Best Website Analytics Software, Because Google Isn’t a Lone Wolf

You know how every time you enter a site, you get that annoying pop up:

“Do you accept all cookies?” You just click yes, right? Just to get on to the content.

Sometimes they don’t even ask. But I promise you, any website that wants to be successful is collecting cookies from your browser.

Why? Cookies are a cute name for all the information about you, the user, while you’re navigating a website. This includes which pages you click on, how long you view certain pages, and how your eyes move through a page by your scrolling rate. This also includes how you got to a site, and when you leave it. And a whole lot of other shit that you may not even realize you’re doing.

The point of this is to tell a story—your story. The data collected from your session (the total time you spend on a website) can be analyzed to piece together your experience. Piece together a lot of narratives, and site owners will be able to learn what works about a website, and what doesn’t.

Web analytics gives you information about your website in ways that surveys or testimonials can’t. Information is the powerhouse of change. If you want to optimize your website to increase engagement and sales, then you’re going to want to do some analytics.

But I didn’t study statistics in college, and if you’re here, I’m imagining you didn’t either. So we use software that makes website analytics possible. Learn more about website analytics and how to actually do it. And, of course, find out about the best website analytics software out there—yes, there are more options than Google Analytics.

Website Analytics: Making meaning out of numbers.

If you sat down and really thought about how you, as a user, interact with a website, you’ll realize that you produce a lot of data. And that’s only for a single user. Every user leaves their data marks on your site.

Imagine sifting through all that data to try and make something meaningful out of that.

As a person sifting through, it would take forever. That’s why web analytics software exists. It combs through all the data users produce to present numerical data about dimensions you want to know about.

Oh, an analytics term: dimensions. On that note, let me give you an in depth rundown of how to actually use web analytics software.

What are dimensions? And other important terms you need to actually perform website analytics.

Alright, let’s say you skim through this article, get to the best analytics software to use, choose one and install it.

Great—now what?

Having a nice, abstract idea of web analytics is nice, but completely useless if you’re performing your own website analytics (which you as individuals/small businesses probably are, otherwise you’d just hire someone to do this for you).

So, some key terms and what to do with them:

Dimensions – Qualitative, nonnumerical attributes that can be used to describe, segment, organize, and sort data.

When your web analytics software collects data from your users, it just collects everything. You have to tell it what you care about, so that it will pull the important data out of the sea of numbers.

You define the things you care about using dimensions. Some examples of dimensions:

Medium – How your user got to your site
Browser – The kind of browser your user is using to access your site
Country – Where in the world your user is accessing your site from
Language – The language used by your user when using your site
Device category – What kind of device they are using to access your site

Values are the categories within each dimension to group users together. Some examples of values:

For medium: Organic traffic, social media, paid advertising
For browser: Chrome, Firebox, Internet Explorer (Is it Edge now? It’s irrelevant.)
For country: U.S., India, China, U.K.
For language: English, Chinese, Swahili
For device category: Desktop, mobile, tablet

Dimensions that are separated into values help you (and your web analytics software) define what kind of information is important for your website.

For example: If you find that at least half your users are accessing your site using a mobile device, you should damn well make sure your site is mobile responsive. If you find that the majority of your users are using Android devices, you should really make sure your site looks good on that type of device. (Although it’s in my opinion that every site should be mobile responsive.)

Metrics – Quantitative, numerical measurements of data that show how a website is performing in relation to a specific dimension.

Metrics are always expressed through numbers: number value, percent, dollar value, time, etc. They are the collective quantitative measurement of a dimension over a defined period of time.

For example: If you want to know how many users visited a certain page of your website over the past month, the dimension would be something like “Page Visits” and the metric would be a number like, I don’t know, 1,205.

If you wanted to know the average amount of time a user spends on your website, the dimension would be something like “Average User Session,” and the metric would be 3 minutes.

Web analytics software is coded to pull that kind of information for a defined dimension. Numerical values, graphed or shown in tables, gives you an overall view of how your site is doing. You can share that with others, measure site performance in comparison to other times, and use it to monitor Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) – A measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is reaching key business objectives.

