The Internet has been around for a long time, and so have the tools that help us understand how it works. A lot of these tools have come and gone during that time — long since abandoned by their creators — but a new wave is hitting the scene. They’re referred to as cloud analytics tools and very simply, they’re taking the place that web server analytics tools used to fill.
Are you interested in finding out if your website is generating enough customer conversions and how your business fares against the competition?
If your answer is yes, what you need is a sophisticated web analytics software solution. Then again, if you are not exactly sure what web analytics software does, there is no reason to worry because I am going to tell you all that you need to know. I’ll also explain how to choose the best web analytics tool for your online business.
After spending hours delving deep into all aspects of both free web analytics tools and paid ones, I have managed to compile a list of the best web analytics tools for eCommerce and small businesses, along with the pricing lists for paid options.
With data generated using website analytics software, you will be able to find out how many visitors come to your website, how much time they spend there, what percentage of them subscribe and buy something, and plenty of other useful information that will help you to drive your business further and ultimately boost your revenue.
Server statistics is actually one of the most important aspects of website performance and web application development. In most of the situations, making changes on a live server requires custom development on both sides. I am talking about changing the code to collect more data from the server, and also learning to use different tools for reporting and analyzing that data.
There are many monitoring tools out there, but they can be hard to pick. Which ones do you choose? And how deep do you go into each one? This article is here to help you understand the differences between them all, so you can find the tool(s) that fit your needs the best!
Web analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your web content’s data in order to glean meaningful information about how your site is being utilized by your users. There are plenty of Web analytics applications out there, and you probably already know the big guns such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and remote-site services such as Alexa and Compete. We go off the trodden path of Google Analytics and explore a few lesser-known Web analytics options.
In this article, you’ll find 10 excellent and free tools and applications to help you gather and analyze data about your web content.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. BBClone
Go to Live Demonstration of BBClone. If you’re looking for a simple, server-side web application that doesn’t rely on third-party services to monitor your data, check out BBClone – a PHP-based server application that gives you a detailed overview of website traffic and visitor data. It supports language localization for 32 languages like English, Chinese, German, and Japanese.
It easily integrates with popular publishing platforms like Drupal, WordPress, and Textpattern. Since it’s logfile-based, it doesn’t require you to use a server-side relational database.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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. Check out this YouTube video on how easy it is to set up 4Q.
9. MochiBot
MochiBot is a free Web analytics/tracking tool especially designed for Flash assets. With MochiBot, you can see who’s sharing your Flash content, how many times people view your content, as well as helping you track where your Flash content is to prevent piracy and content theft. Installing MochiBot is a breeze; you simply copy a few lines of ActionScript code in the .FLA files you want to monitor.
10. Grape Web Statistics
Go to Live Demonstration of Grape Web Statistics. Grape Web Statistics is a simple, open-source application geared towards web developers. It has a clean and usable interface and has an Extensions API to extend and customize your installation.
It uses PHP for the backend and you can run it on any operating system that runs PHP.
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.
Conclusion
Web server logs can track every request coming into your website, but you’re probably just looking at the Apache logs in logs/access_log. You’re losing a lot of data by leaving it uncaptured. Server-side web analytics tools can give you tons of information on how people are visiting your website. Below is a list of 12 tools that can help you set up web analytics on your website today.