Alexa Rank Alternatives: 3 Free Tools to Track Visitors to Your Website

Thursday, January 6th, 2022

As a website owner, one of your main goals is to attract as many visitors as possible.  One way to measure the popularity of your site is by using Alexa Rank.  However, after 25 years, the team behind Alexa rank is retiring its service on May 1st, 2022 and so webmasters are expected to find an Alexa rank alternative. So what can you do to prepare for this? There are other tools that will tell you more about who visits your site and how long they stay on it. In this article, we’ll go over three free tools that can help you better understand what’s happening on your website: Google Analytics, Woopra and Clicky Web Analytics.

 

1. What is Alexa Rank
2. Why should you care about your website’s popularity
3. Google Analytics – free tool for understanding visitors to your site
4. Woopra – free tool for understanding what people are doing on your site (e.g., how long they stay, where they come from)
5. Clicky Web Analytics – free tool that can help you understand who visits your site and how often (e.g., location, time spent on page)
6. Ways to use these tools effectively

 

 

What is Alexa Rank

Alexa Rank is a free web service that provides site rankings according to the traffic your site receives. The Alexa Rank tracks the popularity of your website by ranking it in relation to all other websites in the world. If you upgraded your account, you were able to view opportunities to get more website traffic free through content research, competitive website analysis, target audience analysis, keyword research, SEO analysis and more.

 

 

Why should you care about your website’s popularity

It’s important to track your website’s popularity because it gives you an idea of how successful your efforts are. If you’re paying for advertising, it is useful to know what traffic is most likely to convert into leads or sales.

 

 

Google Analytics – free tool for understanding visitors to your site

The first Google Analytics tool we’ll go over is the free version. For beginners, this makes a good tool to get started with. This way, if you find out that you really need more sophisticated features, you can upgrade later on without having wasted money initially. Google Analytics provides insight about where people come from and the keywords they put in their search engine before finding your page (e.g “organic dog food”). It also shows you what pages get the most traffic and how long visitors stay on your website. You can get reports for specific dates or get daily, weekly, monthly and yearly information. Google Analytics is an excellent tool to get a snapshot of where your traffic comes from and how they interact with your page.

Google Analytics: Where do my visitors come from?

When you go to www.google.com/analytics, click “Sign Up” in the top right corner and follow the steps to set up your account (enter your email address and choose a password). Once you’re logged in, you’ll see a dashboard that looks something like this:

It’s important to note that when someone visits your site, their activity isn’t automatically tracked. You have to add a small line of code to your website in order for it to work.

Google Analytics: What pages get the most traffic?

In order to see which pages on your site get the most traffic, you have to go into “Acquisition” > “All Traffic” > Channels and then select “Landing Page.”

Click on “Top Entry Pages,” you’ll be able to see what page each person who visits your website lands on first before they leave. This information is free from yearly fees or overestimated data that many other services charge extra for. Also, Google Analytics offers free support, free tutorials and free tips on how to track your visitors in increasing levels of detail.

Google Analytics: How long do visitors stay on my site?

If you’re interested in how long a person stays on a page, google “Google Analytics” and click “Tools.” Once you’re there, type in your URL into the search bar. The free version lets you track three pages for free. This should be enough to get you started so that if you find out down the road that you need more than three pages tracked, then you can upgrade without losing any data. Google Analytics measures time as so many seconds before someone leaves your website.

Google Analytics: What keywords bring me free website traffic?

Once again, type in your URL into the search bar at the top of Google Analytics under Tools and select “Keyword Selector.” This will help you find out what keywords people are using to get to your site.

 

 

Woopra – free tool for understanding what people are doing on your site (e.g., how long they stay, where they come from)

Woopra is a tool that helps you understand what people are doing on your website. It shows you how long they stay on each page, where they come from, and what other pages they visit on your site. This information can be really helpful in understanding how people interact with your website and what pages are the most popular. Plus, it’s free to use!

Woopra: How long do visitors stay on my site?

To see how long people stay on your website, you have to go into “Visitors” and then under “Sessions.” Then, click “Action.”

I chose to look at activity by duration. You can also view activity by number of page views or by events (e.g., listening to music, watching a video). After I followed those steps, I got this result:

You can see how many minutes each person stayed on the page and the percentage of total sessions that it represents. This tells you what % of people who visit this page leave after viewing it for x amount of time. To put this information into perspective, here’s an example of a page on my site that has an average session duration of 1 minute and 43 seconds.

Woopra: Where are my visitors coming from?

Under “Sources” you can see where your traffic is coming from. I’ve chosen to look at Facebook under the social tab because it’s one of my biggest referrers. You can also view referrals by country, city, platform, comment section, etc.

 

 

Clicky Web Analytics – free tool that can help you understand who visits your site and how often (e.g., location, time spent on page)

Clicky is a free tool for understanding who visits your site and how often. When you create an account, they give you a 7-day free trial with no credit card required.

Many people don’t know that most website statistics are delayed by 2-3 months from the date they’re collected because it takes time for data to reach the providers servers. This can lead to major inaccuracies in reports.

What is Clicky?

It’s a specialized statistics program that lets you see where your traffic comes from and what people are doing on your site.

Why does it matter?

It’s important to know who your visitors are and what they’re doing on your site so you can make changes as needed. For example, you might take down a poorly converting page that no one is visiting or re-work your homepage if it’s not bringing in traffic. You can also use this data to figure out how much money you’re making per visitor (referred to as eCPM).

What can I do with Clicky?

Key features of Clicky include live stats, real-time stats, heatmaps, uptime checks and conversions tracking. They also have other tools like automatic notifications when certain things happen on your website. This would be useful for people who want to know when someone signs up for their newsletter so they can start marketing to them right away or if someone makes a purchase then immediately sends an order confirmation email with special offers.

 

 

Ways to use these tools effectively

There are many ways to use these tools effectively to improve your website. Some of the most important ways include:

1. Tracking your website’s traffic to see where it’s coming from and how people are interacting with it. This information can help you make changes as needed to improve your website’s popularity and usability.
2. Understanding who is visiting your website and what they’re doing on it. This data can help you figure out what pages are the most popular, what content people are engaging with, and how much money you’re making per visitor.
3. Setting up alerts so you’re notified when something important happens on your website (e.g., someone signs up for your newsletter, someone makes a purchase, etc.). This helps you engage with your audience and start building a relationship.

 

 

Conclusion

Alexa rankings are a great way to measure your website’s popularity, but they’re not the only free tool out there. You can choose an Alexa alternative we mentioned above that is available on the web today. If you want more information about who is visiting your site and what they’re doing on it, Google Analytics can be used for this purpose as well as Clicky Web Analytics or Woopra. All of these tools will provide different types of data that you may find useful in understanding how to make changes based on visitor engagement with certain pages.

Filed under: Tips & Tricks

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