Bitly may be best known as a free link shortener, but its features do more than just save space. Once you’ve shortened links—and possibly even added a vanity URL shortener—Bitly gives you the tools to efficiently share those links and analyze their performances.
 Piwik

Piwik’s free software comes with a caveat: You’re required to download the program and host it on your own server. Piwik offers similar features to other popular analytics programs, including event tracking, visitor maps, and keyword search, but what sets it apart from its competitors is its mobile app and unlimited data storage.

More bloggers are starting to profess their love for Clicky, an analytics program that prides itself on offering up-to-the-minute results. For this reason, I think it’s necessary to include Clicky on this list despite the fact that for most it won’t be free. You won’t be required to pay for Clicky’s service if you have one website that receives fewer than 3,000 pageviews a day, but after that pricing can range from $9.99 to $79.99 per month.

At first glance, Clicky has something very attractive to offer—similar in-depth results to Google Analytics, but with a much cleaner interface. After all, what’s the use of mining data from your website performance if you can’t understand and interpret the information?

Clicky clearly lists every visitor, including when they visited, where they’re located, where they were referred from, how long they stayed on your page, and what actions they took. Clicky also provides heat maps in real time, not just for a collection of visitors, but for each individual. This is a feature normally offered only by analytics programs that specialize in heat map information, such as Crazy Egg, setting Clicky apart from its biggest competitors

SimilarWeb

Want to spy on your competitors? (Don’t worry, this is totally legal.) SimilarWeb lets you plug in any website or mobile app, receive insights about traffic and rankings, and compare the data against competing sites.

After entering a URL, you can see the website’s global rank, country rank, category rank (such as Books and Literature, Shopping, and Marketing and Advertising), and traffic by country. You’re also treated to an overview of total desktop and mobile visits from the past six months, which are broken down by time on site, pages per visit, and bounce rate.

For instance, here’s what these results look like for Facebook.com:

References: https://1stwebdesigner.com/track-website-traffic/

Measuring your web metrics is a critical step in determining whether your website is producing a positive ROMD and serving users in the manner intended. Data generated from web analytics programs is tabulated and refined into reports and visual presentations to help you understand whether your website is achieving a set of desired results.

Today, there's a vast array of metrics, ranging from simple to complex, for measuring web marketing performance. Each one serves a purpose for you to keep tabs on traffic to your website. Following are more details about eight of the more common web metrics tools and what they measure.

This tool helps you see if your visitors are clicking on what you want or clicking on something else. It's powerful because it al­lows you to look at your web pages and see what various segments of your customers are doing. In other words, if you segment your traffic, you know what each segment is doing when they get to your web pages. You may find, for example, that traffic that comes from Google is different or takes different actions than traffic that comes from Yahoo!.

Most webmasters look at page views to show them how many visitors come to their web pages. The page views tell how many times the web pages were loaded but not why the visitor showed up to begin with. You can find that out by simply placing a survey on the main web page people enter the most, and ask them why they came and what about your website they did or didn’t like.

Asking for this information can help you plan to sell products or provide information that will suit the majority of your visitors. The more you know about your visitors and why they show up, the better you can gear your website toward them. The drawback is if you're trying to sell something on your site, the more questions you ask visitors, the fewer orders you get. Even asking one or two simple questions can cause many visitors to leave without taking the desired action.

This tool helps you see if visitors actually perform an action to complete a task found on a web page -- for example, if someone went to the FAQs page and clicked on a link to see an article. This helps you determine if the content placed on each web page actually works. Of particular importance is the shopping cart abandonment rate: how many people who start to use the shopping cart abandon it before the order is placed.

With multichannel-impact analysis as part of the web metrics tools, you can measure the traffic generated by such channels as television, radio, or print ads.. This way, you can properly monitor where your traffic is coming from and judge which channel sources are the most productive.

Of all the web metrics tools used, web traffic data may be the most useful and most popular. Traffic data is a goldmine, as it contains a lot of valuable information, such as number of visitors to a website, the number of bytes sent and received, the page the visitor came from, what pag­es were seen, the visitor’s IP address, the authenticated user name of the requester, the date and time of the request, and so much more.

Any time a transaction occurs on a web page, especially if it's set up for ecommerce, the data is recorded, then becomes available and viewable as part of the web metrics tools. The data contains the num­ber of customers, number of orders processed, average size of the or­der, and total daily revenues.

The original source of data collection at the dawn of the web was web logs. Over time, they were upgraded to capture more data.When this occurred, they switched from being technically based to marketing-based. Web logs work like this:

The reason web logs are popular is because they're the most easily accessible source of data. Web logs are also the only data-capture mechanism that captures and stores the visits and behavior of robots (software applications that run automated tasks over the internet), which are sent from search engines. Furthermore, when using web logs, you own the data. Other web analytic tools use vendors to collect the data.

Web beacons are 1 x 1 pixel transparent images placed in web pages, and used in combination with cookies, to help you under­stand the behavior of your customers. A web beacon allows your site to record every action taken by visitors when they open the page. The beacon is part of the web page, but because it's transparent, it's invisible to the eye.

One advantage to using web beacons is they're easy to implement: They consist of only a few lines of code. Web beacons can be optimized to collect only the data you want and can collect data from multiple websites at the same time.

There are dozens of different ways to measure website performance by tracking metrics. Here are just a few of the key metrics marketers and webmasters routinely measure using analytics tools: