools.

Website Visitor Behavior Tracking Tools

Before you dive into visitor behavior tracking tool features, here’s a quick summary of the tools from this section. You can scroll down for detailed information about each application. 

Description : Hotjar provides insights that show how users behave and what they feel strongly about, so product creators can deliver real value to them.

G2 rating : 4.4 out of 5 stars (according to 200+ reviews)

Pricing : Free plan; paid plans start at $39/month.

Integrations : With a tracking ID, you can integrate Hotjar to any site, including the ones created with website builders like Boxmode. Hotjar also has integrations with Slack, Hubspot, Segment, Zapier, Google Optimize, Omniconvert, and Optimizely.

Main features : Hotjar can help in revealing your users’ online behavior. The tool can give you the full picture of how to improve your site’s UX, performance, and conversion rates.

The most popular Hotjar’s features include: 

• Session replays
• Data segmentation
• Click tracking
• Mouse movement
• Conversion 
• Side-by-side analysis
• Webpage element analysis

Possible pitfalls : If you have no experience in selling products or marketing, it can be hard to interpret the results (such as a website visitor tracking map) and decide how to rebuild your website’s content. Also, customers noticed that there is no way to track whether or not the same visitor watched a video twice.  

Description : Crazy Egg is a heat map web analytics product.

G2 rating : 4.2 out of 5 stars (according to 90+ reviews)

Pricing : Free 30-day trial for any plan; paid plans start at $24/month.

Integrations : You can integrate Crazy Egg into your website using a tracking code. It also integrates with Drupal, Google Tag Manager, Joomla, Magento, Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and more .

Main features : Crazy Egg’s heat maps, scroll maps, and other visual reports can show you exactly how your customers interact with your site’s elements. 

The most popular Crazy Egg’s features are: 

• Mouse movement 
• Frustration tracking

Possible pitfalls : Most of the tool’s clients are satisfied with the product. However, some customers complained about the unclear signing-up process, which automatically puts you on a yearly subscription instead of a monthly subscription. Also, it can be pricey if you have many visitors per month, as Crazy Egg offers page views-based pricing. 

VWO Insights

Description : VWO is an enterprise program for visitor behavior tracking and site optimization. VWO Insights product is a tool that highlights user experience bottlenecks so that you can frame your user experience problems and work on them.

G2 rating : 4.2 out of 5 stars (according to 45+ reviews)

Pricing : Free 30-day trial; paid plans upon request

Integrations : VWO integrates with various analytic tools (GA, Google Tag Manager, Mixpanel, and more), CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and CallTrackingMetrics), and ecommerce tools (Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce). 

Main features : VWO Insights combines heat maps, session recordings, on-page surveys, and more to diagnose problem areas in your visitors’ experiences. It also works very well combined with other VWO products, such as WVO Testing and WVO Plan.

The most popular VWO Insights’ features are: 

• Conversion opportunities
• Mobile device analysis
• Data quantification

Possible pitfalls : Some customers reported the tool’s navigation and user-experience issues.

Kissmetrics  

Description : Kissmetrics provides advanced analytics functionality for SaaS and ecommerce businesses. 

G2 rating : 4.0 out of 5 stars (according to 160+ reviews)

Pricing : 7-day free trial; paid plans start at $299/month (billed annually).

Compliance : GDPR

Integrations : Kissmetrics integrates with many tools, such as Mailchimp, VWO, Facebook Ads, WordPress, Shopify, and many others. View the full list .

Main features : Kissmetrics is a visitor tracking tool for websites of ecommerce brands and SaaS vendors. It offers behavioral analytics, segmentation, and email campaign automation. 

Its most popular metrics include: 

• Standard and custom events 
• Segmentation

Possible pitfalls : The tool can be pricey for small business owners. The main users’ complaints are about poor customer support, unfriendly UI, and lack of report automation.

Website Visitor Identification Tools

Below, you can find a comparison chart of the tools from this section. Full solution descriptions are, as usual, below the table.

Note: Due to many employees working remotely during COVID-19, these tools can show less accurate B2B tracking data. Also, finding contacts only works mostly for business email addresses, not for Gmail or other private email addresses.

Description : A lead intelligence software that helps companies find and engage with their ideal buyers via phone, email, and LinkedIn.

G2 rating : 4.7 out of 5 stars (according to 180+ reviews)

Integrations : Cognism integrates with many tools, such as Outreach, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Chrome, and many more. View the full list .