Different sites have different purposes. Ecommerce sites are selling things, blog are providing information. Ecommerce sites are focused on sales, and blogs are focused on user engagement.

These different kinds of sites have different goals, as well. An ecommerce business wants to increase sales. A blog owner wants to increase the number of people who visit and interact with their blog.

So they set up goals—it’s how to get things done, no?

The ecommerce site gleans from their web analytics performance data that their cart abandonment rate is pretty high. They notice that a lot of people leave while they’re on the checkout page. They think maybe it’s because their checkout page sucks, so they redesign it. They gather data over the next 2 months.

The blog wants to raise it’s number of viewers. Maybe the owner focuses on raising their SEO ranking and seeing if that helps. They focus on this goal for 6 months. (SEO usually takes a little while guys. Patience is a virtue. Or something.)

The two sites can tell how they’re doing in terms of their goals using KPIs.

For the ecommerce site, their KPIs be Percentage of Completed Sales, or Cart Abandonment rates, or something like that. If their cart abandonment rates go down, then the cart redesign might be working. They can go further with their data, and find out where their users bounced (left the site). If the Bounce Rate is lower for the checkout page, then they definitely know that the redesign was useful.

For the blog, their most useful KPI will be Medium, which is where viewers came from. If the number of viewers that came to their site through organic traffic, then their SEO rankings have probably increased. To further determine this, they could go deeper, and see exactly how many users came from a search engine.

Setting up KPIs is crucial to determining the success of your efforts to improve your site in some way.

If you have some marketing or conversion in action, but have no idea to tell if it’s working, learn more about defining and using KPIs here.

Related: Not sure how to set up a sales or conversion campaign? Funnel builders are made for this. Learn more about them, and about the best funnel builders to use for creating successful campaigns.

Some general dimensions that help seedlings sites see how they sprout:

If you’re a big, bad blogger and everyone’s on their hands and knees to advertise on it, you’re set. There are other metrics for you to measure, like what kinds of posts users are most interested in.

If, however, you have set up a relatively new website, there are probably some kinks in it, or in your marketing plans, that you don’t even realize because the site is so new. You also have an idea about your users, but you don’t really know anything about them,

This is where these super important, super basic dimensions come in:

Acquisition Related Dimensions: How did users get to your site?

Users: The total number of users who started a session (the time, from entrance to exit, that a user is on your site) in a range of dates that you’re interested in looking at.
New Users: The number of people who are new to your site (as opposed to returning users, who have already been charmed by you and your stunning website) in a date range.
Sessions: Analytics software starts a session whenever a user lands on any page of your site. It stops recording data after a specified amount of time. In Google Analytics, it’s 30 minutes. This tells you when your site has essentially become irrelevant to a user. They click on another tab, something more interesting, etc.
Source/Medium: The number of users that reached your site from various other sources. Example: The number of users who came to your site from a social media outlet.

Behavior Related Dimensions: What are your users doing when they’re on your site? What do they like? What do they hate?

Bounce Rate: The percentage of all single-page sessions, where users didn’t do anything else on the site and just exited. Example: A user just dips after clicking on your site. Maybe it was an accident, maybe they didn’t find what they were looking for.
Exit Rate: The percentage of users who have left your site from a specified page. Example: A huge percentage of users exit your site from one blog post. That blog post is probably terrible, and you should take it down.
Pages per Session: The average number of pages viewed in a single session. Example: On average, people read 4 blog posts before leaving your site.
Session Duration: The average length of a session. Example: The average user spends 5 minutes on your website before leaving it.

Conversion Related Metrics: How many people did you convert?

Ecommerce Conversion Rate: The percentage of sessions that resulted in a transaction.
Newsletter Signups: How many people submitted emails for your newsletter.

When your website is in its infancy (hopefully it has a long, healthy life ahead of it) these dimensions help you flesh out what needs improvement on your site, what’s working, and what’s worth your time to focus on.

