A beginner’s guide to tracking website visits + the 7 best tools to use

Today’s website users have a short attention span, and most leave without engaging with the business. Even the most effective landing pages barely crack a five percent conversion rate.

If you’re one of the many businesses that fall below that rate, there may be a problem with your website copy, traffic sources, or the prospects you’re targeting—but you won’t know for sure without tracking website visits.

When a company tracks its website visitors, it can reveal who is browsing the site and for how long, which goes a long way toward understanding traffic and evaluating the business’s content and UX.

In this article, we will go over the basics of tracking website visits, covering why you should be doing it, the seven best tools to use, and how Clearbit can help in uncovering the customer behind the cursor.

Why should a business be tracking website visits?

A business should track its website visits because it can reveal who is browsing the  site and how these prospects are interacting with the business’s content. This gives marketing and sales departments the information they need to optimize outreach, website design, and conversion rates.

Tracking website visits is especially important if your website is an integral part of your lead generation engine. Nearly seven in ten B2B visitors leave after viewing just a single page, and more than half of all website visitors never fill out a form. Without tracking visitors, you may be losing valuable prospects every day without the information or ability to re-engage with them.

What visitor activity is important to track?

Website visitor data can shine a spotlight on a host of valuable information. Which metrics you deem important is dependent on your specific business goals, but a few of the top data points to track include:

• Page traffic: When you understand your page traffic, you understand which pages on your website are most popular and which ones need improvement. This paints a picture of what content your audience prefers.
• Bounce rate: Just as important as the traffic itself is how quickly visitors are leaving pages on your website. High bounce rates indicate a serious problem with the on-page content, like if the content itself was not what the visitor was expecting.
• Traffic source: Where are your visitors coming from? When you know what sources bring in the most traffic, you can double down on those efforts, or work to improve underperforming sources.
• Firmographic and technographic attributes: Both firmographic and technographic attributes are used in website tracking to identify the website visitor. This information helps you to better understand if your content resonates with the right people. Firmographic data includes information on the company the visitor represents, such as industry, company size, location, annual revenue, and more. Technographic data includes the technology they use, their current infrastructure, and other tech-based capabilities and attributes.

How to take advantage of website visitor tracking in your operations

It’s not enough to be mindful of the website traffic metrics to be looking for—you need to have a concrete plan to implement these insights into your daily operations. Below are three ways you can take advantage of website visitor tracking to improve your outreach.

Enlist visitor tracking tools

If you aren’t actively using a visitor tracking tool, you have no way of reliably tracking your website data. You need a platform that can give you analysis day after day so you can spot trends and rectify any inefficiencies before your business loses too many prospects.

If you are unsure about what tool to use, we have included seven of the best website visitor tracking tools just below this section.

Understand your traffic

Having a complete understanding of your traffic can lead to better conversions.

All website tracking tools will give you insight into where visitors are coming from, the website pages they visit most, and the pages they bounce from or completely avoid. This information—paired with an ideal customer profile (ICP), which every business should have—will give you a deeper understanding of what matters to your prospects. This, in turn, can improve the messaging on your website and your outreach as a whole.

Going further, some website tracking tools—like we offer with Clearbit Reveal—allow you to identify your website visitors in real time, giving you firmographic and technographic insights into exactly who they are. The fact is that not all prospects are created equal, and if you can identify when your ICP is on your website, you can enact real-time strategies to help you win more clients than the competition.

Determine which website pages are most and least effective

A result of understanding your traffic is understanding which pages are working—and which aren’t.

If you have certain pieces of content such as blogs, landing pages, or other pages on your website that are showing abnormally low traffic or a higher bounce rate than other assets, it could indicate a UX problem. The user experience is paramount for a successful website design, and tracking visitors can alert you to those problems. Some tools even offer heatmaps to show where your visitors are clicking and the areas they are most focused on.

Additionally, you can use tools like our free weekly visitor report to understand what types of content and marketing initiatives are attracting your ICP. By looking at the shared attributes of your most engaged visitors, you can create content plans around them and alter any strategies if necessary.

7 best website visitor tracking tools

Now that we’ve covered why it’s important to track website visits, we’ll explore seven of the best tools on the market to help you do so.

1. Clearbit

Clearbit is a data activation platform that enables marketers to discover and engage ideal customers at scale. We offer a number of essential features to create demand, capture intent, and engage ideal customers throughout the outreach process. Our solution for tracking website visits is called Clearbit Reveal.

With Reveal, you can understand the buyer journey clearer than ever before. Our platform allows you to see who is browsing your website in real time, gathering valuable insights such as the company they are affiliated with, the actions they are taking, and which of your solutions they care most about.

When you uncover the people and companies behind anonymous website visits, you can engage them the right way at the right time.

Key features:

• Understand how your target market engages with your business.
• Reach out to valuable prospects in real time as they are browsing your website.
• Ensure your prospect records are always accurate with automatically refreshed data.
  