Main features : Cognism helps businesses find and engage with their prospects by providing premium company and contact information, including firmographics, technographics, sales trigger events, verified business emails, intent data, and phone-verified mobile numbers. 

The most popular Cognism features are: 

• Contact data availability
• Company data availability
• Industry research availability
• Contact data accuracy
• Company data accuracy

Possible pitfalls : Most of the tool’s clients are satisfied with the product. However, since it doesn’t offer a free trial, you may not fully understand the product from the demo. Also, some customers complained about outdated information about leads. 

Description : ZoomInfo offers a technology that provides an accurate, all-around view of customers, prospects, and opportunities.

G2 rating : 4.4 out of 5 stars (according to 5000+ reviews)

Pricing : 14-day free trial; paid plans upon request

Integrations : Zoominfo integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Outreach, SalesLoft, and Zoho.

Main features : ZoomInfo offers territory planning support, lead scoring, sales prospecting, targeted outreach, and more.

The most popular Zoominfo features are: 

Possible pitfalls : Some users reported the tool to be slow and to give sometimes  inaccurate data. Also, they mentioned problems with getting out of the Zoominfo contract. You have to cancel your subscription via email one month before your contract is set to renew; otherwise, they auto-renew it. 

Clearbit Enrichment

Description : A tool that helps you to automatically enrich leads with contact-level and firmographic data to power smarter lead scoring, lead routing, and more personalized email campaigns.

G2 rating : 4.4 out of 5 stars (according to 500+ reviews)

Pricing : Pricing is flexible and on request, based on your CRM database size, monthly web traffic, and monthly contact creation.

Integrations : Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, Segment, and more

Main features : Clearbit helps you know who is visiting your website, who you should target, and how to personalize campaigns while predicting churn before it happens.

The most popular Clearbit features are: 

• CRM integration
• Data cleaning/enrichment

Possible pitfalls : Some clients were unhappy with tracking results, claiming them to be outdated.  

Description : Leadfeeder is a tool that lets you identify your website visitors and helps you convert promising visitors into sales leads. It offers B2B website visitor tracking software that shows companies that have already visited your website, how they found you, and more.

G2 rating : 4.3 out of 5 stars (according to 500+ reviews)

Pricing : Free basic version (with limits); premium plan starts at $63 and has a 14-day free trial and can be downgraded to basic version after that.

Integrations : Leadfeeder integrates with many major platforms, such as Pipedrive, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Zoho, Zapier, GA, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, and more.

Main features : Leadfeeder provides identification and visitor tracking tools to help you determine and convert the leads. 

The most popular Leadfeeder’s features are:

Possible pitfalls : Leadfeeder customers say that free version features are very limited. 

Putting web visitor tracking to work

Today, brands bombard their consumers with more marketing messages than ever. However, these messages are not always accurate. As a result, consumers get irritated with the smallest signs of marketing campaigns or sales pitches. So, brands have to put even more effort into getting them converted.

But how do you know exactly what your consumers need? — For starters, get more out of what you’re currently doing.

Website visitor tracking tools help you deeply understand what you’re currently doing and enable you to guess your prospects’ needs before they’ve even initiated contact. After you find this out, you can get to optimizing your site and refining your marketing campaigns to boost conversions and create an amazing experience for visitors.

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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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10 Tools to Track Visitor Traffic on Your WordPress Website

Do you know what your target users do when they open your WordPress website ? What is their favorite page, and what are the articles that attract them to your blog?

You need to know who visits your website, where do the visitors come from, and what do they exactly do when they land on your WordPress site in real-time. This is where web analytics step in. Analytics play a vital role in determining whether your SEO and marketing campaigns bring relevant traffic to your website.

The more insights you collect about your visitors, the more you’ll recognize their behaviors and improve your WordPress website by optimizing it for a better conversion rate.

WordPress still doesn’t have built-in web analytics and it is likely that it won’t because there are lots of excellent plugins and tools that you can use to keep track of your web visits, user behavior, and more.

Following are 9 of the most popular tools that you can use to track visitor traffic on your WordPress website.

Google Analytics by Sumo

Google Analytics by Sumo makes it super easy to view your Google Analytics directly in the Sumo dashboard of your WordPress website. You don’t have to dig through your data to find the numbers that matter. Google Analytics by Sumo highlights your most important stats so you can easily go about how to measure website traffic.

