Understanding web analytics is a crucial part of building a successful website, at least from the perspective of conversion rate optimization and revenue generation. In this article, you’ll find a list of web analytics solutions that can assist in increasing your conversion rates and improving your revenue stream. There are a variety of web analytics solutions available in the market today, so it can become a daunting task to choose the one that suits your needs the best.
Understanding web analytics is a crucial part of building a successful website, at least from the perspective of conversion rate optimization and revenue generation. In this article, you’ll find a list of web analytics solutions that can assist in increasing your conversion rates and improving your revenue stream. There are a variety of web analytics solutions available in the market today, so it can become a daunting task to choose the one that suits your needs the best.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the best free tools that any website owner can use to track and analyze data about Web traffic. You get to see what keywords are bringing the most visitors to your pages and what aspects of your designs are turning them off. This tool will generate a report for your website that includes information about visitors, traffic sources, goals, content and e-commerce. The downside of Google Analytics is that it can take time to update. (The real-time version is still in beta testing.) There are other tools that offer real-time updates of your data now.
Spring Metrics
Spring Metrics has taken the analytics tool and made it simpler. You don’t have to be a professional data-miner to get the answers to your questions. You get real-time conversion analytics, top converting sources, keyword analytics, landing-page analysis, e-mail performance reports and simple point-and-click configuration. Unlike Google Analytics, Spring Metrics tracks a visitor’s path through your website from the time he landed to the time he left. All of this is included in Spring Metrics’ Standard Plan for $49 a month. When you first sign up, you get to try it free for 14 days. The simplicity of this tool has a lot of website owners switching over from Google Analytics.
Yahoo Web Analytics (web.analytics.yahoo.com) – Free
Once you’ve mastered Google Analytics, Yahoo’s similar offering gives you a little more depth in your surveying. It offers better access control options and a simpler approach to multi-site analytics, raw and real time data collection (unlike Google, you can import cost of goods data), visitor behavior and demographics reports and customized options as well. Yahoo Analytics is a bit of a step up from Google in terms of profiling, filtering and customization, so for those looking to dig a little deeper, it’s a great option.
Crazy Egg (crazyegg.com) – $9-$99/month
In short, Crazy Egg allows you to build heat maps and track your visitors every click based on where they are specifically clicking within your website which is a long way of saying that you’re exploring your website’s usability. It allows you to really see what parts of your site users are finding most interesting and clicking on the most. It can help you to improve your website design and in essence conversion. Setup is quite simple as well, and their 30-day money back guarantee on all accounts is a nice touch.
Compete (compete.com) – Prices vary
Perhaps best known for publishing the approximate number of global visitors to the web’s top one million websites, Compete is a great complimentary tool to clickstream analytics offerings. Compete gives you creative intelligence on what your competitors are doing or how your users ended up on your website in the first place (what their clicks were both before and after). There is a free offering that includes traffic volume data. But where Compete is different is in their search analytics, a paid service that lets you track what keywords are sending users both to your website and to your competitors.
“The deeper digital insights you have, the better understanding you have of your customer,” says Aaron Smolick, senior director of marketing at Compete. “By using Compete products, you will have all of the information that you need to make educated decisions to optimize your online campaign, increase market share and dominate the competition.
ETRACKER
Like every web analytics tool featured on our list of amazing web analytics tools that rival Google Analytics, eTracker provides real-time data. What’s even better, that data comprises of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, providing a superior overview. This, in turn, allows for a better evaluation of your website’s traffic.
eTracker boasts some of the same features as Crazy Egg, such as mouse movement tracking. In this way, and many others, the tool helps you collect visitor feedback that can be used to improve your usability score. The usability score is often either overlooked or overemphasized. While you certainly don’t want users to have difficulty navigating your site if you focus on your usability at the expense of other ranking factors your SEO could be negatively affected. eTracker helps you find the balance. If you’re worried about click fraud (which has to do with pay-per-click—PPC—online advertising), then put your concerns to bed. eTracker not only records suspicious activities such as click fraud but reports them as well.
Google Adwords is a popular online marketing tool used by many site owners because it’s often worth the cost. eTracker automatically integrates itself with Google Adwords to give you feedback on your campaign progress and its effectiveness.
With eTracker’s heat map, you can also identify weak spots on your site and get a better understanding of which sections are the most popular. This is an excellent way to see what works and what doesn’t so that you can improve weaker elements and better plan future content. Depending on how many of the features you want to use, you can get eTracker for anything between free and $851 a month.
FIRESTATS
For a simple, easy to use web statistics tool that offers convenience in how you track site visitor activities, then you may want to earmark FireStats. When we say straightforward and easy to use, we mean once the installation process is complete. The actual installation is quite tricky, unfortunately, and requires some knowledge of script installation protocols as well as access to your server. And unless you have a dedicated server, or at the very least an unmanaged virtual private server (VPS), your web hosting company isn’t going to allow you to do so.
But if you have coding and script installation experience, and have either a dedicated server or VPS, then FireStats is one of the best alternatives to Google Analytics. In fact, if you have multiple sites hosted on your server, you only need one FireStats installation to monitor them all. The tool supports a vast array of languages, and you’ll also be able to download raw data logs.
Of course, FireStats works with real time data; otherwise, it wouldn’t be on our list at all. Furthermore, you’ll also get reports on the search engine queries and referral links that led visitors to your site. At the same time, you can also see which of your pages are the most popular. Together with the other data offered by FireStats, you’ll be able to discover why these pages work and others don’t.
If you’re worried about bots and spammers, FireStats filters them out based on IP, user agent, and URL. FireStats is free for non-commercial use, and a commercial license only costs $25.
Conclusion:
To improve the performance of your website, you need to learn how to use web analytics. Web analytics is a tool that provides feedback for your website. It shows you the performance of different aspects of your website so you can analyze what’s working and what isn’t. But it can be overwhelming trying to figure out which tools fit your needs.