Web Analytics
Saturday, April 14th, 2007
I just spend six hours researching web analytics and web analytic software looking for a solution that would meet the needs of SEO Company. Three hours of that was spend on ClickTracks site reviewing their tutorials and Marshall Law’s flash training on Web Analytics Tips and Tricks. The ClickTracks Pro version looks like a very nice product. It looked so good I signed up for a couple of their free live Webianars on that product.
After checked out a number of blogs, product reviews, and web analytics sites during my research I decided to list them here for your enjoyment. After my pageviews doubling from 600,000 a month to 1,200,000 a month in February I decided I really needed to track my visitors better.
Web analytics is defined by Wikipedia as “the measurement of the behavior of visitors to a website or web application. In a commercial context, it especially refers to the measurement of which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.”
Software Companies — I raided the e-consultancy Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide 2006 list (see below), Googled up “web analytics” and added a few from the top 20, and some of the companies like Clicktracks are house hold words.
ClickTracks — Offers intuitive, insightful analysis of your web site. It shows you campaigns, site navigation patterns, PPC, SEO and ROI stats instantly. ClickTracks is a web analytics program that uses a radically different architecture, making it easy for marketers to perform desktop datamining activities that are difficult or impossible to implement using traditional web analysis methods.
CoreMetrics — Provides organizations with a single resource for planning, measuring, and testing truly integrated marketing efforts. With groundbreaking visualization tools, Coremetrics offers a complete application for data analysis rather than a simple toolkit for reporting, enabling Coremetrics to deliver targeted business solutions that allow marketers to uncover value quickly and take action.
eVisit Analyst — Web analytics that provides all the functionality of a standard website analysis system but is packed with unique features aimed at helping you to make key business decisions, minimize marketing spend, maximize sales conversions, improve customer retention, optimize website performance and generate a higher return on investment.
Fireclick — Web analytics is made easy through a hosted application service that automatically gathers and stores data for online businesses. No set-up fee. No training fee. No expensive consulting required. To report, present, and share the analysis of data, Fireclick provides a comprehensive suite of tools unmatched in the industry. Fireclick provides integration of Web analytics with paid search engines, e-mail providers, affiliate programs and more in order to provide a consolidated view of all site activity.
Foviance — WebAbacus is powerful online behavioral analysis software that analyses the interactions that users make with a website or other interactive system, such as DiTV or mobile. This data is a rich mine of information and can be easily cross-referenced against demographic or customer data to provide revealing insights about user behavior, segmented in meaningful ways.
Google Analytics — It tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. Focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors. It has the enterprise level capabilities you’d expect from a high end web analytics offering and also provides timesaving integration with AdWords. Of course, Google Analytics tracks all of your non-AdWords initiatives as well.
HitsLink — Established in 1999, HitsLink is a leading online service to track hundreds of real-time website statistics. Easy to implement, simply paste a small tracking script on your site’s pages and start viewing reports within seconds.
Indextools — Provides accurate, insightful and timely data to help you make informed business decisions about the performance of your website and online marketing campaigns. Is a comprehensive website reporting system that provides real-time insight into visitor behavior, and helps marketers and site managers increase sales, reduce marketing costs and encourage visitor retention.
Lynchpin — Covers all your online marketing channels as required, including: natural and paid search activity, email campaigns, banner advertising and affiliate program activity. And it can show you how these channels are working together and operating over time to give you a bigger picture of how effective your online activity is operating.
Nedstat — More sales, more leads, more savings, more profit. Focuses on increasing online conversions and improving online marketing performance. Offers flexible web analytics services that can grow with your needs.
WebTrends — WebTrends Analytics produce is a award-winning solution for accurate, timely web analytics to help you measure and improve your online marketing ROI. WebTrends Marketing Warehouse complements this solution with an enterprise-class data warehouse to fuel targeted relationship marketing campaigns.