• Clear Overview : You’ll get a nice overview of how your website performs from page views, users, session duration , bounce rate , and more.
• On-Page Analytics : You can see your stats directly on each page, shown only to you and you can also choose which critical stats you want to see on each page.
• Real-Time : GA by Sumo allows you to see which users are currently browsing your WordPress website, from where they came from and the pages that they click on in real-time.
• Popular Pages : You’ll get an overview of your most popular pages to see where your content performs well and where you need to make some adjustments.

Google Analytics by MonsterInsights

It provides you with amazing analytic tools and an intuitive interface. GA by MonsterInsights also provides you with a universal or asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code , can track search results, outbound links, and downloads, and it can even provide users with IP hiding for stricter privacy.

When you connect your GA and your WordPress website with MonsterInsights, you can see how your visitors find and use your website, and you’d know exactly how to track website traffic on WordPress.

• Easy Setup : With MonsterInsights, it’s easy to set up Google Analytics on your site without touching any code. If you can point-and-click, then you can use MonsterInsights.
• Real-Time : With MonsterInsights, you don’t have to wait until the next day to find out about traffic spikes or potential problems. You’ll get real-time stats, so you can unlock the maximum potential revenue for each customer .
• Universal Tracking : MonsterInsights uses universal tracking, so you can track your users across devices and platforms. With demographics and interest reports, you also get a better understanding of your audience.
• E-commerce/Ads Tracking : MonsterInsights’ E-commerce add-on helps you add Google Analytics E-commerce tracking to your WordPress WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads store.
• Custom Dimensions/Event Tracking : You can take full advantage of all the powerful Google Analytics features such as custom dimensions, file download tracking, outbound link tracking, events tracking, performance tracking, and more.

The premium version of the plugin gives you access to custom reports, 24/7 technical support, and also AdSense tracking .

It is an extremely customizable and adaptive plugin, and it gives its users complete tracking code control. That’s why it’s no wonder this plugin has become essential to some of the most successful business WordPress websites.

AFS Analytics

You’ll be able to analyze your visitor behavior and understand what it takes to improve your website content . An Automated Event Tracking included too, that tracks everything from clicks, downloads, video views, form access, and submissions, scroll depths, etc.

The AFC Web Analytics tool provides you with two real-time reports that are constantly updated. The real-time dashboard displays your website metrics on a single page, and the “Right now” report allows you to monitor the current activity on your website.

This plugin also comes with an algorithm that is capable of recovering in real-time the keywords used by each visitor. Thanks to artificial intelligence, prediction is getting more accurate and powerful over time. The algorithm captures the data from your website but also from your Google Search Console account via an API.

This plugin also helps you track real-time events on your WordPress site and allows you to build user retention by sending push-notifications and emails.

Jetpack by WordPress

This plugin will help you to track your most successful posts, visitor’s peak traffic times and timelines of the users’ visits. It also provides you with website monitoring options and mobile optimization services that are aimed to attract more traffic to your WordPress website.

Along with web visitor insights, Jetpack is also excellent if you want to secure your WordPress site from brute force attacks and also provides you with useful customizing tools for your site, like galleries and notifications. You can also customize the whole website with options like:

• Infinite Scroll
• Sidebar Widgets
• Tiled Galleries and more.

One thing to keep in mind about Jetpack is that it can only be run on a WordPress.com account , which is not the case with the free WordPress.org software.

Jetpack is a plugin that is created by Automattic and its features were originally developed for WordPress.com users. For example, if you use the Jetpack content delivery network (CDN), it will host your files on WordPress.com servers. That means that you’ll need a WordPress.com account to access that infrastructure in the same way that WordPress.com users do.

WD Google Analytics

A versatile and user-friendly WordPress website tracking plugin that can help you bring your Google Analytics dashboard to your WordPress dashboard. This plugin will help you get up to date reports on how your website performs, compare metrics , track users, and monitor targeted user activities.

In addition to the built-in Analytics reports, Google Analytics WD lets you obtain custom reports on various metrics and dimensions, as well as providing you with eCommerce, AdSense, and AdWords report. These reports come in comprehensive charts with the possibility to export in PDF or CSV formats.

Google Analytics WD is a tool that is a certified member of the Google Analytics Technology Partners Program , so its faultless performance is guaranteed.

This plugin also allows you to set and manage goals to track user interactions on your website, such as duration, destination, and pages per session, each of the goals coming with their own set of options to choose. You can set as many goals as you want.

