Web Analytics Management Tools

There are a lot of tools for data collection and web analytics that’ll help you with your website. Choice is great because it gives you more options, but it can also be complicated when it comes to finding the right tool for the job. Here’s a list of what we think are the best web analytics management tools.

If you have a small business website, paid ads manager or webmaster software, it’s important to have a web analytics management tool for tracking and analyzing your campaigns. Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for online businesses. But you might not know there’s an alternative that’s even better!

One of the biggest challenges that SEOs, PPC management and other internet marketing people face is data overload. Too much data about our pages makes it difficult to tell what information is actionable and relevant. Web analytics tools are a great way to analyse website traffic but they have a learning curve. If you don’t know what to look for, it can be easy to miss important insights.

Have you ever tried to manage multiple websites using just one web analytics tool? It is a royal pain. There are so many options available these days from Google Analytics to Adobe Analytics. But there’s still only one truth: you can’t track everything at once! It’s impossible. So what do you do? You need to pick a tool that works best for your website, and stick with it.

Here are the top 7 Web Analytics Management Tools in vogue today:

  1. Python
  2. R
  3. SAS
  4. Excel
  5. Power BI
  6. Tableau
  7. Apache Spark

Let us walk through each of these tools.

1. Python

Python
  • Python was initially designed as an Object-Oriented Programming language for software and web development and later enhanced for data science. Python is the fastest-growing programming languages today.
  • It is a powerful Data Analysis tool and has a great set of friendly libraries for any aspect of scientific computing.
  • Python is free, open-source software, and it is easy to learn.
  • Python’s data analysis library Pandas was built over NumPy, which is one of the earliest libraries in Python for data science.

With Pandas, you can just do anything! You can perform advanced data manipulations and numeric analysis using data frames.

Pandas support multiple file-formats; for example, you can import data from Excel spreadsheets to processing sets for time-series analysis. (By definition – Time-series analysis is a statistical technique that analyses time series data, i.e., data collected at a certain interval of time)

Pandas is a powerful tool for data visualizing, data masking, merging, indexing and grouping data, data cleaning, and many more.

To know more about Pandas, checkout Python Pandas Tutorials.

  • Other libraries, such as Scipy, Scikit-learn, StatsModels, are used for statistical modeling, mathematical algorithms, machine learning, and data mining.
  • Matplotlib, seaborn, and vispy are packages for data visualization and graphical analysis
  • Python has an extensive developer community for support and is the most widely used language
  • Top Companies that use Python for data analysis are Spotify, Netflix, NASA, Google and CERN and many more

2. R

R Programming
  • R is the leading programming language for statistical modeling, visualization, and data analysis. It is majorly used by statisticians for statistical analysis, Big Data and machine learning.
  • R is a free, open-source programming language and has a lot of enhancements to it in the form of user written packages
  • R has a steep learning curve and needs some amount of working knowledge of coding. However, it is a great language when it comes to syntax and consistency.
  • R is a winner when it comes to EDA(By definition – In statistics, exploratory data analysis(EDA) is an approach to analyzing data sets to summarize their main characteristics, often with visual methods).
  • Data manipulation in R is easy with packages such as plyr, dplyr, and tidy.
  • R is excellent when it comes to data visualization and analysis with packages such as ggplot, lattice, ggvis, etc.
  • R has a huge community of developers for support.
  • R is used by
  • Facebook – For behavior analysis related to status updates and profile pictures.
  • Google – For advertising effectiveness and economic forecasting.
  • Twitter – For data visualization and semantic clustering
  • Uber – For statistical analysis

To know more about R you can visit here:

3. SAS

SAS
  • SAS is a statistical software suite widely used for BI (Business Intelligence), data management, and predictive analysis.
  • SAS is proprietary software, and companies need to pay to use it. A free university edition has been introduced for students to learn and use SAS.
  • SAS has a simple GUI; hence it is easy to learn; however, a good knowledge of the SAS programming knowledge is an added advantage to use the tool.
  • SAS’s DATA step (The data step is where data is created, imported, modified, merged, or calculated) helps inefficient data handling and manipulation. SAS’s data analytics process is as shown:
SAS’s data analytics process
  • SAS’s Visual Analytics software is a powerful tool for interactive dashboards, reports, BI, self-service analytics, Text analytics, and smart visualizations.
  • SAS is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, BI, and weather forecasting.
  • Since SAS is a paid-for service, it has a 24X7 customer support to help with your doubts.
  • Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter are a few companies that use SAS.
  • SAS is used for clinical research reporting in Novartis and Covance, Citibank, Apple, Deloitte and much more use SAS for predictive analysis

To know more about SAS you could visit here.

