Stop wasting time gathering data, and start using it. The Best Tools for Web Analytics slides directly into your pocket to help you get the most out of your web analytics data. This high-level overview includes suggestions on the top free and paid choices available to marketers today. Learn when to use Google Analytics vs. Clicky, when to use conventional text reports vs. something like Tableau, and when standard SQL queries are an option rather than building an elaborate API-based system.
Online business owners find that simple and effective analytics tools are important to their marketing strategy and professional growth. The right set of tools can provide all the measurement and analysis you need to assess your progress and use it to improve your site’s performance. Analytics measures key metrics such as user engagement, activities, and demographics to help you understand how users interact with your website, whether they’re new visitors, repeat visitors, or returning customers. For online businesses, proper analytics is an integral part of running an effective SEO campaign.
SimilarWeb
Want to spy on your competitors? (Don’t worry, this is totally legal.) SimilarWeb lets you plug in any website or mobile app, receive insights about traffic and rankings, and compare the data against competing sites.
After entering a URL, you can see the website’s global rank, country rank, category rank (such as Books and Literature, Shopping, and Marketing and Advertising), and traffic by country. You’re also treated to an overview of total desktop and mobile visits from the past six months, which are broken down by time on site, pages per visit, and bounce rate.
For instance, here’s what these results look like for Facebook.com:
As you scroll down, SimilarWeb shares other useful data reports, including top referral sites, organic search traffic vs. paid search traffic, a breakdown of traffic from social platforms, the most popular subdomains, a ranking of similar sites, and categories that interest your audience (e.g., News and Media, Business and Industry).
As marketer Jeff Bullas writes, “I use SimilarWeb to help me understand where I should spend my time, i.e., which channels and strategies I need to investigate further.”
However, if you want to see how your traffic stands against your competitor’s, just click Add Competitors at the top of the screen, and select from the drop-down list or enter your own suggestion. You’ll see side-by-side comparisons of your ranking, traffic overview, and referrals.
To compare more than two sites at a time and receive more in-depth insights, users can upgrade to a paid version of SimilarWeb, starting at $199 per month.
SEMrush
SEMrush can also help you get ahead of your competitors by researching keywords in display ads, organic and paid search, and link building. Just enter a domain, keyword, or URL in the search bar, and you’ll gain access to a wealth of insights. Take this sample search for eBay.com:
Users can see a website or keyword’s traffic breakdown by organic search, paid search, backlinks, and display ads. Below that data, you can see live updates of top organic keywords and organic competitors, paid keywords and paid competitors, and sample ads. There are also lists of backlinks and indexed pages to browse through.
Users can click on any of these graphs or lists to view an expanded report. Here’s one for eBay’s top organic competitors:
This report shows the number of organic keywords bringing users to each website and the number of users expected to visit the website in the coming month (assuming average monthly traffic stays the same). There’s also a breakdown of competitors by criteria such as competition level, common keywords, traffic, and the estimated price of organic keywords in Google AdWords.
For free, users can make 10 requests per day (e.g., searching a term or viewing a full report). For full access to the platform, as well as API access, you can register for a pro account starting at $69.95 per month.
Yandex Metrica
What it is: free all-in-one website analytics from Russian search engine Yandex
What it’s used for: traffic metrics and user behavior data
Price: free
Another 2% of polled experts use Yandex Metrica as their web analytics tool of choice. Unlike GA, Yandex Metrica offers unsampled data, even at high traffic volumes. Yandex Metrica also includes behavior analytics tools, including session replays, click maps, and scroll heatmaps.
Amplitude
What it is: product intelligence.
What it’s used for: tracking product usage, user behavior, and funnel conversions
Price: from free for up to 10 million actions per month
1% of our polled analytics users chose Amplitude. Unlike GA, Amplitude is focused on tracking user experience and offers advanced features like behavior cohorting, and persona and user profile data.
Woopra
Woopra is a Web analytics application written in Java. It’s split into two parts which includes a desktop application for data analysis/exploration and a web service to monitor website statistics. Woopra has a robust user interface, an intuitive management system that allows you to run it on multiple sites and domains, and even a chat feature so that you can gather non-numerical information by talking to your site users. Woopra is currently in beta and requires you to request for a private beta registration.
JAWStats
JAWStats is a server-based Web analytics application that runs with the popular AWStats (in fact, if you’re on a shared hosting plan – AWStats is probably already installed). JAWStats does two things to extend AWStats – it improves performance by reducing server resource usage and improves the user interface a little bit. With that said, you can’t go wrong with just using AWStats either if you’re happy with it.
4Q
A large part of Web analytics deals with number-crunching and numerical data. Raw numbers tells only part of the story and it’s often helpful to perform analytics by way of interacting with actual users. 4Q developer Avinash Kaushik puts it perfectly when he said: “Web analytics is good at the ‘What’. It is not good at the ‘Why’”.4Q is a simple surveying application focused on improving your traditional numerical Web analytics by supplementing it with actual user feedback.
Conclusion
Web Analytics is a method for measuring and analyzing Internet-based statistics to make well-informed business decisions. It’s important to work with the right tools, and luckily there are many options available that will suit a variety of platforms and budgets.