Every visit to your site is a chance to understand your customers better. But terms like “conversion rate” or “behavior analytics” can feel like a new language. That’s why we’re breaking down the best ways to track website statistics in an actionable way that makes sense for small business owners—no data science degree needed. This article will help you understand how to track statistics for website growth.
From understanding who your visitors are to what they’re looking for, the right website tracking tools can help uncover clear insights that drive real business decisions, helping grow your customer base and bottom line. Whether you’re new to analytics or want more value from your reports, we’ll walk you through exactly what to track and which tools simplify the process.
- Understanding statistics for website growth helps improve sales, engagement and customer relationships. You don’t have to track everything, just the data that drives results.
- Tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity show what’s working and what’s not.
- Tracking user behavior means learning directly from how customers browse, click and convert.
- Use website statistics to improve your business, from your digital marketing strategy to web design, creating a site that’s more intuitive, professional and customer-friendly.
A dashboard of statistics about websites via Depositphotos
Why tracking website statistics is your business growth secret weapon
Understanding website statistics and how to track them provides a direct line to interpreting your customers’ needs. Every click, scroll and bounce tells a story, and paying attention to those clues can lead to real business outcomes like increased sales, better customer service and smarter marketing strategies. Think of statistics about business websites as customer conversations happening silently behind the scenes.
Want to know who your website should be targeting? Use our guide to find your target audience.
When someone spends three minutes on your home page but bounces from your contact form immediately, they’re telling you something important. Understanding this data helps you respond to your customers’ needs, like having a 24/7 focus group for your business, except it’s automatic, honest and doesn’t cost you anything beyond the tools you’re already using.
Many small businesses still rely on gut feeling and guesswork for web development, missing valuable user behavior insights. Successful businesses use data to drive sales because it tells them much more than basic traffic numbers. Tracking is about working smarter, not harder. According to LinkedIn, 67% of small businesses invest over $10,000 annually in data analytics. It might sound like a lot, but the benefits are worth it.
5 standout tools for tracking website statistics
These top five tracking tools can help you turn your website numbers into valuable, actionable insights.
New to small business website statistics? Find out how to use tracking to grow your business.
1. Google Analytics
Best for: Free, comprehensive foundation for website tracking that integrates with other Google tools.
Limitations: Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has a learning curve, and can feel overwhelming if you’re new to analytics or just need quick, surface-level insights.
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tracking tools out there, and it’s completely free. It tracks who’s visiting your site, how they got there, what they clicked on and where they lost interest or dropped off.
The learning curve might feel steep initially, but the basics are surprisingly accessible. Start with the “Behavior Flow” report, which shows how visitors navigate your site, indicating which web pages keep them engaged and which need work. If you’re running a coffee subscription site, for example, you might discover that Instagram users browse more pages but don’t convert, while Google Search users are more likely to subscribe. That’s a helpful insight to refine your social media strategy or create targeted landing pages.
Particularly useful for small businesses, acquisition channels reports can show whether your social media efforts or email campaigns are actually driving website traffic. GA4 also includes predictive metrics like purchase probability, which can help anticipate customer behavior. You’ll also get automated alerts when something changes suddenly, like a drop in traffic or spike in conversions.
2. Hotjar
Best for: Visual tools for understanding user behavior through heatmaps and recordings.
Limitations: While it’s great for visuals, Hotjar doesn’t provide in-depth traffic or demographic data, so it’s best used alongside another analytics tool.
Hotjar brings a visual element to website statistics with heatmaps and screen recordings so you can identify patterns and physically see where users click, scroll and pause. This website tracking tool is especially useful for informing web redesign or optimizing key pages. If you notice visitors scrolling halfway down a product page but not getting to the “Buy Now” button, you might need to reduce or move the page content.
Hotjar’s features—feedback widgets and pop-up surveys—allow you to ask visitors questions like, “Did you find what you were looking for?” This provides quantitative and qualitative stats on website design to guide your improvements.
3. Matomo
Best for: Full data ownership and privacy-focused businesses.
Limitations: The manual setup means Matomo can be less beginner-friendly and more time-consuming.
Matomo is a great option for businesses that want more control over their online data. Unlike Google Analytics, which sends data to Google’s servers, Matomo can be self-hosted, giving you full ownership over your customer data.
This tracking tool is ideal if your business operates in a privacy-sensitive space or needs to comply with strict regulations like GDPR or HIPAA. Matomo gives you access to a full range of analytics features like pageviews, bounce rate and user flow, but without third-party tracking. You can also run A/B tests, analyze conversion funnels and create custom reports, without sacrificing privacy.
