Want to learn about web analytics tools google? Or maybe you’re just excited to learn about web data analytics tools? If so, then I can help! It can be overwhelming learning about all of the different types of analytics tools out there. And it seems like you need to understand everything before you can use them. Heavily priced enterprise solutions are intimidating and knowing what the every day words they use actually mean is even more confusing.
Some of the best analytics tools for a website are free. WordPress, for example has a free plugin that you can use to find out how much traffic your website is getting. While web based analytics tools can be very useful, you should never rely solely on them to tell you everything you need to know about your business. Below are some examples of free web based analytics tools that can help you get startedout with your analytics journey.
Piwik
Go to Live Demonstration of Piwik.
Piwik is an open-source Web analytics application developed using PHP and MySQL. It has a “plugins” system that allows for utmost extensibility and customization. Install only the plugins you need or go overboard and install them all – the choice is up to you. The plugins system, as you can imagine, also opens up possibilities for you to create your own custom extensions. This thing’s lightweight – the download’s only 1.9MB.
FireStats
Go to Live Demonstration of FireStats.
FireStats is a simple and straight-forward Web analytics application written in PHP/MySQL. It supports numerous platforms and set-ups including C# sites, Django sites, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and several others. Are you a resourceful developer who needs moar cowbell? FireStats has an excellent API that will assist you in creating your own custom apps or publishing platform components (imagine: displaying the top 10 most downloaded files in your WordPress site) based on your FireStats data.
Snoop
Snoop is a desktop-based application that runs on the Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista platforms. It sits nicely on your system status bar/system tray, notifying you with audible sounds whenever something happens. Another outstanding Snoop feature is the Name Tags option which allows you to “tag” visitors for easier identification. So when Joe over at the accounting department visits your site, you’ll instantly know. This is great for businesses such as hotels who have a variety of people visiting their sites.
Yahoo! Web Analytics
Yahoo! Web analytics is Yahoo!’s alternative to the dominant Google Analytics. It’s an enterprise-level, robust web-based third-party solution which makes accessing data easy especially for multiple-user groups. It’s got all the things you’d expect from a comprehensive Web analytics tool such as pretty graphs, custom-designed (and printable) reports, and real-time data tracking.
SimilarWeb — SimilarWeb measures the digital world
SimilarWeb utilizes multiple methodologies in its approach to data analysis and collection to provide users with a better understanding of their customers.
SimilarWeb is a unique platform for data analysis that gathers information about the performance, traffic, and other aspects of a website from hundreds of different sources and combines it into a single data set.
With that business-specific data set, customers can get unprecedented levels of insight into the behavior of potential clients and website visitors and the most comprehensive analysis of the performance of their app or website.
SimilarWeb’s team of experienced mathematicians and other data scientists process the data through machine learning algorithms to get the prediction models and estimations of future customer acquisitions.
SimilarWeb’s platform gives clients the opportunity to see the current trends in the industry and what strategies can be employed to boost overall success and revenue. Also, SimilarWeb’s website analytics tools gauge the effectiveness of the competition’s customer acquisition so that you can make the necessary comparisons and see what practices can be implemented in your business and where further improvements can be made.
There are various solutions that SimilarWeb offers depending on what you want to accomplish. Whether it is the growth of your business through marketing solutions, or getting more knowledge about your competition and the industry at large so that you can make the best strategic decisions, or simply improving your sales, SimilarWeb has a solution for you.
Key features
- Traffic and engagement measuring — helps you see how your business fares against the competition and how much time your visitors spend on your site, page views per site, etc.
- SEO and PPC — gives you insight into your organic and paid keywords, and how much traffic they generate.
- Affiliate traffic — helps you to see what affiliates drive traffic to your competitors so that you can find new affiliates for your business.
- Marketing strategy — compares different marketing-channel data to optimize your marketing strategies.
- Funnel analysis — helps you learn about funnel leakage and performance metrics that provide information about which marketing channels provide the highest conversion rates.
Pricing and plans
SimilarWeb offers a free plan which gives you the chance to test the service before switching to the paid version and getting even more out of the platform.
Free plan
- Free of charge
The free plan from SimilarWeb gives you three months of web traffic data, followed by a month of mobile app data, and five results per metric.
Enterprise
- Price upon request
Enterprises that want the complete version of the platform can enjoy unlimited results per metric, up to 28 months of mobile app data, access to global and country-specific data, keyword analysis, and much more.
Pricing for the paid program depends on the services you want to use, the size of your business, and many other factors. What usually comes out to a five-figure price is paid on an annual basis. You need to contact customer support at SimilarWeb for specific details and pricing for your business.
GRAPE WEB STATISTICS
If you’ve got some programming experience, Grape Web Statistics is an open source analytics tool that was designed primarily for web developers. The simple interface takes into consideration how overwhelming Google Analytics can be and offers the basic statistics with a high level of accuracy. This does mean Grape Web Statistics misses some of the more advanced features found in the other tools we’ve mentioned.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t use them. If you have experience with developing in PHP or are at least adept with HTML, you can customize Grape Web Statistics to make the software meet all your needs. And therein lies the tool’s charm. If you’re happy with the basics, you won’t get distracted by the more advanced options. On the other hand, if you want some of the advanced features but not certain others, you can add those you need. Because Grape Web Statistics is open source rather than merely another free-to-use tool, you can use it as a foundation on which to build the web analytics tool you want and need. The essential features that are already present include tracking unique and total visits.
Theoretically, Grape Web Statistics works on any operating system (OS) but has only been officially tested on Windows and Linux. It does require that JavaScript is enabled on your OS and that you use PHP 4.3 or higher (anything below 5.6 is obsolete in any case) and MySQL 4 or greater. The main reason cited for JavaScript being a requirement is to prevent bots from wreaking havoc with Grape Web Statistics’ analysis.
PaveAI
If you’ve used Google Analytics at any length, you’ve probably seen line after line of referrer spam showing up in your reports.
Many people aren’t even aware that spammers and their evil bots are visiting their websites and falsely driving up page views by hiding in the traffic reports.
PaveAI removes this “fake web traffic” from your analytic reports, thereby giving you a clear view of your traffic levels.
It works in conjunction with Google Analytics and uses the Management API to continually add new filters once referrer spam is detected.
Cost: Free
Conclusion:
Good web analytics can help you to find out where your website is performing well, and where it could be improved. It’s an essential part of blogging that most bloggers forget about. You probably want to throw yourself for not seeing this earlier. Don’t worry, it happens to everyone! Whether you’re looking for web based analytics tools or data analytics tools there are plenty of options out there. These are some of our favourites, but there are loads more on the internet, so make sure you explore them all!