Things like exit rates can tell you if a page is running slowly. New user dimensions can tell you how many new people you’re reaching, and how much of your user base is a dedicated user base. Medium dimensions tell you where to focus your advertising efforts.

Take a deep breath.

That is the general framework of website analytics. This is what a first time web analytics user will need to know. Once you get used to analytics, you can deep dive into it.

Many first time web analytics users drift towards Google Analytics because it’s well known. And every web building product known to man has made it easy to integrate Google Analytics with it. They’re a major league player, don’t get me wrong. But Google isn’t the only web analytics software in the game.

Bearing this in mind, here is the best website analytics software to turn data into something meaningful for your website.

Best Website Analytics Software, Because Google Analytics isn’t a Lone Wolf in the Analytics World

Quantcast: Free
Plausible: A simple to use, privacy focused alternative to Google Analytics
SE Ranking: Clean up your site for primo SEO
UX Optics: Literally replay user sessions and see where their eyes land with heatmaps
Crazy Egg: Use A/B testing and quick site editing to test and improve your site’s pages
Matomo: Flexible, robust, privacy compliant sales and conversion measurement
Buffer: For social media analytics (and content publishing if you’re into it)
Cyfe: Quick dashboard setup and massive integration capabilities
Tableau: A revolutionary visual web analytics drag-and-drop builder
Piwik Pro: For enterprise level analytic capabilities
MonsterInsights: A WordPress specific analytics plugin
Reach Reporting: For businesses to neatly analyze and present financial data

Quantcast: It’s free. It’s other things, but mostly, it’s free.

Quantcast is, first and foremost, free. This is definitely the selling point in terms of it being one of the best pieces of wbesite analytics software out there.

The Quantcast Intelligence Cloud is there to quantify (gasp) the data poured into your site. Their analytics products include:

Measure: Demographics (age, location, education, etc.), Psychographics (shopping and media interests, etc.), Engagement, Traffic
Choice: For obtaining consumer consent to data collection and managing compliance and privacy practices (this is something you need, no matter what kind of web analytics software you use)
Audience Insights: Combining human and machine learning to see trends and stack your site up against competitors
Measurement: Measure success of marketing campaigns

Quantcast, like many web analytics products, is added to the code of pages on your website. It’s supposedly easy to install, but some beginners have had trouble installing code. Some also have trouble gleaning meaningful information from the Q Platform.

The makers of this cloud based platform have left you a resource library to help with getting started and working Quantcast. There’s also a help center to ask specific questions. If this doesn’t satisfy you, there’s always community forums for popular software like this.

Quantcast is one of the best free web analytics software. It is not the best if you aren’t willing to work with something that requires more effort, and aren’t willing to troubleshoot if something goes wrong.

There’s an old adage when it comes to Quantcast, and any free software:

You get what you pay for.

Plausible: An easy-to-use, privacy focused alternative to Google Analytics. It’s not free. But it’s stupid cheap.

One of the aspects of Google Analytics that leaves a sour taste in the mouths of site viewers and web analytics users alike: Google’s handling of consumer data. Google has been known to use the data you collect for third-party advertising.

This is largely why Google Analytics is free.

A big selling point for Plausible is that the data you collect is 100% yours, making your users’ data private and therefore respected. Plausible doesn’t use cookies like Google Analytics. User data is collected anonymously. You are able to learn about your website, while your users have a comfortable, anonymous browsing experience.

Because you’re not essentially selling your users’ data to third-party advertisers (via Google Analytics), Plausible is not free. Pricing is extremely flexible, though.

Plausible is completely open source. Coders can review and modify code for their own needs. Some coders have written Plausible into a plugin for WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace sites. If you’re using a web builder like this, you’ll really appreciate the easy way to install this software.

It’s super lightweight code too. Adding Plausible web analytics to your site won’t make it load any slower.

The analytics platform itself is stripped down to a single, easy to understand page with the essentials of measuring engagement. Compared to Google Analytics, there is no virtually no learning curve. You won’t need to spend a week getting certified in Plausible and flip through complex reports. You won’t drown in setting up and sifting through unnecessary reports.

