Five Web Analytics Tools To Make a Start

Hi guys, hopefully you would have read a background of this article series on Web Analytics. If not, you can read the first article @ Intro to Web analytics. Let me define Analytics: The Branch of logic dealing with Analysis. source: thefreedictionary.com


Through this series on web analytics, my intention is to write simple easy-to-digest articles on web analytics space, trends and top most tools/ softwares that can help any small business owner to make use of available tools to discover interesting things about their customers (visitors), that they can use to tweak and optimize websites and ultimately increase revenue.

Okay, let's look at some prominent Web analytic softwares available in market today:

Google Analytics (free)



Google has always been forefront of launching easy-to-use, powerful features, industry leading products like  Adwords, Adsense, Webmaster tools, that helped people meet specific needs. Analytics ties all of bits and pieces together to give a full view of your marketing campaign. With a simple piece of tracking code injected in your website, you instantly start getting insights to your website's audience. A simple dashboard presents different statistics- Demographics, Bounce rate, Avg time spent, Referrals, etc which is simply powerful way to monitor your marketing efforts get fructified. Besides, it's free- all you need a google email address!

Talking dis-advantages, the updates are not real time, it could take few hours for google to update latest visitor activity. This delay may not bother startups, but most probably not acceptable to major eCommerce websites.

Yahoo! Web Analytics (free)

In its own words, Yahoo! Web Analytics is a highly customizable, enterprise-level website analytics system designed to help website businesses increase sales and visitor satisfaction, reduce marketing costs and gain new insight on online customers. By storing data in raw, non-aggregated form, Yahoo! Web Analytics is more than simply a reporting tool. It is a powerful, and highly flexible, data analysis tool. Both near real-time AND historical data can be segmented instantly and even visualized with advanced graphs to help marketers and site designers answer specific business questions and find new insights to improve their business.

Omniture Discover (paid)

Omniture Discover® provides Web analysts and online marketers with the deepest insights and most concise segmentation as revealed by unlimited real-time visitor information. Discover delivers a comprehensive, multi-dimensional view of customers that enables marketers with accurate, timely and insightful decisions—improving the performance of their business. Discover is part of the Omniture Online Business Optimization Suite.

This is pretty advanced stuff and I wouldn't recommend this to a budding internet business. I don't have a line beyond which you may want to have a look at, but essentially its more geared towards small to medium and even large corporate businesses. Interested, view product tour (requires free registration)

Woopra (free/paid)

Woopra is a popular desktop based web analytic tools. The main advantage is intuitive interface and real time updates (unlike Google Analytics). Besides, Woopra also claims that its javascript injection (that is primarily used to track visitor activities) doesn't slow down your website.

GoingUp (free)

With an AJAX-rich interface, GoingUp! combines powerful web analytics with top notch SEO tools.

Which one to use? 
It depends! If you are a business trying to work out from home and just nearly started, I would assume you wouldn't really have much to invest at this point. Good thing is not all professional grade softwares has to have a price tag, sometimes, things are just free (yippie). My recommendation is to start with free tools, when you are starting you don't want to invest heavily now and not when you don't have any traffic :) because without any traffic all above tools doesn't help much. Once your business starts getting visitors, then you can use web analytic softwares to understand visitor profile and behaviour, may be some sequence of actions on your website triggers them to make a buy decision. The real benefit of web analytic softwares is to decode this sequence and tweak your business so that maximum number of visitors experience the same triggering sequence of actions.

I actively use web analytic softwares to understand visitor behaviour for this blog and couple of other websites and I am amazed to see some interesting observations. I will keep updating this post and write some more too actually a video that has step by step on how to use such web analytic softwares. You are welcome to join my newsletters to receive such updates as well as other useful articles dealing with aspects of Internet Marketing. Thanks.

*** Does your company offer a web analytic software? I and my readers will be interested to know about your analytic software. If you want, you can send a brief writeup on your web analytic software to internetmarketinghoopla "At" gmail.com . Please stress more on any unique features in your product.