4. Microsoft Clarity
Best for: Visual behavior analytics with heatmaps and session recordings, at no cost and with minimal setup.
Limitations: Clarity lacks advanced reporting and goal-tracking features offered by tools like Google Analytics.
For heatmaps and session replays at no cost, Microsoft Clarity is a great choice. It’s 100% free, with no limits on the number of users or sessions. One standout feature of Clarity is “rage click” detection, letting you know if a visitor repeatedly clicks the same button. This might indicate the button is broken, hard to use or confusing, and Clarity will show you exactly where it’s happening.
Microsoft Clarity allows you to filter recordings by mobile or desktop users and specific regions. Use this tracking tool to find small user experience tweaks that make a big difference in how your website performs.
5. Mixpanel
Best for: Analyzing conversion funnels and user journeys.
Limitations: It’s powerful but can be overkill (and more expensive) for businesses without complex user journeys or product flows to track.
Mixpanel goes beyond standard analytics by focusing on the actions users take, like clicking a button, signing up for an account or adding a product to a cart. This tracking tool is ideal if your site or app has multiple steps in the user journey. For example, if you run an online fitness platform, you can track how many visitors view a class, register and attend.
One of Mixpanel’s best features is its ability to build conversion funnels where you can see exactly where visitors drop off and where they complete a desired action. It’s also great for retention analysis, helping to show which customers are returning to your business website and why.
Source: Website design with clear CTAs by spoonlancer via 99designs
4 tools to decode behavior analytics
While traditional statistics about websites, like standard traffic analytics, tell you what’s happening on your site, behavior analytics tools reveal why users behave the way they do. These analytics tools reveal patterns behind the small business statistics on website behavior, like why visitors aren’t converting to making a purchase, finding your content engaging enough or struggling with the User Experience (UX).
1. Fullstory
Best for: Advanced platform with session replays and AI-driven predictive analytics.
Fullstory takes user session recordings to the next level, using AI-powered insights to highlight friction points in real time. You’ll see exactly how customers move through your site, where they hesitate, scroll and drop off, helping you to understand patterns like users rage-clicking on a broken link or struggling to complete a booking form. This means you can fix issues quickly and create a smoother customer experience.
2. Heap
Best for: Automatic data capture across platforms with minimal setup requirements.
Heap automatically captures every user interaction without requiring any technical setup. This means you’ll spot patterns you never thought to look for, like users who repeatedly click a non-clickable element or abandon your sign-up form at the same field. These insights let you fix customer frustrations before they cost you business, and can reveal simple changes that will dramatically improve your conversion rates.
3. Quantum Metric
Best for: AI-powered real-time detection of user frustration points.
Quantum Metric combines behavior insights with real-time alerts so you can react faster to what’s not working. This tool goes beyond standard analytics and uses AI to detect moments of frustration, like when users suddenly stop clicking or abandon the checkout process. For example, you might get notified when a specific product page is causing high exit rates, which will help you fix the content or website design before it hurts your sales. It’s like having a customer experience assistant watching your site 24/7.
4. Hotjar
Best for: Heat mapping and user recordings that visualize where users click and scroll.
Hotjar lets you see your website through your visitors’ eyes. With heatmaps and scroll tracking, you can quickly spot what draws user attention and what’s ignored. You’ll also get access to screen recordings of sessions, so you can watch users interact with your pages in real time. Hotjar is perfect for tracking web design statistics and flagging issues like buttons that sit too low on the page or content that doesn’t get seen. Quick visitor surveys also help create a visual and actionable feedback loop.
Want to know how to build a website that attracts and converts customers? Explore these web design ideas.
Business website design via Squarespace
Making sense of your website data: What to actually track
Not all website metrics deserve equal attention. For a small business, stats like conversion rate—the percentage of visitors who take a desired action—tell you far more than total traffic numbers. For example, a local bakery attracting 100 visitors who place 10 orders outperforms one with 1,000 visitors but only 5 orders.
Start by defining what success looks like for your business, then work backward to identify the metrics that will directly impact those outcomes. This focused approach will prevent the analysis paralysis that happens when you try to track everything at once.