Best for: Businesses looking to de-anonymize and understand their website traffic

Pricing: Contact us today for pricing and additional product features

2. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a behavioral analytics tool that allows you to discover how your product is being used, where and why your visitors drop off, and which type of visitors stick around the longest. All of this paints a valuable picture of customer experience, so you can update your website and buyer journey accordingly.

Featuring three main areas of focus—convert, engage, and retain—Mixpanel enables you to achieve a deeper understanding of your most important prospects, and when and how they perform certain actions on your website. In addition to improving your site, you can also use this information to improve conversions and prospect onboarding.

Key features:

• Find the root cause of user drop-off.
• Measure active usage to determine where your visitors are going and for how long.
• Understand the types of customers you retain and why.
  

Best for: Understanding visitor behavior

Pricing: Plans start at a free trial, up to $1,667/mo for enterprise-level features

3. Hotjar

Hotjar is a UX tool that helps you understand user behaviors through visual heatmaps. Through this software, businesses can find bottlenecks and other suboptimal portions of their website to alter what isn’t working and double down on what is.

In addition to heatmaps, Hotjar also offers video recording features that can play back website visitor clicks and mouse movements. This places a business in the eyes of a first-time visitor, and affords the ability to understand what areas of your website are most and least effective—leading to an improved prospect journey, a better website design, and more conversions.

Key features:

• Track prospect activity with heatmaps and recordings.
• Easily test new website features and design.
• Uncover UX issues quickly.
  

Best for: Understanding website design

Pricing: Plans start at a free trial, up to $139/mo

4. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the typical starting point for businesses across the globe to understand their website traffic. This free tool gives users a complete visitor overview to better understand the performance of their website design, content, product placement, and more.

As Analytics is a free tool, it does come with its limitations, including the inability to identify and de-anonymize visitors. That said, the platform does come with a number of useful features, and the ability to integrate with other Google applications such as Ads makes it a great starting point for businesses that are just starting to learn about their website traffic.

Key features:

• Understand and monitor the traffic to your website or app.
• Enable full integration with other Google software such as Ads.
• Learn the ropes of website tracking and what metrics are important.
  

Best for: Businesses that are new to tracking their website visitors

Pricing: Free

5. Woopra

Woopra is a customer journey and product analytics tool that gives businesses access to advanced analytics in order to understand user behavior. By providing features for product, marketing, sales, and support teams, businesses can equip their personnel with the features they need to be successful in their roles.

With three main principles—unify, analyze, and engage—Woopra promises to track and unify prospect data, provide reports on the customer journey and overarching trends, and engage with prospects in real time via predetermined triggers. Overall, this app allows users to optimize every touchpoint in the consumer experience.

Key features:

• Sync and export existing prospect data.
• Allow team-wide access and decision-making capabilities.
• Automate actions to instantly trigger emails, Slack messages, and more based on prospect behavior.
  

Best for: Analytics across the customer journey

Pricing: Plans start at a free trial, up to $999/mo

6. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a website visitor tracking tool that promises to improve on what’s working for a business, fix inefficient touchpoints, and easily test new ideas and layouts. Primarily relying on heatmaps, this software allows users to get a complete picture of how visitors are interacting with their website.

The data doesn’t end with heatmaps, however, as Crazy Egg also boasts features such as page recordings, customer surveys, A/B testing, analytics, and site error messages. Providing solutions for agencies, e-commerce, education, and lead generation, this tool can give businesses the information they need to track and improve their website activity.

Key features:

• Use heatmaps to see how visitors are interacting with your website.
• Compare and analyze traffic sources and behavior.
• Discover unresolved errors.
  

Best for: Businesses that want to understand how visitors interact with their site

Pricing: Pricing ranges from $29/mo to $249/mo

7. Matomo

Matomo is an analytics tool that gives businesses insight into their website traffic while also protecting their data and the privacy of their customers. Positioned as an alternative to Google Analytics, this platform advocates for users to take back control of their data with 100 percent data ownership.

Self-described as a tool with no limitations, businesses can track more data points than Analytics in regard to the total number of websites you can monitor, users, customer segments, and more. The open-source software comes with enhanced insights, support, and easy-to-use features that make tracking website visitors a breeze.

Key features:

• Enure 100 percent accurate visitor tracking data in a secure interface.
• Enable endless customization and tracking options.
• Import data from Google Analytics.
  

Best for: Businesses that want more out of Google Analytics

Pricing: Plans start at a free trial, up to $23/mo

Capitalize on your website traffic with Clearbit

Tracking website visits is an important step to gaining a deeper understanding of your site traffic and ideal prospects. With visitor tracking tools, you can take some of the guesswork out of UX and content planning to hone in on what’s working and cast aside what’s not.

That said, you don’t just need a tracking tool—you need the right tracking tool or combination of tools. With capabilities such as data enrichment to acquire prospect information and the use of Reveal to identify website visitors in real time, Clearbit can be the partner you need to expertly capitalize on your website traffic.