Web Analytics Tools - Analyzing The Traffic On Your Website

Analyzing The Traffic On Your Website Using Best Web Analytics Tools

web_analytics Temperature is measured by a thermometer; height or length is measured by a scale, Readership of a print medium is analyzed by readership surveys, Television viewership is gathered by Television Rating Points (TRPs), and Radio Listenership is estimated by Radio Rating Points (RRPs). Till now, there was no instrument or tool to collect or measure internet data. Web analytics are special tools designed to understand and optimize the usage of the web world. These tools highlight the actual utilization of your website by the visitors.

With diverse objectives, technologies, and access of resources, it is important to select the correct web analytics tool compatible with your website or blog. Before taking a decision, it is essential to hold a brain-storming session so as to pick the ideal tool. Hence, you must:

1. Estimate the needs and demands of your business
2. Evaluate the products from all aspects
3. Assess the interest of the company and the necessary support required either technical or training
4. Study the track record of the company

The birth of Google Analytics and Crazy Egg provided an opportunity for the website owners to keep a close eye on the rise or fall of their product.  Certain tools which assist in managing vital marketplace opinion are listed below.

Clicky

Clicky is in a league of its own as it provides real-time analytics. A very clean and functional UI aims to monitor, analyze and react instantaneously to the traffic on a website or blog. The web analytics service also enables services with an iPhone, to keep you reported when you are on the move. The services are unbeatable as the stats detailing is stupendous and the interface is easy to digest.

Google Analytics

The most favorite and popular web analytics service provider – Google Analytics offers free analytics tools. The analytics tools and features are powerful, convenient and easy-to-use as they analyze the data in a completely innovative manner. The custom reporting feature introduced by Google Analytics prepares you to conceive better ideas and strategies for marketing websites and attracting larger traffic. This web analytics provide deep insights with the help of its advanced segmentation and motion charts feature.

ManageEngine

ManageEngine is another real-time stat tracking program which helps to gain an insight about the audience and help you perform better. It measures the progress on hourly, weekly and monthly basis by watching the granular visitor traffic. Alerts are triggered by some actions on the site. The heat map technology feature enables you to see the spots where the visitors are clicking.

Piwik

Piwik is a unique PHP MySQL software program which provides elaborate reporting about the visitors on your website. It is an open source downloadable web analytics software program and serves as a powerful alternative to Google Analytics. The fully customizable user interface makes Piwik user friendly and allows building your own web analytics plugins. You can install Piwik on your server to get started and the important statistics can be accessed using open APIs.

Yahoo! Web Analytics

Yahoo! Web Analytics is a powerful data collecting tool which provides a deep insight about the demographics and psychographics of the visitors of the website. The application is free and enables flexible dashboards, segmentation tools, and campaign management features. The web analytics tools services by Yahoo! focuses on multiple-user groups and operates at an enterprise level. The Yahoo! tools assist in delivering raw and non-aggregated data in forms of graphs, custom-designed (and printable) reports, and real-time data tracking.

WordPress.com Stats

WordPress doesn’t have too many features rather it grabs attention with its unique stats system. The stats system identifies the strength of the visitors and identifies the reason behind their interest in the blog. You can enable a plugin for your individually hosted WordPress blog.

Woopra

Woopra is a complete package when it comes to web analytics applications. It is an information rich, user-friendly, real time web tracking system. Woopra’s healthy mix of an intuitive management system and chat feature enables communication with the users while running on multiple domains. You will require a private beta registeration as Woopra is available in beta. Woopra’s unparalleled user interface claims to deliver an extensive collection of statistics about the visitors. There are a few additional features alongwith its open API and plugins specifically designed for convenient client application.

FireStats

Firestats is a refreshing statistic management system. The important statistics about the visitors are recorded and enables as footer on the blog. It runs on PHP 4.4.2 or My SQL,while Unix like operating system is preferred but users also use it on Windows.

GoingUp

GoingUp! measures the performance of your website from all aspects. Its user-friendly interface incorporates powerful web analytics & SEO tools. Enabled with an AJAX rich interface, GoingUp! turns out to be your website’s best friend. It offers complete website statistics, tracks keyword positions, analyses actions & progress on a customized dashboard.