The premium version of Google Analytics WD offers the following additional features:

• Analytics reports on Demographics, Interests, Geo, Behavior, Technology, Mobile, Site content, Site Speed, Events, Goals.
• Tracking Custom Dimensions: Logged in, Post type, Author, Category, Tags, Published Month, Published Year.
• Custom Reports with any possible configurations of metric and dimension.
• Six E-commerce tracking reports based on Time to Purchase, Transaction ID, Sales Performance, Product SKU, Product Category, Product Name.
• Link and track your Google AdSense and Google AdWords accounts.
• Alerts and Pushover notifications to monitor any changes in your website traffic.
• Set tracking exclusions based on WordPress roles and users.

WP Power Stats

The light-weightiness of this plugin makes it fast, secure, and reliable. The highly-customizable settings will help you in fine-tuning your visitor tracking. Some of the top features of WP Power Stats are:

• Multiple languages
• One-click install
• Fully customizable plugin
• Private statistics on your hosting
• Keeping track of page views, referral traffic, devices that the users visit from, operating system, location and much more

Kissmetrics

Even though it provides users with no overall website traffic data, by providing you with insights about individual visitors, you’ll know how your page performs and when it is the time to optimize in order to increase your conversion rate.

This is generally an optimization plugin, but it has successfully evolved into an excellent tool for web traffic analysis . ExtraWatch includes optimization options such as direct site editing, and also provides daily and weekly stats in preferred forms.

This plugin will provide you with access to monitoring visitor behavior, time spent on website and reports when visitors leave the site. ExtraWatch also allows “bad words” blocking, which helps you in blocking specific IP addresses.

Site Kit by Google

Site Kit allows its users to integrate Google Analytics with the WordPress site. The tool is owned by Google and is specifically built for WordPress site owners who want to track user activity and overall traffic. Site managers can view their traffic by going to the provided dashboard without having to leave the WordPress dashboard.

Site Kit provides solutions for managing and deploying other Google tools for better website supervision. The said tool supports the following Google products:

• Search Console
• Tag Manager
• PageSpeed Insights

The Site Kit tool is completely free to use, easy-to-manage, and can be set up in a matter of minutes.

Wrapping Up

Above all, the choice of a tracking plugin for your WordPress website needs to be done according to your goals and needs. If you want just to track the amount of traffic, you can choose each of the tools above to support your analytics. If you want to dig deeper into data, some solutions and premium versions are better than others on the list.

In essence, each of the plugins serves the same goal – collecting data about your website visits. Whatever data you get, you need to use the insights to continuously test, adjust, and improve your WordPress site to scale it for more visits and better conversion rate .

If you already use some of the tools above or are considering using them and have additional questions, the DevriX team is here to help you out.

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Our marketing experts specialize in the complete spectrum of inbound marketing strategies. As an accredited HubSpot Agency Partner and a Semrush Partner, we engage in meticulous research, blending our extensive experience with the unique insights of our highly skilled team.

We set benchmarks in content creation by incorporating cutting-edge marketing trends, leveraging in-depth industry research, and utilizing state-of-the-art AI tools for data segmentation and captivating content hooks. Our proficiency extends across a diverse range of sectors, including working with SMEs, Fortune 1000 companies, global B2B brands, major publishing entities, WooCommerce platforms, business directories, and affiliate networks.

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You Can Visit the World’s Largest Continuous Dinosaur Trackway, Now on Protected Public Land

In the Late Jurassic, a long-necked dinosaur made a 270-degree turn while walking in present-day Colorado—and left behind a rare treat for paleontologists

Daily Correspondent

Roughly 150 million years ago, a long-necked dinosaur tromped through present-day Colorado. At some point, the creature decided to change direction, making a wide, 270-degree turn as it walked.

Today, the sauropod’s 134 consecutive footprints—created during the Late Jurassic period—make up the largest continuous dinosaur trackway on the planet. And now, they’re federally protected for researchers and the public to access.

Last week, the United States Forest Service announced it purchased three parcels of land in Ouray County, Colorado. Two of the parcels—which together total 27 acres—encompass the 106 yards of sauropod tracks, known as the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Track site.

The footprints are located just west of Ouray, a small town in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado with a population of around 1,000 residents.

