This is going to be a very short blog. This is a list of five popular and, more importantly, free website tracking tools.
Section 01The first is Google Analytics.
GA is now 17 years old, believe it or not. Google Analytics collects numerical data on new and returning users, engagement, revenue, retention, demographics, conversions, and custom events. The most recent version, 4, focuses on how people interact with your site rather than just traffic. It now includes apps as well as websites. There is a free version called GA4 Standard, as well as a paid version called GA4 360, which is primarily intended for large enterprises with a million or more visitors per month.
Section 02Hotjar is up next.
To be honest, Hotjar is the main competitor and an excellent complement to Google Analytics. It has been around since 2014 and can provide you with both numerical and behavioral insights about your product. It has five distinct tools, yes, five. Heat maps, screen recordings, onsite surveys, a feedback widget, and an entire user interview platform are all available. And each of those tools is available for free. Paying grants access to additional features as well as the ability to capture more traffic. In general, the larger your company and the more professional you want to be with your user experience set up, the more likely you'll want a paid plan.
Section 03Google Optimize is my third choice.
Google Optimize is a website experimentation platform. It provides AB testing, split testing, and multivariate testing options. This entails serving different variants of website pages, such as A and B, to your users and measuring how they perform against one another. Google Optimize follows a familiar pattern in that it is free. However, if you want to access more features, you must pay to upgrade to Optimize 360.
Section 04Google Search Console is the fourth option.
And, contrary to popular belief, this article is not sponsored by Google. I guarantee it. This tool is designed to track your website's SEO performance. This includes keyword impressions and clicks, as well as backlinks, scrolling errors, and speed issues. The best part is that it is completely free. So, if you're curious about how your site performs in Google Search, and you should be, give it a shot.
Section 05Mixpanel is last but not least.
This is a product analytics tool for tracking mobile and web application performance. You can access reports on product-specific metrics such as activation, retention, and churn. It's strong, adaptable, and visually appealing. The free version will cover up to 100,000 monthly visits.
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Section 06FAQ: free tools for tracking user behavior
What are the best free user behavior tracking tools?
Five that cover different jobs. Google Analytics for numerical data on new and returning users, engagement, revenue, retention, demographics, conversions and custom events. Hotjar for behavioural insight alongside the numbers. Google Optimize for website experimentation. Google Search Console for SEO performance. And Mixpanel for product analytics across mobile and web.
How do Google Analytics and Hotjar differ?
Google Analytics is the numbers and Hotjar is the behaviour. GA, which is now 17 years old, collects quantitative data on users, engagement, revenue, retention, demographics, conversions and custom events. Hotjar, around since 2014, gives you both numerical and behavioural insight into what people actually do on the page. They are competitors on paper and complements in practice, which is why most teams run both.
What does Google Optimize do?
It is a website experimentation platform covering A/B testing, split testing and multivariate testing. In practice that means serving different variants of a page to different visitors and comparing what happens. It sits alongside the analytics tools rather than replacing them: analytics tells you something is wrong, experimentation tells you whether a specific change fixes it.
When would you use Mixpanel instead?
When the question is about the product rather than the website. Mixpanel is a product analytics tool for tracking mobile and web application performance, with reports on product-specific metrics such as activation, retention and churn. Those are the numbers a web analytics tool is not built to answer, which is why it appears on the list alongside the traffic-focused options rather than instead of them.
Rishikesh Ranjan
I reverse-engineer how the fastest-growing companies actually grow, then run the same plays for a living. First growth hire at ngram, growth at StreamAlive, Spaceonova, CloutFlow, and Airbook. Teardowns, playbooks, and field notes for people already in the trenches.
