As a business owner, you know the importance of providing the best experience to your customers. In a brick-and-mortar store it’s relatively easy to speak with customers and get feedback from them instantly. The web, however, is a bit more complex. You can always use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media channels to engage with customers, but it still leaves a huge source of insights untapped for your website.

Google Analytics is popular among business owners because of its simplicity. But it isn’t the only tool out there. Whether you’re looking to gather additional insights or searching for a non-Google offering, below are a few Google Analytics alternatives worth your time.

Mouseflow

Sometimes just looking at general stats isn’t enough for your projects. Mouseflow is a fairly straightforward solution, which allows you to see exactly what your visitors see when they’re on your site. The most notable feature is the session recording option, which allows you to watch live recordings of your user activity from the control panel. You can even use heatmaps to get a high level overview of your users’ general trends. The primary advantages of Mouseflow over Google Analytics are the robust heatmap and recording capabilities. Plus they offer a free plan so you can hit the ground running without any risk.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is another heatmap tool that shows you how visitors click and scroll through your website. By visualizing user behavior on your site, you can better understand what users find most engaging, where you should place your CTAs, and which ads are clicked most often.

Heap Analytics

In today’s data-driven business environment, you can’t always use a single tool for processing all your data. Sometimes you’ll want to take past data and analyze it for trends and other key activities to drive your business. This is where Heap Analytics comes into play. Although it’s not intended to replace your data gathering tools, it serves as a good middle ground for when you’re not yet ready to make the leap from Google Analytics. Since the tool only requires a tiny snippet of code, you don’t need to worry about performance bottlenecks or other challenges.

Heap also supports real-time data analysis, funnel analysis, event visualization, and more. However, its primary strength lies in gathering data and helping users make sense of it retroactively.

Piwik

If you’re looking for a fully customizable analytics solution which can be tailored to fit your exact needs, Piwik is worth exploring. Although it isn’t as large a brand as Google Analytics, Piwik has been used by individuals, governments, and large corporations so it’s easy to use for any type of projects you have. As long as you have access to your web server, you can get Piwik up and running fairly easily.

It’s an open source tool, meaning you’re free to change the code to fit your exact needs. Unlike the other solutions mentioned in this article, Piwik is self-hosted so you don’t have to worry about other companies accessing your website statistics. There’s also a hosted version available should you not want the burden of technology logistics.

Gaining Customer Insights

For times when you’re looking to gather intelligence to understand your customers, Connectivity specializes in gaining insights specific to your prospects and audience. Using the Connectivity dashboard, you can upload data from contacts lists, create segmentation reports (based on locations, interests, and other key demographic points), and track your interactions with customers (whether it’s a phone call, email, or text). The experts at Connectivity can help you make the best use of your information. Whether you’re a novice or looking to take your business to the next level, you’ll have a team of professionals on standby, ready to help you tackle even the toughest challenges.

Check back into the Connectivity blog throughout the month of October for more information on analytics tools for small business. 

Charles Costa is a content strategist specializing in product marketing and business & technology writing. Charles is also a contributor to the Connectivity blog.