Footprint Analytics is a free website visitor analytics software that provides real-time analytics about your website visitors. At any time it can show all the visitors that are currently active on your website. For each of those visitors, you can see referrer, click path, geography, browser, OS, and more.
Footprint Analytics is not a replacement for Google Analytics, but instead a nice companion to it. Google Analytics is great in providing summarized info about website visitors. Like, how many total visits you had, popular pages, and so on. However, if you want to do analysis on a particular visitor, Google Analytics lacks in that. Apart from that, Google Analytics also does not gives any easy option to see live analytics. That is where Footprint analytics comes in.
Also check out: Free website uptime monitoring services.
Footprint Analytics works by adding a small JavaScript on all pages of your website. After that, Footprint Analytics will start capturing visitor information about your website. At any time, you can login to your free Footprint Analytics online, and see which visitors are currently active on your website, and which were recently active.
The dashboard of Footprint Analytics is quite intuitive. As you can see from the screenshot below, it shows one row for each visitor, and it shows colored puppets in each row. Green means currently active visitor. Orange means recently active visitor, and Red means either visitor is offline, or hasn’t done any activity for last 10 minutes.
This is just the starting point of seeing real-time visitor analytics. To see more information about any of the visitor, you need to just hover over the puppet corresponding to that visitor. This will bring nice info in a tooltip corresponding to that. This is the information that Footprint Analytics provides for each visitor when you hover over the icon:
- Visitor’s Geography
- Visitor’s ISP. If the visitor is logged in from a particular company or organization, then that name shows up.
- Current status
- Number of visits (this includes past visits)
- Pageviews in current visit
- Total pageviews in all visits
- Current visit duration
- Total duration of all visits
- First time activity record date for this visitor
- Operating System of visitor
- Browser of visitor
- IP address of visitor
As you can see, there is quite a lot of useful info in there. Let me also point to another useful info there: Even though Footprint Analytics shows real time analytics, it does stores historical information as well. As mentioned above, you can see number of past pageviews as well as total time that visitor has spent on your website. This is quite useful.
Now, the real time analytics information provided by Footprint Analytics does not ends here. You can actually drill-down in the dashboard to see more information for any user. For that, just click on the row corresponding to any visitor. This will bring up a detailed clickstream for that visitor.
This click stream shows user’s location on a map, as well as other attributes for the user (OS, Browser etc.). Apart from that, it shows you in reverse chronological order all the visits of that visitor, and all the pages viewed int that visit. It also shows referrer and exit page.
Also check out: SmarterStats, and Free Cross-Browser testing tools.
Footprint Analytics is a really feature rich software to see real-time analytics about visitors of your website. The best part is that it is completely free. Try Footprint Analytics here.