Imprinted in sandstone roughly 9,300 feet above sea level, the fossilized tracks form one of the few known examples of a dinosaur changing direction so significantly. Only five other instances have been discovered—four trackways in China and one near Moab, Utah. (The Utah site, called Copper Ridge Dinosaur Trackway, is on Bureau of Land Management land.) But this newly protected site is the only intact example of a turn greater than 180 degrees.

In 1945, the Charles family purchased the land in hopes of discovering gold. They knew about pothole-like features on the property, where they’d spent parts of their summers camping. But it wasn’t until 2021 that they realized the shallow indentations, which often filled with water, had been made by a dinosaur.

“The Charles family kids grew up thinking the strange blob-shaped impressions in the rock at their mining property above Ouray were just convenient dents holding water,” writes Erin McIntyre for the Ouray County Plaindealer . “The convenient part came from not having to haul water for their dogs, who trekked up the mountain with them each summer.”

In 2022, the family approached the Forest Service and asked if the federal agency would be interested in purchasing the land. Now, two years later, the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests bought the land from the Charles Real Estate Trust for $135,000, reports the Denver Post ’s Tiney Ricciardi. The agency used money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund , which was created by Congress in 1964 and is funded with oil and gas royalties.

Members of the public will be able to access the footprints along the existing Silvershield Trail, a steep, two-mile route (one way) that gains about 1,600 feet in elevation from start to finish and is open to hikers and horseback riders. Now, the Forest Service hopes to install signage and interpretive information at the site, as well as create a web page that explains the sauropod footprints’ significance.

Sauropods were a group of massive, four-legged creatures with long necks and tails. These herbivores were the largest of all dinosaurs and could grow up to about 100 feet long. At the time they roamed in what is now Colorado, the towering peaks of the Rockies (of which the San Juans are a sub-range) hadn’t been pushed up toward the sky yet.

“It’s amazing to think that, with the Rocky Mountain uplift in the later part of Mesozoic Age of dinosaurs, that dinosaur trackway layer was lifted up some 7,000 [or] 8,000 feet in elevation, and then glaciers came in few thousand years ago and scraped off all the overburden above this trackway, that somehow miraculously became preserved in sandstone to begin with,” says Bruce Schumacher , a senior paleontologist with the Forest Service, to the Denver Post . “It’s this amazing geologic story.”

Though the tracks were previously on private land, visitors could walk the surrounding public trails of the Uncompahgre National Forest. Over time, as parts of the tracks became exposed, people snapped photos and posted them online, but they did not reveal the exact location, according to a 2021 paper about the site. The footprints are even visible on Google Earth.

Local residents likely knew about the tracks much earlier. Rick Trujillo, one of the paper’s co-authors and a resident of the town of Ouray, “discovered [the tracks] as a youngster in the late 1950s when the track-bearing surface was mostly covered.” But he assumed they were on public land, even when he later became a geologist, per the  Ouray County Plaindealer . Ultimately, Trujillo informed the Charles family of the tracks’ significance, once he learned they owned the property.

“The family is happy to offer this unique trackway to the U.S. Forest Service, ensuring that the land is protected and enjoyed by future generations,” says Anita McDonald, whose grandfather originally purchased the land, in the statement.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.

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John McWhorter

I’m a columbia professor. the protests on my campus are not justice..

By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4'33",” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.

I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza war would view them that way. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

I understand this to a point. Pro-Palestinian rallies and events, of which there have been many here over the years, are not in and of themselves hostile to Jewish students, faculty and staff members. Disagreement will not always be a juice and cookies affair. However, the relentless assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what any people should be expected to bear up under, regardless of their whiteness, privilege or power.

Social media discussion has been claiming that the protests are peaceful. They are, some of the time . It varies by location and day; generally what goes on within the campus gates is somewhat less strident than what happens just outside them. But relatively constant are the drumbeats. People will differ on how peaceful that sound can ever be, just as they will differ on the nature of antisemitism. What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say, anti-Black, even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying “All lives matter.”

And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an Israeli Arab activist is roughed up on Broadway, when the angry chanting becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying members of Hamas as heroes. The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.

I understand that the protesters and their fellow travelers feel that all of this is the proper response, social justice on the march. They have been told that righteousness means placing the battle against whiteness and its power front and center, contesting the abuse of power by any means necessary. And I think the war on Gaza is no longer constructive or even coherent.

However, the issues are complex, in ways that this uncompromising brand of power battling is ill suited to address. Legitimate questions remain about the definition of genocide, about the extent of a nation’s right to defend itself and about the justice of partition (which has not historically been limited to Palestine). There is a reason many consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the most morally challenging in the modern world.