4. Excel

Excel
  • Excel is a spreadsheet and a simple yet powerful tool for data collection and analysis.
  • Excel is not free; it is a part of the Microsoft Office “suite” of programs.
  • Excel does not need a UI to enter data; you can start right away.
  • It is readily available, widely used and easy to learn and start on data analysis
  • The Data Analysis Toolpak in Excel offers a variety of options to perform statistical analysis of your data. The charts and graphs in Excel give a clear interpretation and visualization of your data, which helps in decision making as they are easy to understand.

The Analysis Toolpak feature needs to be enabled and configured in Excel, as shown.

Configured in Excel

Once the Toolpak has been set up, you will see the list of tools. You can choose the tool based on your goals and the information that you want to analyze.

Data Analysis Toolpak
  • Excel is used by more than 750 million users across the world.

5. Power BI

Power BI
  • Power BI is yet another powerful business analytics solution by Microsoft.
  • Power BI comes in three versions – Desktop, Pro, and Premium. The desktop version is free for users; however, Pro and Premium are priced versions.
  • You can visualize your data connect to many data sources and share the outcomes across your organization.
  • With Power BI, you can and bring your data to life with live dashboards and reports.
  • Power BI integrates with other tools, including Microsoft Excel, so you can get up to speed quickly and work seamlessly with your existing solutions.
  • Gartner says – Microsoft is a Magic Quadrant Leader among analytics and business intelligence platforms
  • Top companies using Power BI are Nestle, Tenneco, Ecolab, and more.

To know more about Power BI, you can click on the link.

6. Tableau

Tableau
  • Tableau is a BI(Business Intelligence) tool developed for data analysts where one can visualize, analyze, and understand their data.
  • Tableau is not free software, and the pricing varies as per different data needs
  • It is easy to learn and deploy Tableau

To know and learn Tableau, you can visit the link.

  • Tableau provides fast analytics; it can explore any type of data – spreadsheets, databases, data on Hadoop and cloud services
  • It is easy to use as it has a powerful drag and drop features that anyone with an intuitive mind can handle.
  • The data visualization with smart dashboards can be shared within seconds.
  • Top companies that use Tableau are Amazon, Citibank, Barclays, LinkedIn, and many more.

7. Apache Spark

Apache Spark
  • Spark Is an integrated analytics engine for Big Data processing designed for developers, researchers, and data scientists.
  • It is free, open-source and a wide range of developers contribute to its development
  • It is a high-performance tool and works well for batch and streaming data.
  • Learning Spark is easy, and you can use it interactively from the Scala, Python, R, and SQL shells too.
  • Spark can run on any platform such as Hadoop, Apache Mesos, standalone, or in the cloud. It can access diverse data sources.
  • Spark includes libraries such as
  • for SQL and structured data – SparkSQL
  • Machine learning – MLlib
  • Live dataStream processing – SparkStreaming
  • Graph analytics – GraphX.

To know and learn Apache Spark, you can visit the link.

CONCLUSION

Digital marketing is constantly changing and evolving. The way that digital marketers and digital marketers alike measure their metrics, analysis, keywords and more has all changed dramatically over the last several years, especially with the ever-increasing popularity of social media, mobile phones and tablets.

I am sure by now; you would have got a fair understanding of data analytics tools. For you to move ahead in your data analytics journey and search for the right tool, you need to invest quite a bit of your time in understanding your and/or your organization’s data needs, and then scout around analyzing various tools available in the market and then decide.

While the role of analytics in the marketing campaign is still debatable there is no doubt that data is crucial for many business decisions and website development. The right analytical and statistical tools can help to make a website more profitable, user-friendly-and marketable.

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