11 Top Web Analytics Tools for Your Ecommerce Businesses (2024) – Shopify

Hope may fuel dreams, but it’s not a strategy. When it comes to marketing, many entrepreneurs take the spray-and-pray approach—trying everything and hoping something works. 

“I wouldn’t bet on hope,” says Brad Charron, the CEO of Aloha, who helped turn the struggling company into a thriving business. “I’m betting on experience, smarts, rigor, and trying to do the best thing.”

To make effective, informed decisions, you need data—even if you’re not running a $100 million business like Aloha (yet). Here are the best web analytics tools to leverage data and scale your business.

What are web analytics tools?

Web analytics tools are software solutions that track website visitor behavior—like the number of visitors, page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates—and turn this data into digestible performance reports. Understanding how users interact with your website or ecommerce store can help answer questions like:

• How do people find my site?

• What do users do when they get to my site?

• What content are users engaging with, for how long, and to what end?

A web analytics tool lets you assess performance and implement meaningful changes. The primary goal is to evaluate user behavioral data to drive more sales.

For example, Aloha regularly gathers checkout drop-off data from web analytics tools to monitor how its website and listings perform. Armed with that data, the stakeholders make improvements over time. “We started doing things like upselling people at the very end as they got to the checkout,” Brad says. “We started to spend more effort on fulfillment knowing that people were going to buy from us versus Amazon.”

11 top web analytics tools

1. Google Analytics 4
2. Adobe Analytics
3. Matomo
4. Similarweb
5. Ahrefs
6. Semrush
7. Amplitude
8. Mixpanel
9. Hotjar
10. Optimizely
11. Kissmetrics

Among the many available platforms, here are some of the most popular web analytics tools to help you make more informed business decisions:

1. Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a free tool that measures web traffic, conversions, website interactions (such as button clicks), and audience data. GA4 integrates with Google Search Console and Google Ads to provide a more comprehensive view of organic and paid web traffic.

The standard version of GA4 is free and often sufficient if you’re just getting started with web analytics. However, larger businesses tend to benefit from GA4’s enterprise plan, Google Analytics 360, which offers more advanced capabilities, like unsampled reporting and data warehousing options.

Pricing: GA4 is available for free, while Google Analytics 360 starts at approximately $50,000 per year.

2. Adobe Analytics

Adobe’s web analytics solution is enterprise-grade and designed for very large businesses with custom needs. It’s extra useful if you integrate it with Adobe Cloud or Adobe Target. Like Google Analytics 360, Adobe Analytics can process large volumes of data without losing any functionality. Moreover, it segments your audiences into different groups to deliver content tailored to their unique behaviors. The platform also pulls data from non-Adobe sources, making it a powerful tool for businesses with large IT or data departments.

Pricing: Adobe Analytics starts at $2,000 per month.

3. Matomo

Matomo (formerly Piwik) is an open-source web analytics platform offering web traffic monitoring, user behavior analysis, heat maps, A/B testing, and real-time analytics. Positioned as a GA4 alternative, Matomo distinguishes itself by ensuring users own all their data and protecting their privacy—unlike GA4, which relies on third-party cookie tracking. Matomo also provides access to its raw data, whereas GA4 provides only limited access to export data. Access to raw data enables a more detailed view, allowing for custom calculations and compatibility with additional analytical tools.

Pricing: Matomo’s options include a free version for users who host their own site, a Business plan that’s $26 per month, and an Enterprise plan available by quote.

4. Similarweb

Similarweb provides comprehensive web analytics, including website and app usage, traffic sources, and visitor demographic data. Unlike many other tools, it lets you look up competitor data, making it ideal for benchmarking your site against the competition.

Pricing: Similarweb offers a Starter tier for $125 per month, a Professional option for $333 per month, and Enterprise pricing available by quote.

5. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a leading SEO-focused web analytics reporting tool that offers detailed insights into the number, quality, and source of links to your and your competitors’ sites. It also tracks keyword rankings over time with historical data, aligning that keyword performance with your traffic. If search engine optimization (SEO) is central to your marketing strategy, Ahrefs can be a valuable complement to GA4 and Google Search Console.

Pricing: Ahrefs’s pricing plans include the Lite package at $130 per month, the Standard package at $250 per month, the Advanced package at $500 per month, and an Enterprise option available by quote.

6. Semrush

Semrush originally focused on search engine optimization and keyword research but now includes robust web traffic analytics, content marketing, and search engine marketing (SEM) features. Semrush also tracks off-website metrics like backlinks, brand mentions, sentiment analysis, and social media mentions.

Pricing: Semrush’s pricing options are Pro at $140 per month, Guru at $250 per month, and Business at $450 per month.

7. Amplitude

Amplitude is a product-first analytics tool. With advanced features like cohort charts, retention graphs, and conversion funnels, Amplitude’s usage metrics help you understand customer behavior with a high level of detail. It excels at visualizing the entire user journey by tracking post-purchase actions, product usage, and more, helping you connect the purchase process to long-term engagement. This insight can help you better engage and retain your audience.

Pricing: Options include a free version with limited capabilities, a Plus plan with custom dashboards available for $61 per month, and Enterprise packages priced by quote.

8. Mixpanel

Originally built for SaaS businesses, Mixpanel is an advanced product analytics tool that has recently incorporated ecommerce-specific features like cart analysis and checkout report templates. Its strength lies in data visualizations that display every step of the funnel, so you can easily see where your customers start and end their journeys. Another standout feature is the ability to group users and compare them across custom-defined cohorts.

Pricing: Pricing plans include a free version, a Growth plan that starts at $24 per month and scales according to how much traffic you get, and an Enterprise option available by quote.

9. Hotjar

Hotjar is a heat map tool that visualizes user behavior on your website through click, scroll, eye-tracking, and mouse-tracking maps. These maps reveal what visitors click, read, and interact with on your pages. While not a comprehensive web analytics suite, Hotjar can be a powerful complement to other tools. By interpreting heat map data, you can reorganize your web content to ensure users see and engage with the most important information.

Pricing: Hotjar’s plans include Basic for free, Plus at $40 per month, Business at $100 per month, and Scale at $213 per month.

10. Optimizely

Optimizely is a leading analytics and A/B testing tool focused on improving your website’s conversion rate. Its “experience analytics” suite lets you create and compare different page versions, helping you identify which performs best with your audience.

Pricing: Optimizely’s plans reportedly start at $36,000 per year, though you’ll need to request pricing.

11. Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics helps you identify your ideal customers through detailed reporting. Unlike other analytics tools that track anonymous visitors, Kissmetrics focuses on known or identified customers, like those on your email or customer list. Its advanced features offer email marketing automation (to send personalized emails based on customer interactions) and digital advertising (allowing you to import customer data to remarket and find similar audiences within the same platform).

Pricing: Kissmetrics’s options include a limited plan for as low as $126 per month, a $300/month plan for small teams, a $500/month plan for medium-sized teams, and enterprise solutions available by quote.