By S Mohan Ramkumar



There is always a mad rush among businesses to drive more traffic to their web properties. Given the single digit conversion rates, it’s totally understandable the urge to get more and more eyeballs to a website.

With some hardwork doing SEO, social marketing and content marketing, it’s very much possible to bring massive traffic to a website. After reaching that goal, the focus shifts to making the most of the inbound traffic.

It used to be really tough to measure the right metrics that matter to your business. Some would like to know exactly where their visitors have been before reaching their website. On the other hand, some would like to know more about what these visitors do on their website.

For a very long time, Google Analytics used to be the silver bullet for all things traffic number crunching. In fact, it still is a highly relevant and indispensable tool to measure and monitor web traffic.

The problem is that it takes a lot of work to bend Google Analytics to your business needs. And, businesses tend to outgrow the limited scope of making sense of the traffic data. Eventually they start looking for an app that gives them fine grained analytics.

After the break, let us take a look at a list of web apps that are doing a fabulous job when it comes to helping you understand the numbers and the customers better. Read on!

Mixpanel’s USP is to take you beyond pageviews and they are very much right. Once upon a time, pageviews used to be the only metric that mattered. But today, it’s all about how far you can engage your visitors.

Mixpanel lets you measure what your users do in your app by reporting events such as a user login on desktop or mobile apps. Their prices start at $150/month and there is a free tier that allows you to track 25,000 data points.

In today’s connected economy where social networking is influencing decision making, it’s time to stop seeing people as numbers in a dashboard. KISSmetrics ties all your analytics data to real people.

If you are on a quest to know who your customers are, then KISSmetrics is the weapon of choice. Like all good analytics solutions, you can build all your funnels and cohorts over here too. The beauty is you get to see where real people are in your funnel.

Prices start at $179/month and there is a free trial for 14 days for you take the app for a spin.

Figuring out which sections of a webpage get the most attention of your visitors is key to fine tune conversion optimization techniques. Crazy Egg comes to your rescue by helping you visualize user interaction in the form of heat maps.

They offer a handful tools like scroll maps, click tracking overlays and confetti (such a sweet name) to ascertain the usability of your website. If you are looking for a way to find out the boring parts in your website, get a Crazy Egg account for $9/month.

Real time analytics is not a luxury anymore. Fox Metrics helps you track your website and mobile application traffic in real time.

There are a few other real time traffic analytics tools available in the market. But, Fox Metrics offers comprehensive insights, better targeting and actionable KPIs. They have customized solutions available for a variety of verticals as well. Prices start at $20 a month.

Trak is one of the newest analytics tools in the market. The app specializes in throwing more light about your customers with individual visitor timelines and metrics that are customised to your web or mobile app.

From customer acquisition to activation and tracking referrals, Trak is the tool that keeps track of metrics that are vital to a business. You can build rich customer profiles to understand your users in detail and see a detailed timeline of all their activities. Plans start at $49/month.

This is one app that has been around for sometime now. Chartbeat’s real time traffic and audience-behavior data shows you who’s on your site and how they’re engaging with your content right now. This way, you can take action on what matters when it matters.

Chartbeat offers specialized products for publishing houses who want to ascertain what type content is engaging to the user and how far is the engagement with advertisements in display.

This is a great tool for your website if you are in the business of content creation. You can get access to these and more for $9.95 a month.

Intercom is the darling of product startups. The strength of this app lies in its ability to throw light on how a product is used by its customers and interact with them to gather feedback. Sounds like an ingenious idea, right?

If you want to be in constant touch with your users and hold their hands while they get used to the product, then Intercom is the perfect choice.

In the age of over priced customer support systems, this app bridges the gap between helping your customers, onboarding them properly and keeping them engaged with targeted messaging. I hear that it’s a steal for $49 a month!



I could not have found a better product to showcase how lucrative it is to solve a real world problem. And, it’s also a stellar example for picking a niche and serving it with gusto. Baremetrics is an app that breaks down the numbers from your Stripe account.

Just like us, they are hell bent on freeing people from the clutches of spreadsheets. From a single dashboard, you can track key revenue metrics like monthly recurring revenue, net revenue, churn rate, customer lifetime value, refunds, revenue growth rate and more.

If you aren’t sure about the idea behind this app, do check out the demo dashboard where the revenue metrics of Baremetrics are laid bare!

RJ Metrics is a business intelligence app that makes comprehending data far more easier for making data driven business decisions. While they cater to all online businesses, they specialize in unearthing insights for ecommerce companies.

From customer lifetime value to marketing RoI, repeat purchase rate and churn rate, the app offers a number of tailor made solutions out of the box. This and the ability to track custom metrics will cost you $750 a month.

BuzzSumo comes from the stable of AppSumo. There are so many apps to track social media metrics and I was not planning to include them in this list because those analytics are hardly useful to make business decisions.

However, BuzzSumo is an app that tracks the popularity of content for any topic or competitor. By breaking down the number of likes, retweets and other social shares articles have received, the app offers a way to gauge trending topics and key influencers.

Usually, companies build web scraping tools to collect such competitor information. It’s a good thing that you don’t have to do that anymore!