7 Tools for Tracking Visitor Behavior On Your Website
In the competitive world of online business, understanding visitor behavior is pivotal for success. Industry leaders like digital marketers and CEOs have shared their favorite tools for tracking user engagement. The discussion kicks off with insights from a digital marketer advocating for Google Analytics and Fathom, culminating in a web analyst who believes in a multi-tool approach for holistic tracking. This comprehensive guide features seven expert insights on the most recommended tools to optimize website performance.
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Utilize Google Analytics and Fathom
I run Google Analytics on all sites due to its usefulness and price (free), but for sites where cookie compliance is necessary, I also set up Fathom Analytics. The tool does not give you the depth and visibility of GA, but its main positive is that it is cookie-compliant and does not require the user to accept cookies.
So, for any client operating in Europe or California in the States, Fathom does not need users to agree to your cookie policy to be tracked. This means that you see 100% of the traffic that comes to the site, giving you an actual true view of visitor numbers.
The other main benefit it has over GA is that it updates in real-time, allowing you to react more quickly to changes in traffic. GA shows you the last 30 minutes of traffic, but for more than that you have to wait 24-48 hours to get a full picture.
Mike Espie, Digital Marketer, mikeespie.com
Track User Interactions with Crazy Egg
We use Crazy Egg to track visitor behavior on our website, as it provides unique visual insights through heat maps and scroll maps. This tool allows us to see exactly where users click and how far they scroll, helping us understand their interactions with our content. For example, during a recent promotion for our zero-waste products, Crazy Egg revealed that visitors were engaging heavily with a specific product feature but were not clicking through to the purchase page.
We used this information to redesign our product pages, enhancing visibility for the purchase button and streamlining the user journey. As a result, we experienced a 27% increase in conversions within a few weeks. Crazy Egg’s ability to provide clear, actionable insights has been invaluable for improving our website’s user experience and maximizing the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns, allowing us to better connect with our audience while promoting our eco-friendly mission.
Chaitsi Ahuja, Founder & CEO, Brown Living
Optimize User Engagement with Mixpanel
We use Mixpanel for its powerful AI-driven analytics. It’s been invaluable in helping us understand user behavior and optimize our productivity platform. The real-time data and customizable dashboards have significantly improved our decision-making process, leading to a 30% increase in user engagement.
Gain Insights with Hotjar
Our understanding of visitor behavior on our website underwent a significant transformation with the integration of Hotjar into our analytics toolkit. Here’s a story that illustrates the impact this tool had on our strategy.
A few months ago, we faced a challenge: one of our key landing pages was underperforming, with a higher-than-expected bounce rate and lower conversions. Despite several rounds of A/B testing and content adjustments, the issue persisted, leaving us puzzled. We needed deeper insights into user behavior.
That’s when we turned to Hotjar. By deploying Hotjar’s heatmaps, we immediately gained visual insights into user interaction patterns. It became evident that visitors were not engaging with the call-to-action (CTA) button as we had expected. The heatmaps showed users’ attention was predominantly drawn to a visually striking image further down the page, rather than the top-section CTA we assumed was the focal point.
Intrigued by these insights, we explored Hotjar’s session recordings. Watching real user journeys revealed that many visitors scrolled past the introductory content without engaging, seemingly searching for more detailed information before committing to the CTA. This was a pivotal moment—realizing the page layout and content hierarchy weren’t aligning with user expectations.
Armed with these insights, we restructured the page. We repositioned the CTA closer to the content that captured the most attention and added concise, compelling information to guide users more effectively. Additionally, we utilized Hotjar’s feedback polls to directly ask visitors about their experience, gathering qualitative insights that informed further refinements.
The results were significant. Within weeks, the bounce rate decreased, and conversions improved noticeably. This experience highlighted the power of truly understanding user behavior to drive strategic changes.
Through Hotjar, we learned that combining quantitative data with qualitative feedback can reshape how we approach user experience. It transformed not just that one landing page but our overall methodology for designing user-centric digital experiences. This tool continues to be invaluable in our quest to optimize our website and ensure it meets user needs effectively.
Josh Matthews, Director, LogicLeap
Leverage Clarity for User Behavior
Clarity is the way to go! Microsoft’s Clarity literally records users on your website. You can watch them click about and tap into different menus, and see where they are hesitating or where they are reading.
Google Analytics has become utterly useless. They have complicated it so much that people in the industry even hate it. I personally use a mix of Clarity and my own custom software.
Clarity is actually not new. Most European marketing agencies already know that Yandex actually had this tech a long time ago, and it did a great job.
Selim Karaaslan, Website Speed Specialist, Web V8
Recommend Google Analytics for Comprehensive Data
I use Google Analytics to track visitor behavior on my website, and I highly recommend it for several reasons. A key benefit is the comprehensive data it provides. Google Analytics offers detailed reports on traffic sources, user demographics, and device types, helping businesses like mine understand where visitors come from, how they interact with the site, and what content engages them most.
Another reason I recommend it is its ability to track goals and conversions. I can set specific goals like newsletter sign-ups or purchases, and Google Analytics tracks completion rates. This helps measure marketing effectiveness and optimize the user experience to increase conversions.
Real-time tracking is another stand-out feature, especially for monitoring the immediate impact of promotional campaigns or social media posts. I can see how many people are on the site and what pages they are viewing in real-time, which allows for quick adjustments.
Additionally, Google Analytics integrates seamlessly with other Google tools like Google Ads and Search Console, offering a unified view of marketing efforts across channels. It categorizes traffic from organic search, paid search, referrals, and social media, making it easy to assess each channel’s effectiveness.
Customization is another strength. Google Analytics allows for creating custom dashboards tailored to business needs, such as focusing on mobile-user behavior. This flexibility makes it adaptable to any business.
Finally, Google Analytics is free, which is a big advantage, especially for small businesses. Despite being free, it offers robust tools for tracking insights, and the paid version, Google Analytics 360, provides advanced features for growing businesses.
In summary, I recommend Google Analytics for its detailed data tracking, real-time capabilities, seamless integration, customizable options, and affordability. These features make it an invaluable
.
Stephen Osmond, Owner, Involve Media
Combine Multiple Tools for Holistic Tracking
To effectively track visitors’ behavior on websites, we rely on a suite of tools that provide both quantitative and qualitative insights, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of user interactions.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is our primary tool for capturing quantitative data. It provides a robust overview of traffic patterns, user demographics, and on-site behavior with event-based data collection. For each website (business), we create a unique set of custom events that represent different user journeys.
By integrating GA4 with BigQuery for raw data export, we gain the ability to conduct deeper, custom analyses, ensuring that all stakeholders have access to granular insights. This setup also helps maintain a unified source of truth for all our analytics.
For qualitative data, which provides a more user-centric view, we use HotJar and Microsoft Clarity. These tools offer session recordings, heatmaps, and user feedback, helping us understand how visitors interact with various elements on the site. HotJar, with its intuitive heatmaps, session recordings, and user feedback surveys, allows us to capture user intent and pain points. We build user paths and funnels to analyze them and look for any bottlenecks and friction points. Microsoft Clarity offers additional insights into user sessions with features like click maps and dead-click detection.
Finally, we rely on New Relic for performance monitoring. While primarily focused on site performance, its ability to correlate user experience with technical issues gives us a holistic view of how speed and uptime affect user behavior and engagement.
By combining these tools, we cover the full spectrum of visitor behavior—from high-level trends to specific user interactions. This multi-tool approach ensures that we are data-driven in our decision-making while also being agile in identifying and addressing user experience issues.
Karol Wilczyński, Web Analyst, Vaimo
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