It is very important to choose and configure the best analytics tool because all your future strategies and plans depend on the data collected and analyzed by these tools. So make an informed decision before selecting any one. In order to help you decide which ones to use, I’ve come up with a list of the best web analytics tools on the Internet right now-
Google Analytics needs no introduction. It’s such a popular web analytics tool that it seems like everyone is using it. BTW Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google launched the service in November 2005. 🙂
- SNOW PLOW ANALYTICS – It is open source, and is nearly free (self-hosted). Serving a million hits will cost you around $1.00 on Snowplow, using Amazon Cloud Front. It was originally based from Piwik, which is itself an open-source clone of Google Analytics. Fair warning, Snowplow takes some doing to set up, but it is very extensible, allowing for JavaScript tracking, embedded GIF tracking, and even Internet of Things tracking.
- CLICKY – Clicky is considered to be one of the most robust web analytics tools today and it provides real-time traffic information of your website. The main dashboard includes a variety of website stats that can be customized based on date. It offers a link report that shows all external websites sending traffic to you. It offers an action metric that measures all visitor actions like video views and downloads by the user. It offers search data which provides a list of incoming search keywords that brought the users to your website and, with its Sheer SEO tool, Clicky also shows the ranking for those keywords.
- INDICATIVE – is a great analytics tool for growth marketers, product managers, and data analysts who want a complete picture of their customer behavior data. Behavioral analytics platform designed to help teams get actionable insights from customer data in order to optimize customer engagement, conversion, and retention. Indicative integrates all sources of behavioral data together (e.g. websites, mobile apps, marketing automation, CRM, help desk, etc.), and enables complex data analysis using drag-and-drop in a web browser. Managing and analyzing this data requires no code or SQL knowledge.
- CHARTBEAT – It is focused primarily on real-time data and real-time analytics. In short, this is a tool, which lives in the present. Its robust dashboard, iPhone app, and email alerts notify you immediately of any server crash or traffic spikes. Their clientele includes Billboard, Fox News, Foursquare, and Time.
- GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOL – Website performance/error Analytics: Another powerful and free tool from Google, also a must-have.
- SHOPPING CART ELITE – It is a very powerful tool for tracking visitors’ mouse movements and assigning engagement score based on how they engaged with specific key performance indicators. It ensures that your website receives only genuine visitors, and the fake ones are automatically eliminated from your business campaign.
- KISSMETRIC – Kiss metrics is started by a couple of bright guys, getting very high reviews. Kiss Metrics offers a great system for getting to know your visitors, although I would place it more for online commerce businesses over blogs.
- FACEBOOK INSIGHTS – For Facebook Insights, there are many free tools that simply measured to help you track Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more. Also, it has some paid tools like Buzzsumo and Moz Content, which help you to track your website content and your competitor’s content performance as well.
- COUNTY – Provides web analytics, as well as mobile analytics, referral tracking, crash reports, user profiles, push notifications, powerful segmentation and other features that help you view everything on a single, beautiful dashboard. Its web analytics features are on par with mobile analytics, and you can use the same dashboard to track both your web pages and mobile apps.
- CRAZY EGG -Very easy to use tool that offers a free trial period which is then followed by paid plans starting from $9/month and extending up to $99/month (billed annually). It offers a visual representation of data which makes it extremely user-friendly and with just one view you can identify which parts of your web pages work well and which needs attention. The data is visually represented in the form of heat maps, overlay, scroll maps etc. The reviews of crazy are great but the only bad part is it is very expensive.
Final Words: So, find a good analytics tool from one of the above (or even another), try it out, measure your success with the information provided, change and tweak if needed, and keep your site moving in the right direction, but my personal suggestion would be that you must use a combination of these tools along with Google analytics.
