10 website analysis tools to audit your site

Building a website is the first step for a business entering the internet. But that is not enough. To hold your ground in the market, compete with rivals and maximize revenue, you need to keep monitoring and caring for your website, or turn to a full website management service so it grows in the right direction.

Whatever your website is about and whatever your growth strategy, you need to know what works, what does not and what can be improved. Using website analytics tools is the best way to get the results you want. In this article, MONA Media introduces the top 10 website analytics tools available today.

What is website analysis?

Website analysis (website analytics) is the collection, measurement and reporting of web activity and data, so administrators have the numbers to analyze, assess and optimize website performance.

Specifically, it helps you find key metrics such as total or per-page traffic, where visitors are located, their activity and time on the page, the content they like, and more.

With that, you know exactly what your customers and readers care about, where your potential audience is concentrated, which content converts well, and so on. From there you can set a suitable marketing strategy and make the right changes so your website becomes more appealing and gives users the best experience.

Top 10 website analysis tools

There are many tools for analyzing and evaluating websites on the market. Each has its own set of features and strengths. Below are the 10 best web analytics tools by use case, suited to different kinds of users.

1. Google Analytics: free and fits every need

Google Analytics is a website analytics tool developed by Google. Even the free version offers many useful, necessary features, which is why it is the most widely used web analytics tool in the world.

Besides showing key figures such as traffic, bounce rate, time on page and useful visitor information, Google Analytics also integrates with other Google services such as Google Adwords, Google AdSense and the A/B testing tool Google Optimize. This online website evaluation tool also lets you connect third-party software for more effective analysis.

Overall, it is the best website evaluation tool for individuals and small and medium businesses. It suits almost every kind of website, has a friendly interface, full Vietnamese support, integrates with many web platforms, and above all: most widely used.

When something is popular, it is easy to find related material online. That matters, because a tool alone is not enough: you need to know how to use it well to get positive results for your project.

2. Clicky: a good alternative to Google Analytics at a lower price

Clicky is a website analytics tool comparable to Google Analytics in its free version. The paid versions of the two offer somewhat different features, but overall Clicky costs less.

Users often choose Clicky because it is easy to install, with plugins for many CMSs such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

Standout features of the paid version of Clicky include basic heatmaps, video analytics and especially “spy”, which monitors visitor actions in real time. With “spy” you get practical data on how people move around your website. That helps you understand user behavior better and improve design and content to raise your conversion rate.

Objectively, the interface of Clicky is rather dated. In return, it has plenty of interesting features at an affordable price. That is why, after many years, it is still a good alternative to Google Analytics for individuals and small businesses.

3. SEMrush: marketing support from A to Z

With more than 40 tools in total, SEMrush is an all-in-one solution for any business or individual who wants to build a professional website, especially on the marketing side.

From content marketing, market research and social media promotion to everything related to advertising, SEMrush has in-depth analysis and support tools. Among them, SEO is the standout feature and the best known among users worldwide.

To speed up the process of learning how to do SEO well, Semrush offers very useful features such as keyword research, backlink management, rank tracking, checking SEO Onpage and above all, competitor website analysis.

You can measure traffic, research rankings, find keyword and backlink gaps, and analyze your competitors' backlinks. From that you can study your rivals' marketing tactics and plan a sound strategy to win higher rankings on search engines.

SEMrush also has tools for optimizing local SEO (local SEO), a form of SEO that is extremely useful for travel websites and restaurant and hotel websites.

With 3 plans serving different marketing purposes and different users, from freelancers and bloggers to e-commerce projects and large businesses, SEMrush deserves its place as one of the most widely chosen marketing platforms today.

4. Ahrefs: focused on SEO

Ahrefs is an excellent web analytics tool for effective SEO. Nobody working in professional SEO service has not heard of Ahrefs. If SEMrush is strong in marketing in general and competitor tracking in particular, Ahrefs is best known for its excellent backlink analysis.

Comparing itself to SEMrush, Ahrefs lists 8 features that only it has, such as:

• Unique metrics for keywords.
• Finding backlink opportunities on high-traffic pages.
• Researching content and finding promising links with Content Explorer.
• Comparing a website's current and past rankings.
• Analyzing and monitoring the external (outbound) links on your website.
• Viewing traffic for specific pages.
• Checking a website's ranking history for any keyword.
• Researching and automating internal links.

Ahrefs is a measurement toolkit that lets users work every angle of SEO to optimize their website. That is why using its full feature set is not cheap. But if you are serious about investing in SEO, Ahrefs will not let you down as a powerful aid on any SEO project.

5. Hotjar: behavior tracking combined with feedback

Hotjar, a website measurement tool Hotjar is best known for tracking customer behavior through heatmaps and session recordings, combined with a useful set of feedback features.

The feedback features are what set Hotjar apart. With them you can ask visitors why they did not take an action, such as clicking buy or signing up. If someone is filling in a form and stops, you can ask right away. If they are about to leave the page, you can ask why. These survey pop-ups appear automatically based on what Hotjar picks up from tracking customer behavior.

You can of course keep them in a fixed position or set them to show under other conditions. Hotjar also offers many display styles for different types of websites and needs.

Hotjar is an effective website analytics tool for improving UX and raising conversion rates. Knowing how customers behave and being able to ask for their opinions makes it much easier to change content and design to match what they like. You can then improve conversion rates in many ways, especially the order rate on online stores and e-commerce sites.

6. Crazy Egg: detailed research on user behavior

As one of the services supporting A/B testing, Crazy Egg is a professional, long-established website analytics tool, trusted by many SEO specialists users and widely used.

