Free and low-cost web analytics tools for your business

3-minute read

Now that you are online and your company has a great website, what comes next? If you really want to maximize the impact of your website and make sure it was worth your investment, you need to track and analyze your online efforts using web analytics.

How these tools help you?

Web analytics software and social media monitoring tools help you avoid getting lost in data. The key is to set clear goals, isolate which metrics matter to your company and find the tools that will present that information to you simply.

For instance, web analytics applications can help you:

target your marketing initiatives
track the success of your search engine optimization efforts
understand your website visitor experience
learn what keywords bring in the best prospects
improve your sales conversion and
identify trends and improve website usability to maximize your website’s return on investment.

How do web analytics work?

Web analytics applications provide information about visitors to a website. By monitoring statistics such as visitor referrals, navigation paths, page views and geographic location data, you can learn about your visitors. For instance, you can learn whether they came to your website via search engines, ads, e-mails, blogs or affiliates.

The following review focuses on web analytics tools, but keep in mind that these tools are also increasingly incorporating social media monitoring tools. If you prefer to use standalone solutions to keep track of your social engagement, you may want to check our list of free and low-cost social media monitoring tools.

Free and low-cost web analytics tools

There are many tools for tracking your company’s success online. If you are just getting started, you may want to consider the following.

Revised May 2024

Free English French English support French support Data stored in Canada iOS app. Android Cloud or SaaS

Fathom Analytics

Free English French English support French support Data stored in Canada iOS app. Android Cloud or SaaS

Fathom Analytics a Canadian company based in British Columbia, prioritizes visitor privacy. This means you can avoid cluttering your website with cookie banners or slowing it down with unnecessary tracking scripts. Fathom Analytics likes to keep things simple. Just add a single line of code to your website and you'll get a clear, user-friendly dashboard that helps you understand your website visitors without spying on them.

Google Analytics Solutions

Free English French English support French support Data stored in Canada iOS app. Android Cloud or SaaS

Google Analytics enables you to understand how users interact across your sites and apps, so you can take action to improve their experience, identify potential issues and ultimately boost sales. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) uses machine learning to analyze user behaviour and automatically uncover trends you might miss, like what pages are most popular or if there are any difficulties during the checkout process. Setting up GA4 involves adding a tracking code to your website, which can often be done with a plugin for your website builder.

Lucky Orange

Free English French English support French support Data stored in Canada iOS app. Android Cloud or SaaS

Lucky Orange goes beyond basic web analytics tools to help you optimize your website for conversion. Its real-time dashboard lets you see which marketing channels are driving the most sales or leads. Powerful features like dynamic heatmaps and session recordings reveal how visitors interact with your website, helping you identify areas for improvement and ultimately boost your conversion rate.

Mixpanel

Free English French English support French support Data stored in Canada iOS app. Android Cloud or SaaS

Mixpanel is a powerful analytics platform that tracks meaningful visitor actions like watching videos, adding items to carts and completing purchases. With a user-friendly interface, you don’t need any technical expertise to gain valuable insights. Plus, their integration of Generative AI allows you to ask questions that will be translated into data queries, making it even easier to detect trends and user behaviour patterns.

Nudge

Free English French English support French support Data stored in Canada iOS app. Android Cloud or SaaS

Nudge is an analytics platform that enables you to get customer insights easily, diving straight into how web visitors are engaging, what they’re paying attention to, where they’re coming from and on what devices. It also creates automated insights from the data, so you can act faster.

Open Web Analytics

Free English French English support French support Data stored in Canada: n/a iOS app. Android Cloud or SaaS

Open Web Analytics (OWA) is a free, open-source website analytics tool that gives you more control over your data by allowing you to store it on your own server. This can be a valuable feature if you want to keep your data private. While OWA offers useful insights like visitor behaviour reports and heat maps, setting it up might require some technical knowledge.

This table lists applications alphabetically and isn’t exhaustive. Hyperlinks to external sites do not constitute endorsement by BDC of those websites or any information, opinions, products or services expressed or described on them.

Furthermore, the list is only a starting point and excludes applications not offered either in English or in French, or that are neither low cost nor free. When assessing which solution is best for your organization, you will probably consider many other factors.

BDC will review and edit this list regularly. If you offer a similar application and would like us to consider adding your solution, please contact us.