Track and analyze your statistics and visitors in one application with Visitor Analytics

Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?

Visitor Analytics started as a simple native statistics plugin on Wix, with the vision of presenting the most important website data in a way that could be easily interpreted by anyone.

Back then – and it’s even still partly the case today – we felt that existing web analytics applications somewhat neglected inexperienced users and made little effort to develop intuitive interfaces that would enable such individuals to easily interpret their own data. There were also minimal efforts to advance any comprehension around the crucial, and quite complex, data privacy considerations related to this.

After a couple of months, due to thousands of daily installations, it became clear that there was a substantial demand in the market. This led to the development of our standalone offering, enabling Visitor Analytics to be installed on almost any website.

In 2020, we broadened our horizons even further and adopted our new all-in-one approach – developing a range of new features that go far beyond website statistics.

Since then, we are very proud to have launched several advanced visitor behavior analytics modules, including event tracking, session recordings, heatmaps, and conversion funnels, as well as a range of integrated features, such as polls and surveys – never sacrificing our core beliefs of data privacy and user-friendliness.
With almost three million installations across 190 countries, being fully bootstrapped, and with fantastic feedback/inspiration from our awesome users, we have extremely high ambitions for what is to come. Stay tuned.

Why should I switch from Google Analytics to Visitor Analytics?

For so many reasons, I don’t know where to begin.

Firstly, because of privacy. Being an ethical platform, we guarantee that the data you collect will be safe and never share it with third parties, as others do. We don’t cross-track; meaning that we don’t follow a user’s activity from one site to another, gathering personal information in the process.

All data is stored on highly secure EU servers, while our users get to decide for themselves what data to collect and what to ignore – we strongly believe that they should remain in full control of their own data!

Secondly, Visitor Analytics comes with a set of behavior analytics features that Google Analytics simply does not have.

With Visitor Analytics, you can actually see how visitors are interacting with your site. You can watch real-time videos of their sessions and therefore understand and convert your visitors into customers faster – and, above all else, improve the experience they have on your website.

The heatmap feature is an amazing tool for visualizing where on your website visitors are interacting the most and which areas are experiencing the least attention.

We also have a conversion funnel feature that’s really easy to set up, enabling you to keep track of website interactions and dropouts – always with the aim of improving your site’s usability/conversion capabilities and making full use of existing data synergies.

You can also use Visitor Analytics to gather feedback from your visitors, via our integrated polls & surveys features.

I could go on and on about our features forever – and this is without touching upon our future roadmap or exceptional UX.

Perhaps above and beyond all of this, however, is the method we use for gathering data – Cookieless tracking. This approach enables our users to remove a whole bunch of complications, as there is no requirement for an annoying and intrusive opt-in/cookie banner and no concerns about crazily high privacy-related fines.

Only around 5% of website visitors give consent to the collection of their data if a website uses cookies. Imagine making decisions based on knowing only 5% of what is going on!

And, on top of everything, it’s very easy to switch with our Google importer feature, which will bring all of your historical data into our app, without the loss of any valuable stats. You just click a button and you’re ready to collect data from where you left off.

Visitor Analytics – The All-in-One Analytics Suite – Analytics, Statistics, Polls, Surveys, Funnels

Please tell us more about ‘Cookieless tracking’ and why this is important and relevant?

With cookieless tracking, we eliminated the need for setting cookies for stats and behavioral analytics altogether.

Instead of relying on controversial cookies, we use innovative technological approaches to gather important anonymous data for the website owners without touching the visitor’s privacy at all.

When a visitor enters a website for the first time, they leave a digital fingerprint by default. The Visitor Analytics tracking code will be able to later recognize that fingerprint on a subsequent page visit.

Fingerprinting has the advantage of not being stored on the user’s device, hence making cross-tracking impossible. Some anonymized data is stored, but only within the analytics environment, and it is impossible to associate it with the habits and history of a particular individual – which is a gray area when it comes to GDPR.

There’s also the accuracy issue that we solve with cookieless tracking.

Since many visitors opt-out when it comes to tracking cookies, their activity on a website is simply not tracked by analytics tools that rely on cookies, or even worse, it is tracked illegally without user consent.

In this situation, the website owner will either get incomplete data – and by incomplete, I mean potentially missing up to 95% of total traffic – or a giant fine if discovered to be tracking without consent

In such a fast-moving field, how do you keep up and stay ahead of the competition?

There is probably only one answer to this: we were able to gather amazingly talented people from all over the world on our team.

Everybody is extremely serious about what they do and dedicated to excellent results.

We listen very closely to what our users say they need and regularly check whether we can learn from our competition, which I always regard as very healthy.

What has the most challenging thing been over the last two years?

Creating a technical infrastructure that is able to process billions of sessions every day and developing technically complex features without compromising on data privacy or user-friendliness.

What is the thing that you are most proud of over the last two years?

Actually making the switch from a fairly simple web statistics application for beginners to an advanced all-in-one application, also being able to serve highly demanding professional enterprise clients. 

What can we expect to see from Visitor Analytics in the future?

Many new features – some of them being completely new on the market. Our roadmap is continuously expanding, as we aim to make Visitor Analytics the only platform a website owner truly needs in order to manage their site.

Besides enhancing our existing stats, analytics & feedback modules, we will soon launch a chat feature, for our users to be able to handle customer support within the app while staying privacy compliant.

Also, an SEO module is already in development, alongside an e-commerce module and enhanced automatic event tracking.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When we say, we aim to be the complete web analytics platform, we really mean it!