Plausible Pricing:

You start at $6/month for 10k pageviews. You can add Plausible to any number of websites, and pageviews from all your sites are aggregated and counted towards your total pageviews.

If you go over your pageview limit because of a spike in traffic, Plausible does not charge extra. They understand that traffic is good, and that spikes aren’t your fault and you shouldn’t be penalized for it. The next month, though, your plan will move up to the next payment tier (an increase of another $6/month). You have 2 weeks to decide whether you want to keep this plan, or if you want to cancel your account.

If you’re not feeling like giving up user data to Google Analytics, and don’t have weeks to spend learning how to use a website analytics tool, then Plausible is for you. If you’re an entrepreneur and/or blogger working with one or a few websites, Plausible is definitely for you.

This is not the software for intense, thorough website reporting. Larger businesses or enterprises requiring rich data analytics should steer clear of Plausible.

SE Ranking: Scope out your site for SEO defects. Then let the software fix all your problems.

If you want your site to succeed, the “in thing” right now (and probably for awhile) is SEO. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to make sure your entire site is perfectly optimized for SEO. It’s also a pain in the ass to monitor every single method of SEO (internal and external linking, keyword ranking, meta tagging, the works).

SEO basically requires a set of eyes that is able to spot places where site content could be stronger for SEO. And a set of eyes to make sure your website pages themselves are set up correctly.

SE Ranking is your second set of eyes.

This website analytics software completes a full website audit, checking for broken internal and external links. It analyzes specific pages for page load optimization, meta tags, images, URL structure, and keyword density.

SE Ranking then makes suggestions for quickly improving your pages.

You can also easily research keywords and keyword groupings. Then choose the best ones for your content. Use SE Ranking to design an entire SEO boosted marketing plan.

For B2B businesses, SE Ranking has White Label features. Choose levels of accessibility to SEO reporting for employees and clients. If you need more robust features, SE Ranking offers API scripts to develop more advanced reporting.

This website analytics software is scalable. As your site and team grow, SE Ranking will grow with you.

SE Ranking Pricing (So flexible I can’t give exact numbers):

Pricing is very competitive and flexible. Choose how often you want reporting done, how many months you want the service for (the longer you subscribe for, the higher the savings), and how many keywords you want tracked per month. After you choose all that, you choose from the Optimum, Plus, and Enterprise level plans.

Because of the incredible levels of choice, I really can’t give you exact numbers for plans. Play with subscription pricing here. I can tell you that it is much cheaper and more feature rich than the most popular SEO tracking tool out there, SEM Rush.

If your site in its infancy, SE Ranking is the best website analytics software to make sure your site functions well and is geared towards beginning to rank. If you expect your site to grow, and want to do so especially through SEO, SE Ranking is also for you. Basically, if you have any interest in growing through SEO, SE Ranking is the one.

UX Optics: Understand how users physically interact with your site.

You know when you start reading a blog post (and really probably this blog post) and you’re excited in the beginning? But then—right about now, I imagine—you’re just tired. Your eyes are tired of looking, you’re hardcore skimming at this point.

It would be wise, then, to put the most important things (like the full list of best website analytics software) at the beginning of a post. It’s also wise to put the most important information in big, bold headers to catch your attention. (Welcome to my Ted Talk about your brain. Take a seat.)

Wouldn’t you like to know what your users look at the most, so you can improve the visual elements of your pages?

This is where UX Optics comes in—no, struts in.

This website page analytics software collects user experiences of your site’s pages. It then creates heatmaps that tell you where your users’ eyes lingered. It also records individual user sessions of your site. Literally replay a user navigating through your site, from cursor movements to video clicks and everything in between.

Great, creepily watching screens, what do you do with that?

This software allows you to analyze what grabs attention to your viewers, what they like to see, and what makes them leave. You’ll know what draws them in for more, and you can organize your site and your marketing campaigns around this.

For example: Say you made a great web banner promoting a limited-time-only sale. If your viewers never make it to the bottom of any page, don’t put it in the footer. If they don’t notice the header, either, don’t stick it there.

