10 Tools to Track Visitor Traffic on Your WordPress Website

Do you know what your target users do when they open your WordPress website? What is their favorite page, and what are the articles that attract them to your blog?

You need to know who visits your website, where do the visitors come from, and what do they exactly do when they land on your WordPress site in real-time. This is where web analytics step in. Analytics play a vital role in determining whether your SEO and marketing campaigns bring relevant traffic to your website.

The more insights you collect about your visitors, the more you’ll recognize their behaviors and improve your WordPress website by optimizing it for a better conversion rate.

WordPress still doesn’t have built-in web analytics and it is likely that it won’t because there are lots of excellent plugins and tools that you can use to keep track of your web visits, user behavior, and more.

Following are 9 of the most popular tools that you can use to track visitor traffic on your WordPress website.

Google Analytics by Sumo

If you’re already familiar with the Sumo plugin, then you know that using real-time web analytics by Sumo will be worth it.

Google Analytics by Sumo makes it super easy to view your Google Analytics directly in the Sumo dashboard of your WordPress website. You don’t have to dig through your data to find the numbers that matter. Google Analytics by Sumo highlights your most important stats so you can easily go about how to measure website traffic.

• Clear Overview: You’ll get a nice overview of how your website performs from page views, users, session duration, bounce rate, and more.
• On-Page Analytics: You can see your stats directly on each page, shown only to you and you can also choose which critical stats you want to see on each page.
• Real-Time: GA by Sumo allows you to see which users are currently browsing your WordPress website, from where they came from and the pages that they click on in real-time.
• Popular Pages: You’ll get an overview of your most popular pages to see where your content performs well and where you need to make some adjustments.

Google Analytics by MonsterInsights

Google Analytics by MonsterInsights is one of the most commonly used web tracking plugins for WordPress websites.

It provides you with amazing analytic tools and an intuitive interface. GA by MonsterInsights also provides you with a universal or asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, can track search results, outbound links, and downloads, and it can even provide users with IP hiding for stricter privacy.

When you connect your GA and your WordPress website with MonsterInsights, you can see how your visitors find and use your website, and you’d know exactly how to track website traffic on WordPress.

• Easy Setup: With MonsterInsights, it’s easy to set up Google Analytics on your site without touching any code. If you can point-and-click, then you can use MonsterInsights.
• Real-Time: With MonsterInsights, you don’t have to wait until the next day to find out about traffic spikes or potential problems. You’ll get real-time stats, so you can unlock the maximum potential revenue for each customer.
• Universal Tracking: MonsterInsights uses universal tracking, so you can track your users across devices and platforms. With demographics and interest reports, you also get a better understanding of your audience.
• E-commerce/Ads Tracking: MonsterInsights’ E-commerce add-on helps you add Google Analytics E-commerce tracking to your WordPress WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads store.
• Custom Dimensions/Event Tracking: You can take full advantage of all the powerful Google Analytics features such as custom dimensions, file download tracking, outbound link tracking, events tracking, performance tracking, and more.

The premium version of the plugin gives you access to custom reports, 24/7 technical support, and also AdSense tracking.

It is an extremely customizable and adaptive plugin, and it gives its users complete tracking code control. That’s why it’s no wonder this plugin has become essential to some of the most successful business WordPress websites.

AFS Analytics

AFS Analytics is a powerful plugin that lets you explore your analytics with a drag-and-drop canvas, modern data visualizations while getting a real-time and robust picture of your visitors’ behaviors.

You’ll be able to analyze your visitor behavior and understand what it takes to improve your website content. An Automated Event Tracking included too, that tracks everything from clicks, downloads, video views, form access, and submissions, scroll depths, etc.

The AFC Web Analytics tool provides you with two real-time reports that are constantly updated. The real-time dashboard displays your website metrics on a single page, and the “Right now” report allows you to monitor the current activity on your website.

This plugin also comes with an algorithm that is capable of recovering in real-time the keywords used by each visitor. Thanks to artificial intelligence, prediction is getting more accurate and powerful over time. The algorithm captures the data from your website but also from your Google Search Console account via an API.

MixPanel

With MixPanel, you can analyze users’ interactions across the customer journey by utilizing internal and external data. This will help you to find ways to improve the engagement rate and customer lifetime value by engaging with users based on actions they’ve taken.

This plugin also helps you track real-time events on your WordPress site and allows you to build user retention by sending push-notifications and emails.

Jetpack by WordPress

Jetpack by WordPress is one of the fundamental plugins for your WordPress website. It’s a robust analytics tool that also comes with a number of other features like security and image optimization.

This plugin will help you to track your most successful posts, visitor’s peak traffic times and timelines of the users’ visits. It also provides you with website monitoring options and mobile optimization services that are aimed to attract more traffic to your WordPress website.