When I was at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, the protests were against investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. There were similarities with the Columbia protests now: A large group of students established an encampment site right in front of the Rutgers student center on College Avenue, where dozens slept every night for several weeks. Among the largely white crowd, participation was a badge of civic commitment. There was chanting, along with the street theater inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, to effective protest; one guy even lay down in the middle of College Avenue to block traffic, taking a page from the Vietnam protests.

I don’t recall South Africans on campus feeling personally targeted, but the bigger difference was that though the protesters sought to make their point at high volume, over a long period and sometimes even rudely, they did not seek to all but shut down campus life.

On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

John McWhorter ( @JohnHMcWhorter ) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “ Nine Nasty Words : English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “ Woke Racism : How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @ JohnHMcWhorter

Tupac's estate threatens to sue Drake over diss track using what appears to be late rapper's AI-generated voice

Tupac Shakur’s estate is threatening to sue Drake over his recent Kendrick Lamar diss track, calling what appears to be the use of an artificial intelligence-generated version of the late rapper’s voice a “blatant abuse” of his legacy.

Drake released the track, “Taylor Made Freestyle,” on his Instagram page Friday, using AI software to generate verses emulating both Shakur and Snoop Dogg.

In a cease-and-desist letter Wednesday, Howard King, an attorney who represents Shakur’s estate, requested that Drake remove the track from all platforms where it is publicly available. 

Drake, whose legal name is Aubrey Drake Graham, has until noon Thursday to confirm his cooperation. Otherwise, the estate will “pursue all of its legal remedies” against him, according to the letter, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News.

“Taylor Made Freestyle,” which is not yet on streaming services, is Drake’s latest diss track against Lamar amid their feud.  

“Not only is the record a flagrant violation of Tupac’s publicity and the estate’s legal rights, it is also a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time,” King wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Billboard . “The Estate would never have given its approval for this use.”

A representative for Shakur’s estate had no additional comment. A representative for Drake declined to comment.

The letter warned that Drake’s nonconsensual use of Shakur’s likeness violates Shakur’s right to publicity, an intellectual property right protecting against the misappropriation of somebody’s name or image.

The track and its popularity have created the “false impression that the Estate and Tupac promote or endorse the lyrics for the sound-alike,” the letter states. 

Shakur’s estate seeks damages including all profits from the record, as well as additional damages for substantial economic and reputational harm caused.

“The unauthorized, equally dismaying use of Tupac’s voice against Kendrick Lamar, a good friend to the Estate who has given nothing but respect to Tupac and his legacy publicly and privately, compounds the insult,” King wrote in the letter.

The track was released about a month after Lamar took shots at Drake and fellow rapper J. Cole in a guest verse on the song “Like That” by rapper Future and producer Metro Boomin. His fiery verse stirred fan speculation about whether Drake would respond. 

Drake fired back last week with his song “Push Ups” before he quickly followed up with “Taylor Made Freestyle” as a second diss track.

“Kendrick, we need ya, the West Coast savior / Engraving your name in some hip-hop history / If you deal with this viciously / You seem a little nervous about all the publicity,” the AI-generated voice of Shakur raps in the song.

Snoop Dogg’s AI-generated voice then joins in, taking over the second verse.

“’Cause right now it’s looking like you writin’ out the game plan on how to lose / How to bark up the wrong tree and then get your head popped in a crowded room,” the voice raps. “World is watching this chess game, but are you out of moves?”

A representative for Snoop Dogg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The explosion of AI tools has brought up a slew of ethical questions for the music industry as it becomes easier than ever before to generate new music. Users can easily create their own renditions of songs using AI versions of real artists’ voices.

More than 200 artists signed an open letter this month calling on AI developers, tech companies and digital music services to pledge not to use AI in ways that “undermine or replace the human artistry of songwriters and artists.”

As part of the cease-and-desist letter, King referred to “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song that featured unauthorized AI emulations of Drake that was taken down from streaming services last year after it went viral. 

“Even more recently, no doubt with your approval and possibly even at your request, your record label took down a well-publicized AI imitation of you and the Weeknd with a great deal of news coverage highlighting how damaging the fake was to you,” King wrote.

Angela Yang is a culture and trends reporter for NBC News.

Diana Dasrath is entertainment producer and senior reporter for NBC News covering all platforms.