Your heatmap analysis tells you that people look most at your sidebars. Maybe you put cool videos there, or your social media feed is there. Maybe your categories or menus are over there. For whatever reason, viewers are over there. Pop your banner over there.

Then see what happens.

Related: “What’s a web banner?” Glad you asked. Learn how to improve conversions with them here.

UX Optics Pricing:

Free: Free for one website and 100k pageviews/month
Startup: $29/month for 5 websites and 450k pageviews/website/month
$99/month for 50 websites and 5 million pageviews/website/month

Note: These are monthly prices. Buying yearly basically gives you two months for free when compared to monthly plans in the same tier.

In addition to heatmaps and user experience replays, UX Optics also has those basic website analytics features you need for any site. This is the best website analytics software for understanding the visual experience of your websites, and optimizing for a better user experience.

Crazy Egg: Test different site pages and quantitatively analyze for effectiveness.ggg

Crazy Egg has similar features to UX Optics to analyze where customers are attracted to and where they get stuck.

But the real bread and butter of Crazy Egg is the ability to take this knowledge and quickly test different page setups. Make your page perfect with A/B testing and monitoring of key changes for greatest impact.

Track ad campaign traffic, find out where your customers avoid completely, and learn how long your visitors are on your site before they dip.

Make quick changes with their editor, which can be integrated with Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify. Export and share reports with a team.

Crazy Egg Pricing:

For an unlimited number of sites:

Basic: $29/month for 30,000 pageviews/month
Standard: $49/month for 75,000 pageviews/month
Plus: $99/month for 150,000 pageviews/month
Pro: $249/month for 500,000 pageviews/month
Custom: Ask.

Note: All plans are charged annually.

Crazy Egg is a great website analytics tool for quickly testing changes and watching how users react. It’s a great way to know why your users do what they do. However, it doesn’t have standard analytics tools, so you don’t have any of those quantitative metrics.

Pair Crazy Egg with another analytics software, and you’ll have the perfect quantitative and qualitative understanding of your users.

Matomo: An open-source , full featured analytics software geared towards conversion.

Matomo is a super popular alternative to Google Analytics. But popular doesn’t mean better, so let’s get into it.

This open-source, cloud based platform is similar to Plausible in that it’s designed with user privacy in mind. User data is 100% yours, and 100% protected. It, like Plausible, has all the core features of good quantitative analytics software.

In terms of privacy, users have the ability to opt-out of tracking. You can anonymize data, and set the software so that it doesn’t process any personally identifiable information. Matomo uses no cookies, so that irritating pop up doesn’t show up, and potentially lead users to bounce.

It is unlike Plausible in that it is a more robust web analytics tool. Use it to analyze the relative value of your content, marketing, and SEO efforts. Analyze forms for pain points that drive users away. Monitor acquisition sources to help you decide the best ways to spend time and money advertising. Make conversion funnels and monitor goals of campaigns.

And, import all your Google Analytics data when you make the switch. No reason to lose all that information, right? But there is all the reason to drop the third-party poachers.

Matomo Pricing:

Pricing plans start out with 500,000 pageviews/month. You can add more, but the price increases slightly (obviously). 500,000 pageview/month plans:

Cloud Essential: $19/month for for 3 websites max
Cloud Business: $29/month for 30 websites max
On-premises: $0. This is because Matomo would be hosted on your servers, so you don’t take up any server space for Matomo.
WordPress: $0. Same deal.

Related: No idea what servers are and why they cost money? Learn with me here.

Your users are at the forefront of your mind if you use Matomo. This is one of the best pieces of analytics software for privacy focused data collection and having many more ways to use that data. If you’re looking for a Google Analytics alternative that has all the analytics capabilities (and more, including heat maps) Matomo is for you.

Buffer: The best analytics software for measuring social media engagement and conversion.

Buffer is also low key famous in the social media management circle. Why?

Buffer is split into two products: Publish and Analyze.

