The short answer
You need three kinds of information and they come from different places: how people arrive and behave on the site, how you perform in search, and what individual sessions actually looked like. One tool per question is enough.
Running two traffic analytics tools guarantees two different numbers, because they count differently. Pick one and use it for trends.
What each category answers
| Question | Category | Free options exist? |
|---|---|---|
| How many people, from where, doing what | Traffic analytics | Yes, several |
| Which queries show us in search | Search console tools | Yes, from the engines |
| Why did someone abandon that form | Session replay | Yes, with limits |
| Is the site fast enough | Performance testing | Yes |
| Is the site accessible | Accessibility auditing | Yes |
The second row is free from the search engines themselves and is the most under-used. It is the only place you see what people searched before arriving.
The privacy trade-off
Analytics tools differ substantially in what they collect and where it goes. Some are designed to avoid personal data and work without consent banners; others are not.
- Check what data leaves your site and to whom
- Check whether your consent banner is legally required by the tool you chose
- Consider a privacy-focused tool if your consent rates are poor
- Remember that blocked analytics undercounts, sometimes heavily
That last point matters for interpretation. If a third of your visitors block analytics, your numbers are directional rather than exact, and comparing against another tool with different blocking will not reconcile.
Do not skip the free search data
Search Console and its equivalents are free, come directly from the search engine, and tell you things no analytics tool can: which queries showed your pages, at what position, and how often people clicked.
That is the data that tells you what to write next. Most sites we look at have it connected and have never opened it.
Measure what you will act on
A dashboard with forty metrics gets looked at once. Pick the handful that would change a decision: enquiries, the pages that produce them, and where people abandon.
Everything else can be available without being on the front page.