Most analytics tools, especially Google Analytics and Matomo, make it easy to set up and automate regular reports. Just create a simple dashboard that includes total visitors, top-performing traffic sources, bounce rate and conversions. It’s also important to look at how your metrics relate to each other. A short “time-on-site” plus a high conversion rate probably means your site is efficient, whereas a long “time-on-site” with a low conversion rate could be a sign of confusion or a lack of clear CTAs.
Source: Responsive design for mobile by malzdesign via 99designs
Here’s a common example: your bounce rate is high on mobile devices but low on desktop. That’s a sign that your mobile layout might need work. Or maybe you find that email traffic converts better than social, telling you where to invest your time, money and energy, meeting customers where they’re most responsive.
Google Analytics: Getting started with the best overall tool without the overwhelm
Despite its steep learning curve, Google Analytics is the best free tracking tool to gain insights into how your website is performing. Start with the basics like tracking total visitors, traffic sources and top-performing pages, then move on to deeper metrics. By exploring new features, you can create data-driven strategies to boost your online presence and search engine optimization (SEO).
To get started, create a free Google Analytics account and connect it to your website. Platforms like Shopify, WordPress and Wix usually have a plugin or integration that makes this easy. Or try Google Tag management to edit the code directly.
In GA4, actions like scrolls, video plays and clicks are automatically tracked as “events.” This means you’ll quickly see what people actually do, not just where they go. You can also set up custom goals, like “Contact form submitted” or “Newsletter sign-up,” to track your key business outcomes.
Always check your “Acquisition” report to see how users find your business site, whether through social media platforms, Google or email. Then explore “Behavior Flow” to understand how visitors move between pages. This helps identify which marketing channels bring in high-quality traffic and where visitors drop off. With a few tweaks like adjusting a landing page or moving a CTA higher up, you can convert more visitors into customers.
Turning insights into action: Website improvements that work
Now you’ve got your insights, it’s time to use them to improve your website. If your analytics tools have flagged a problem, like visitors abandoning the checkout page at the shipping information step, take action by adding a progress indicator or offering a shipping cost calculator earlier in the process. Small changes like these, directly informed by data, often deliver surprising results.
For example, TruckersReport, a community for professional truck drivers, ran six rounds of A/B testing to improve their landing page’s conversion rate. They implemented several changes: using responsive design for mobile devices, improving the headline to address drivers’ main concerns, replacing the generic stock photo with a relatable image and simplifying the overall design. These improvements led to a 79.3% increase in conversions compared to their original landing page.
Want to know how to improve website design statistics? Update your website layout and plan your website redesign to improve performance.
Here are a few quick steps you can take to respond to common website issues:
- If users keep leaving at checkout, simplify the process and add trust signals, like logos of trusted payment providers and clear returns and refund policies, to help customers feel confident completing their purchase.
- If visitors spend time on your blog but don’t convert, add more CTAs.
- If one source (like Instagram) brings high-converting traffic, focus more of your marketing efforts there.
Start small, measure consistently, grow confidently
When you understand the basics of website stats, tracking your metrics won’t feel intimidating. With the right tools and a clear idea of what to measure, you can turn data into action, and action into real results. Every insight will help you make smarter business decisions.
FAQs about tracking website statistics
What’s the difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console?
Google Analytics shows how people interact with your site, including how long they stay, what pages they visit and whether they complete key actions. Google Search Console focuses on how your site appears in Google Search results. It shows which keywords bring people to your site, errors affecting visibility and how to improve your search engine rankings.
How often should I check my website statistics?
You don’t need to check your stats daily, but regularly is recommended. Weekly check-ins help you spot changes early, and monthly reviews are great for understanding trends. If you’re running a campaign or making updates, keep a closer eye every day to track what’s working in real time and make any necessary changes.
Which website metrics matter most for e-commerce businesses?
Conversion rate is the most important metric that tells you if your visitors are buying. You’ll also want to track cart abandonment, average order value and where your web traffic comes from. These insights will help you improve customers’ shopping experience and increase sales.
Can I track user behavior without violating privacy regulations?
Yes. Tools like Matomo offer privacy-first tracking, and most platforms let you customize your settings to stay compliant with laws like GDPR and CCPA. Just be sure to be transparent with users by updating your privacy policy and offering cookie consent where it’s needed.
How do I fix a high bounce rate on my website?
First, check that your content matches visitor expectations when they click through to your site. Make sure your pages load quickly, especially on mobile, and that call-to-actions are clear and easy to find. Small changes like shortening headlines or moving buttons can reduce bounce rates and keep visitors engaged.