Publish is attractive for social media management because you can design and publish social media posts for all outlets in one place (which is so nice). You can also schedule content to be published at optimal times (one of those times is Monday at 2 a.m., and no one wants to be up waiting for that). Collaborate with a plan on brand building. Or make it easy for yourself to make your content all at once and schedule it out, and be done thinking about it until next week.

But!—you’re here for all of the analyzing. Analyze provides one dashboard for you to analyze content performance across all channels.

Learn the best times for you to post, the best kinds of posts, and the ideal post frequency. If people are flooded with content, it’s not special. If you put something out once a month, people will forget about you. Find a reasonable balance, and push it out at the right time.

Learn about your demographics. Analyze specific posts, images and hashtags. How are your boosted posts doing? How is your social going on the day-to-day?

Let Buffer tell you. And then tell your team with easy-to-read custom reports that can be exported and shared every day.

Let Buffer give you recommendations for social media improvement. And get email, social media, and community support while you’re at it.

Buffer Pricing:

Pricing for Analyze:

$35/month for 8 social channels and unlimited reports
$50/month for 10 social channels and unlimited reports

Note: Charged monthly.

Pricing for Publish (for those interested):

Pro: $15/month for 100 scheduled posts on 8 channels
Premium: $65/month for 2,000 scheduled posts on 8 channels
Business: $99/month for 2,000 scheduled posts on 25 channels

Buffer is one of the top dogs in the social media analytics software game for a reason: It’s worth the (relatively low) cost. This is one of the best social media analytics tools for both publishing and analyzing content.

Cyfe: Connect your data and funnel it into a pre-built template for industry specific goals.

Cyfe is for lazy people. Or busy people. Whatever sounds better to you.

No, really: The selling point of Cyfe is that the makers of it have already designed template dashboards to use for pretty much any purpose. You import data from sources like Salesforce, Shopify, Unbounce, GetResponse, or any of their 100+ integrations, and the dashboard pulls data relevant to predefined KPIs to show website and business performance quickly and easily.

For example, Marketing Dashboards show you whatever matters to you in the marketing sphere: customer acquisition, ROI, advertising performance, social marketing efforts, etc. Pull data from ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, etc. and voila! Chef’s kiss level of easy to view, easy to share, automated reports.

If you need a custom dashboard template, or are just a template hater, create your own custom dashboard.

Cyfe Pricing:

Free: Free, 2 dashboards and 1 user (no cool features, obviously)
Solo: $29/month, 5 dashboards and 1 user
Pro: $49/month, 10 dashboards and 5 users
Premier: $89/month, 20 dashboards, unlimited users ($4/dashboard after 20)
Agency: $150/month, for 10 clients

Note: You have better options for free website analytics tools. So, pretend the free plan doesn’t exist.

Cyfe is the best website analytics software for automating analytics reports for predefined purposes. It’s an excellent way to pull together a huge amount of data and easily find what matters.

If you’re strapped for cash, or just want to customize from the start, then maybe steer clear of Cyfe.

Tableau: An intuitive, scalable website analytics software.

Tableau is honestly just…fascinating. I don’t know how else to put it.

This company is shaking up the website analytics business using visual analytics builders.

Instead of producing the standard spreadsheet and/or chart, you use a drag-and-drop builder to pull imported data and put it on a visual graph in any format you want. You can make data point graphs, line graphs, or organize data by geographic location. Choose your dimensions and markets, associate them with certain colors, shapes, labels, etc., and generate graphs in real time.

Import data from spreadsheets, cloud apps, SQL databases, or big data sources. Integrate Tableau with pretty much any other data source.

If creating an entire visual analytics dashboard from scratch, Tableau has offered some prebuilt dashboards optimized for your industry. Try them out, then customize after learning the power of visual dashboards.

Let your whole team in on your analytics findings. Tableau, in general, is there to help you create a culture in which data drives choice.

All of this is just Tableau Desktop. Tableau has products for CRM, server management, and more.

Tableau Pricing:

Tableau Creator: $70/month for Tableau Desktop and some other products

After the Creator plan, there’s a lot of add on choices for teams and organizations. You have to have at least one creator to add on other features.