Crazy Egg's standout feature is Snapshot, a set of the following report types:

• Heatmap Report: Shows the areas of the page that get the most clicks.
• Scrollmap Report: Shows how far users scroll on each visit.
• Confetti Report: Shows individual clicks, which you can filter by conditions such as time on page, location, operating system, new or returning visitors, visitors from Google or Facebook, and more.
• Overlay Report: shows the percentage of clicks on every element of the page.
• List Report: gives an overview of the number of clicks on the elements of your website.

Of these report types, Confetti is a feature exclusive to Crazy Egg. In detail, the Confetti Report gives you 22 different filters for analyzing your data. Crazy Egg's Overlay Report is similar. Viewing data by the context of each click gives you a more specific, clearer picture of your customers, so you can change your website to fit what they like.

Overall, Crazy Egg is the most suitable web analytics tool for mid-level and senior marketers. It lets you understand your customers to improve your product and optimize conversion rates, with A/B testing built in.

7. Parse.ly: effective content marketing

Acquired by Automattic, the company behind the well-known CMS WordPress, in February 2021, Parse.ly is a platform designed specifically to measure content performance.

Older website analytics tools usually judge content performance by how long users keep a page open, mainly by measuring bounce rate.

Parse.ly is different: it uses a feature called “heartbeat” to tell whether users are actually engaging with the page. Many people open a tab and leave it there without reading. The “heartbeat” feature confirms two things:

• The tab with your content is open
• They are actually viewing the page (detected through mouse movement, scrolling, clicks and so on)

This gives you more accurate numbers for analyzing and developing your content in the right direction.

Parse.ly also collects data from social networks, search engines, visitors' operating systems and other platforms such as Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP, giving you a clearer view of each type of content so you know where to focus and what to improve.

If you use WordPress, integrating Parse.ly will bring even more benefits to your content marketing. According to Automattic's acquisition announcement, they plan to enrich the experience of all WordPress users who use the Parse.ly analytics tool.

8. Mixpanel: best for web applications

Mixpanel Colocation is a SEO tools is a powerful tool for analyzing websites, especially web applications and even mobile apps. It lets you capture user data on how people interact with your product or website.

Instead of collecting data based on page views and browser sessions, Mixpanel works on a model called “event-based tracking”. An event is a moment when a user interacts with your product. It can also be a series of interactions.

For example: When a customer buys bubble tea on your website, when a user signs up for a new account, when someone downloads a video or plays a song, and so on: each specific action a user takes counts as an event. Events also carry related properties such as price and product type.

Mixpanel also gives you detailed information on each individual user or customer so you understand their behavior. It shows in-depth but clear, visual reports that are easy to analyze. With that data you can choose the right ways to improve engagement on your website or product and drive revenue.

9. Finteza: advanced website evaluation and effective ad campaigns

Finteza is an “all-in-one” website analytics platform with many in-depth evaluation tools. It supports more than 50 CMSs and various SDKs, so administrators can install and use it easily.

Finteza has two unique strengths compared with its competitors:

• Finteza helps you identify “real” visits by recognizing up to 12 types of bad traffic, such as visits from bots or from hackers and spammers. Finteza also helps you spot traffic that comes through proxies or VPNs.
• Finteza has its own ad system with technology that gets past most ad blockers. Ads therefore have a better chance of collecting more clicks, and ad sellers earn more.

Finteza also offers other useful features such as page analysis, customer analysis, sales funnels and website performance measurement. For customer analysis, Finteza shows up to 15 types of reports to help you analyze your audience from different angles.

If you want an “all-in-one” solution, you can use Finteza. It is an interesting platform that helps you optimize your conversion rate with in-depth statistics. Finteza suits many kinds of websites, especially online stores, small and medium businesses, and bloggers who want to place ads on their pages for extra income.

10. Matomo: for those who prefer open source

Matomo (formerly Piwik) is the best website analytics tool for those who value privacy and prefer open-source software. Matomo is also an “all-in-one” platform, with over 70 plugin that help you customize reports to track and evaluate your website effectively.

Like Finteza, Matomo offers many useful features: conversion funnels, heatmaps, A/B testing, form analytics, video and audio evaluation, SEO features, website performance measurement and more.

Because Matomo is open source, you get the following benefits:

• Full control of your data and information.
• Freedom to customize the platform to any need.
• Matomo is 100% free if you install it on your own server. Your server can be shared hosting, SEO hosting or a VPS.

You can look at the best hosting providers in Vietnam to choose the hosting that fits your project.

Don't stop at writing posts and optimizing on-page, then “leave it to drift”. Watch Huy's video on how to track SEO metrics so you know when to hold and when to change course.

Why not combine different website analysis tools?

After the 10 tools MONA has picked out above, you can probably see that each has its own strengths. So you can combine a few of them for the best results.

Example: You can use Google Analytics to analyze your website and Hotjar to understand specific user behavior, or use Crazy Egg together with Parse.ly to improve your content marketing.

Semrush and Ahrefs are also two “standalone” tools. In most cases you do not need to install them on your website, so you can use them alongside any other website analytics tool.

That covers the That covers the top 10 quality website analytics tools and the most popular ones today. Depending on the needs, goals, business model and budget of your company or yourself, consider your options and choose the tool, or combination of tools, that works best. We hope the information MONA shared above is useful to you. If you want to optimize your whole website with MONA's SEO service, contact us and we will send you our SEO price list right away.

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