Along with web visitor insights, Jetpack is also excellent if you want to secure your WordPress site from brute force attacks and also provides you with useful customizing tools for your site, like galleries and notifications. You can also customize the whole website with options like:

• Infinite Scroll
• Sidebar Widgets
• Custom CSS
• Tiled Galleries and more.

One thing to keep in mind about Jetpack is that it can only be run on a WordPress.com account, which is not the case with the free WordPress.org software.

Jetpack is a plugin that is created by Automattic and its features were originally developed for WordPress.com users. For example, if you use the Jetpack content delivery network (CDN), it will host your files on WordPress.com servers. That means that you’ll need a WordPress.com account to access that infrastructure in the same way that WordPress.com users do.

WD Google Analytics

A versatile and user-friendly WordPress website tracking plugin that can help you bring your Google Analytics dashboard to your WordPress dashboard. This plugin will help you get up to date reports on how your website performs, compare metrics, track users, and monitor targeted user activities.

In addition to the built-in Analytics reports, Google Analytics WD lets you obtain custom reports on various metrics and dimensions, as well as providing you with eCommerce, AdSense, and AdWords report. These reports come in comprehensive charts with the possibility to export in PDF or CSV formats.

Google Analytics WD is a tool that is a certified member of the Google Analytics Technology Partners Program, so its faultless performance is guaranteed.

This plugin also allows you to set and manage goals to track user interactions on your website, such as duration, destination, and pages per session, each of the goals coming with their own set of options to choose. You can set as many goals as you want.

The premium version of Google Analytics WD offers the following additional features:

• Analytics reports on Demographics, Interests, Geo, Behavior, Technology, Mobile, Site content, Site Speed, Events, Goals.
• Tracking Custom Dimensions: Logged in, Post type, Author, Category, Tags, Published Month, Published Year.
• Custom Reports with any possible configurations of metric and dimension.
• Six E-commerce tracking reports based on Time to Purchase, Transaction ID, Sales Performance, Product SKU, Product Category, Product Name.
• Link and track your Google AdSense and Google AdWords accounts.
• Alerts and Pushover notifications to monitor any changes in your website traffic.
• Set tracking exclusions based on WordPress roles and users.

WP Power Stats

This is one of the simplest analytical WordPress plugins in the marketplace. With WP Power Stats, you’ll constantly be provided with comprehensive insights about the traffic that comes to your website.

The light-weightiness of this plugin makes it fast, secure, and reliable. The highly-customizable settings will help you in fine-tuning your visitor tracking. Some of the top features of WP Power Stats are:

• Multiple languages
• One-click install
• Fully customizable plugin
• Private statistics on your hosting
• Keeping track of page views, referral traffic, devices that the users visit from, operating system, location and much more

Kissmetrics

Instead of focusing on the overall website usage, Kissmetrics tracks individual visitors and follows the links they’ve clicked and pages they’ve visited. In essence, instead of telling you what’s happening on your WordPress website, Kissmetrics tells you who is doing what on your site.

Even though it provides users with no overall website traffic data, by providing you with insights about individual visitors, you’ll know how your page performs and when it is the time to optimize in order to increase your conversion rate.

ExtraWatch

This is generally an optimization plugin, but it has successfully evolved into an excellent tool for web traffic analysis. ExtraWatch includes optimization options such as direct site editing, and also provides daily and weekly stats in preferred forms.

This plugin will provide you with access to monitoring visitor behavior, time spent on website and reports when visitors leave the site. ExtraWatch also allows “bad words” blocking, which helps you in blocking specific IP addresses.

Site Kit by Google

Site Kit allows its users to integrate Google Analytics with the WordPress site. The tool is owned by Google and is specifically built for WordPress site owners who want to track user activity and overall traffic. Site managers can view their traffic by going to the provided dashboard without having to leave the WordPress dashboard.

Site Kit provides solutions for managing and deploying other Google tools for better website supervision. The said tool supports the following Google products:

• Analytics
• AdSense
• Search Console
• Tag Manager
• Optimize
• PageSpeed Insights

The Site Kit tool is completely free to use, easy-to-manage, and can be set up in a matter of minutes.

Wrapping Up

Above all, the choice of a tracking plugin for your WordPress website needs to be done according to your goals and needs. If you want just to track the amount of traffic, you can choose each of the tools above to support your analytics. If you want to dig deeper into data, some solutions and premium versions are better than others on the list.

In essence, each of the plugins serves the same goal – collecting data about your website visits. Whatever data you get, you need to use the insights to continuously test, adjust, and improve your WordPress site to scale it for more visits and better conversion rate.

If you already use some of the tools above or are considering using them and have additional questions, the DevriX team is here to help you out.