And honestly, the number of add on features is a blog post in itself. Add on viewer capabilities, Tableau data hosting, and embedded analytics.

More pricing and feature info can be found here.

Tableau is the best website analytics software for scalable, collaborative data management efforts. It’s great for the individual creator to visually understand what the hell they’re looking at. It’s great for teams with stupid huge amounts of user engagement data to manage.

You can’t go wrong. Unless you don’t have the cash to drop on that there annual billing.

Piwik Pro: An enterprise level website analytics software.

Imagine taking everything you like about each product so far: The privacy of Plausible and Matomo, the SEO management capabilities of SE Ranking, the scalability of Tableau—and wrap it all into one product. That’s Piwik Pro.

This is honestly just a stupid large website analytics software, with all the bells and whistles. Generate detailed analytics reports and share with your team. Use the tag manager to make sure Piwik is everywhere on your site. Generate reports on individual consumers and learn about them.

You can even hire a dedicated customer success manager to make full use of Piwik Pro for you.

Sounds amazing, right? So what’s the catch?

Pricing—this product is expensive. You have to get a quote, and the bill is not something a small or midsize business can pay.

Piwik Pro is one of the best option for professional level website analytics for huge enterprises.

MonsterInsights: A WordPress plugin with industry specific analytics dashboards.

MonsterInsights is specifically for WordPress users. This plugin integrates nicely with Business WordPress plans.

Some features of this plugin do pull data from a Google Analytics account, so if you want to make full use of it, you would have to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site.

You might be wondering why one would bother adding another analytics tool on top of Google Analytics. Yeah, same.

MonsterInsights allows you to integrate your Google Analytics data into your WordPress admin dashboard. It also lets you track WordPress specific variables, like post authors, WordPress form conversion, ecommerce (using the WordPress specific plugin WooCommerce) and SEO score tracking from plugins like Yoast SEO.

MonsterInsights Pricing:

These are the prices as of their “limited-time-only” sale. I don’t know how true these numbers will be later.

Plus: $99.50/year
Pro: $199.50/year
Agency: $399.50/year

If you have pieced together a sufficiently capable WordPress site, and would like a better way to analyze your site’s performance, MonsterInsights is a good plugin to have.

Reach Reporting: A better way for businesses to gather and analyze financial data.

All of our other website analytics software have been geared towards content monitoring, marketing, user conversions, etc.

Reach Reporting is not that. It’s more like…the Ol’ Reliable business activity analytics tool. If you have a business, you have some sort of financial activities. You’re paying employees, or paying for materials, shipping, etc. You’re (hopefully) pulling money in as well.

Pull in data from spreadsheets, Quickbooks, Google sheets, and external sources. Reach Reporting has been so kind as to give you the ability to auto populate metrics for given dimensions, saving you time and promoting accuracy when transferring data.

Use one of Reach Reporting’s templates for generating reports, analytics dashboards, metrics, and statements. Or create one with custom dimensions yourself. In the end, you’ll have a visual, easy to understand financial report. Then share those insights with your team.

If you own or are a part of a company that manages the finances of other companies, Reach Reporting has you covered, too.

Reach Reporting Pricing:

Business: $129/company (1 company), so $1,548 yearly
Bookkeeper: $59/company (5 companies), so $3,450 yearly
Professional: $49/company (10 companies), so $5,880 yearly
Firm: $39/company (25 companies), so $11,700 yearly

Note: Monthly pricing is more expensive. Of course.

This is some of the best website analytics software for individual companies, bookkeepers and accounting firms to monitor and analyze their financial actions.

If you own a bakery, you could probably use this software. If you’re selling jewelry from your basement, this software is kind of excessive.

If you’re looking for analytics software, you know Google exists. But there are other options.

Some might argue, better options.

Google Analytics is in a weird spot: It’s free, so beginners gravitate towards it. It’s kind of hard to use, so a lot of people start giving up on it. It integrates with everything, so many website owners think it’s a great option. But combine it with everything else on your website and it becomes overwhelming.

Just know that Google is not a lone wolf in the website analytics game.

You have options.