Looking for an alternative (or addition) to Google Analytics?
Maybe you’re concerned about privacy.
Maybe you’re overwhelmed by how to use Analytics.
Maybe you just like trying new tools.
In any case, read on to see if something else suits your needs.
These tools may not be able to offer all of the functionality of Google Analytics but hey, maybe you don’t need it all anyway. All of them also offer a free trial or free plan.
1. Matomo
Matomo, formerly Piwik, lets you import historic Google Analytics data and serves as a full-service web analytics tool.
It provides you with heatmaps, A/B testing, funnels and goals, and many other conversion optimization features.
Their tagline is “Ethical Analytics, Powerful Insights” and they promise 100% data ownership and user privacy protection.
There is the ability to host Matomo on your own servers if you’re worried about sensitive data but they also offer cloud-based hosting on servers located in France.
While it’s not yet available at the time of this writing, there are planned integrations with Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads. There are also no data limits with Matomo.
There is a free trial with prices for the product starting at $19 a month for lite use and custom quotes for enterprise use.
2. Woopra
Woopra is a tool providing information for product, marketing, sales, and support teams as it tracks users throughout their experience on the site.
It has custom tracking capabilities and more than 50 integrations with products such as Salesforce, Google Ads, Google Drive, Hubspot, and Campaign Monitor.
It can also do real-time, on-the-fly things like sending a message to a sales Slack channel right when a new user signs up.
There is a free trial and a free plan with more robust plans starting at $999 a month.
3. GoSquared
GoSquared provides analytics and a live chat to help boost sales. You can check the browsing activity that led a user to your site, and, if they give you their email address, see more of their social activity.
You can purchase just the Analytics or Live Chat or combine them into their Suite package, with pricing starting at $79 monthly for the suite.
GoSquared also offers a Customer Data Hub and Automation for SaaS businesses. To use the software you have to install Javascript code on your site.
It has integrations with Salesforce, Slack, Zapier, Twitter, Drip, and more. Both the Analytics and Live Chat modules have a small free plan.
4. FoxMetrics
FoxMetrics stores your raw data in a “data warehouse” that you have access to, with the ability to generate reports via SQL.
With the ability to use SQL to access your data, you can create specific queries to give you the exact information you want in various scenarios and not be tied down to the usual offered reporting.
You can either use the FoxMetrics’ Javascript library or use a product called Segment to grab the data you need.
This product allows ecommerce companies to do all the usual (track and segment customers, analyze cart abandonment, etc) but it also helps optimize popups and customer site surveys.
They offer a two-week free trial with monthly service starting at $450.
5. Mixpanel
Mixpanel lets you dive deep into user behavior.
You can:
- “Nudge” users with messages based on real-time set behaviors.
- Analyze predictive data models to see which users are more likely to convert.
- Get notified when specific metrics change alongside information about the users causing those changes.
There is a free package with the next level package starting at $779 a year.
6. Heap
Heap is a tool that may be best summed up from a quote on its site from one of their users: “To me, Heap is to Product Managers what Google Analytics is to Marketers.”
As more of a product analytics tool, Heap is designed to give data about products and how customers interact with them.
There is a free trial and a free limited-use plan with all other plans requiring a custom quote.
7. StatCounter
StatCounter is a web analytics tool that also can detect click fraud for paid ads. It also notifies you when a critical visitor returns to the site.
With this tool, you can watch the entire user journey and identify possible issues with navigation, site structure, and flow.
You can also look at how users are interacting with your content. They offer a 30-day free trial.
8. Chartbeat
Chartbeat is a “content intelligence platform” geared toward helping large sites who tend to get over 5 million monthly pageviews with identifying their best readers and understanding how they interact with your content.
It integrates with Facebook Instant Articles and offers offsite social monitoring through Facebook’s CrowdTangle.
It has a video dashboard as well, which lets you anything things like ad drop-off, engagement, playrate, etc.
Pricing starts at $7,000 a year and they offer a free 14-day trial.
9. Clicky
Clicky is a free web analytics platform that also offers a Pro version, with pricing starting at $9.99 per month.
They say that their bot detection is the best in the business and helps eliminate all the referral spam that can clog up data.
They also monitor your site and alert you if it’s down. If you like old school tools this might be a winner for you.
Some features (heatmaps and uptime monitoring) are not available to lower-level plans. Clicky also offers white-label analytics.
10. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder integrates your marketing and sales data, tells you what pages companies are looking at, has a CRM, and can even email you when your dream company visits your site.
It looks like a great tool to help generate leads. They have live webinars and lots of downloadable guides/ebooks which tell you how to maximize the use of their product.
There is a free trial and even a free basic plan, with pricing for bigger plans starting at $53 a month.
Note: this product integrates with Google Analytics and uses that data so it’s not a replacement, rather an enhancement that can help you hone in the desired data you need.
Other integrations include Sales Navigator, Pipedrive, MailChimp, SalesForce, Zoho, Google Data Studio, Slack, Zapier, and many more.
The Takeaway
With a free trial, you have nothing to lose by trying one (or more) of these out.
While you may still rely on Google Analytics, maybe you’ll find something that makes it easier to quickly get the exact data that you want.
More Resources:
Image Credits
All screenshots taken by author, February 2020