Websidestory — Running a successful online business requires you to continually manage, measure and optimize your web presence. Understanding where your visitors are coming from, what content and products they are most interested in and how they are navigating your site are key to improving your online presence. The product is a comprehensive on-demand web analytics solution, delivering up-to-the-second insight into online visitor and customer behavior. This actionable insight can help you increase sales by targeting your most valuable visitors, monetize your site content and measure and improve your marketing return on investment.
Reports — Both these sites are well known from their quality reports.
e-consultancy — Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide 2006
MarketingSherpa — Buyer’s Guide to Web Analytics 2006: Software to Measure Your Web Site Performance
Books — These are all written by Eric so this is not a very deeply researched list. I have read enough in the PDFed Web Analytics Demystified sample chapters to know that Eric is producing quality stuff.
Big Book of Key Performance Indicators, The — The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators promises to be the final word on the subject, written by Eric T. Peterson, a worldwide authority on the subject. Mr. Peterson regularly advises some of the world’s largest companies on their KPI-deployment strategies.
Web Analytics Demystified: A Marketer’s Guide to Understanding How Your Web Site Affects Your Business — Is about the field of Web traffic data and how it can be leveraged to improve one’s Web site. This is a book about making data actionable and turning information into insight.
Web Site Measurement Hacks: Tips and Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business — This is a brand new book from Eric T. Peterson and O’Reilly & Associates covering all aspects of web measurement and analysis. Web Site Measurement Hacks is the first truly complete book on the subject of web analytics ever published.
Blogs — I borrowed from Avinash Kaushik’s Top Ten Analytics Blogs list and then worked the blogrolls and came up with these quality blogs.
Google Analytics Blog — An unofficial Google analytics blog by ROI Revolution.
Inside Web Analytics: Matt Belkin — Blogs on inside Web Analytics. Matt is VP of best practices for Omniture and has a long history in web analytics.
Instant Cognition: Clinton Ivy — Discusses visual report design and web analytics. Clinton is a board of directors for the Web Analytics Association.
Occam’s Razor: Avinash Kaushik — Analytics Evangelist for Google.
Official Google Analytics Blog, The — The latest news, tips, and resources straight from the Google Analytics team.
Tracking Techniques: C. Furlong — Dedicated To Making Web Analytics Professionals More Successful. Furlong works with a VOIP startup company.
Web Analytics Demystified: Eric Peterson — Practical guide to web analytics, business intelligence, and database marketing. Eric is an author of a number of web analytic books.
Web Metrics Guru: Marshall Sponder — Blogs on web analytics, web metrics and how to use them to track and improve conversions.
Website Conversation & Analytics: Robbin Steif — How to use web analytics to increase conversion rates. Robbin is the CEO and founder of LunaMetrics.
Associations — No explaining needed here.
Web Analytics Association — A group of corporations and individuals excited by the opportunity to contribute to the birth of a strong and unified industry voice for web analytics.
Notes
If I am missing quality software, books, blogs or anything else you would like to see on this post drop me a comment and if it is quality I will add it up.
Any one have a license for ClickTracks Pro Software they want to sell (or even Pro SMB)? Pro retails at $9344 and even at 30% off the resellers price ($6540) it is a pretty big bite. Optimizer is cheap at $795, Pro SMB at $3594 could be conceiveable but I like that A/B testing, KPIed graphic timeline, and the data dissection report that lets you build custom performance statistics reports.
Note*: I have emailed ClickTracks to check if the software licenses are tranferable.
Or perhaps there is something else out there that is better than ClickTracks. I want site search reporting, graphic timeline search engine rankings for Google/Yahoo/MSN Live, A/B testing (many page sets, returns cookie’ed to same page version set, multiple pages in a set, side by side set compares) , visitor labeling, superimposed data on site pages for visual navigation reporting, one sceen PPC campaign compares for Adwords/YPN/adCenter, e-commerce and ROI intergration, KPIs in time line, API access and search engine spider reporting. Did I miss any thing?
Thanks to Agent Interactive for the graphics off their Traffic Analyzer page.