Mint

Mint delivers as a self-hosted and paid web analytics program with an uncomplicated interface. Mint currently runs on version 2.17 and has a plugin named – Pepper. It is an extensible web analytics site which helps to keep a count of the visits, referrers, popular pages and searches on its trouble-free dashboard.

Blog Tracker

IceRocket Blog Tracker is an invisible blog tracker which assesses the number of visits providing accurate blog statistics. It is a FREE light weight analytics tool for blogs which doesn’t put any ads on the blog but monitor the blog in real-time.

Snoop

Snoop is a dedicated connection which instantly informs about comments on blogs, forums, purchases, references from other sites etc. It is a desktop based application running on platforms Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista. Its produces specific sounds for different events or actions. The Name Tag integration helps you to tag the visitor.

BBClone

BBClone is a simple PHP based server application which helps you track the interest of the visitor. It is a server-side web application which supports in 32 languages. BBClone web counter provides detailed data like IP address, browser of the visitor. This handy application for webmasters is log-file based and is integrated with publishing platforms like Drupal, WordPress and Textpattern.

JAWStats

JAWStats is a free server-based Web analytics and statistics application package. It runs with the popular AWStats by using its log-files and processing the output in its own format. This multi-language and fully-skinnable application produces charts, graphs and tables about the traffic on the website. The convenience of switching between the logs of different files helps to view the archival information. JAWStats does not interfere with the AWStats and updates your stats using the interface.

4Q

4Q relies on collecting actual visitor feedback rather than tracking the number of people. Web analytics is about numbers but 4Q determines the objective of the visitor by tracking interests and perceptions of the visitor through an exit survey. This first hand information helps to record the performance of the website and thereby improve the numerical.

MochiBot

MochiBot is a free Web analytics tracking tool specifically designed for Flash assets. It analyses the popularity of your Flash game or animation, effectiveness of Viral Flash markting strategies, reach of Flash videos, podcasts or video blogs. MochiBot follows and track people who use Flash content so as to protect the content and avoid theft. It also helps to keep a record of your performance. The lines in ActionScript code to instal MochiBot are very easy to copy.

Grape Web Statistics

GrapeWeb Statistics is a free, open source program enabling the web developers to keep a close watch on the number of visitors accessing their site. It comes with a clean & sleek interface enabled with extensions API to expand and customize its installation. Currently in the beta testing stage, it may report bugs through launchpad bug reporting system or the forums. Grape is specialized in solving web analytics Hotel problem as the stats are fluid and can be cross-checked at any point of time.

AnalyTwits

Twitter, the largest social networking site has introduced 8 tools for analysis of the visitors. These tools serve different functions by crawling through Twitter streams and are becoming quite popular. It is best to use combination of tools to get an insight about the activities on Twitter. These tools are: Twitalyzer, Microplaza, Twist, Twtturly, Tweetstats, Twitter Friend, Thummit QuickRate and TweetEffect.

We have peeped into the positives of the web analytics tools but there are a few features which restrict the use of these tools and announce them as a failure. There has been one major problem with Web Analytics as quoted by Avinash kaushik of 4Q, “the yearning and struggle to understanding the “Why”.” The tools which measure the performance and activity of the visitors on the website are customized. But, there are a few reasons which have betrayed the promises of bridging the gap between the visitor and the website manager. Lack of adequate training and analytical resources, inability to customize business needs,  rising complexity due to cumulative sums of data are reasons for its failure.

Hotel problem has been a major source of confusion for the web analytics users. The web software add the number of unique visitors for particular time period correctly but when the numbers (for days and months) are compared, they don’t tally and lead to complications. The inability to understand simple metric definitions, Web analytics have faced a lot of ruckus from the users. The sum of new visitors and repeat visitors comes out to be unequal and leads to greater misconceptions.

Thus, it is always advisable to get a hands-on experience on the web analytics tools before using them for your website or blog. It is even more important to get the perfect match of the web analytics program for your website.