[edit] Brief Description

[edit] Wiki description

Description

Website analytics tools are used to track how, when, who visits a website every day.Website traffic is an important factor that help you analyze your success on the internet where the competition can be very tough. You can monitor your website stats in many ways and with a variety of tools that were build to give you information you need to improve or to track your website. Mainly, users behavior on a website can be analyzed in two ways, with system logs pulled out from a web server or with page tagging

• Web servers store in log files all the transactions they make.Web server log file analysis software appeared to cover the analysis of all the data stored in log files. The problem with this type of analysis is the widely spread use of web caches that prevents the logs to see a person that visits the same website twice during the cache time. The second request of the returning visitors is retrieved from the browser cache, there for the path of that visitor is lost. Changes can be made to solve this problem but it affects the performance of the website

• Page tagging is the alternative to log file analytics, it uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser.Therefore , the caching problem in the first analytical method is solved

When you consider which method you want to choose to measure your traffic and to track your visitors behavior on your web site you have to think what you want to achieve first. Here are reasons on why to choose one over the other:

• Server logs are already available as row data, all you need is analyze them with the right tool, with page tagging you'll have to make changes to your website
• Web transactions are recorded, page tagging can be accurate only if the visitors browsers co-operates. If the JavaScript are enabled for instance then the visit is lost
• Web server logs are stored in a standard format so they can processed by various software tools. It's easy to switch between the providers
• With log analysis failure and success is stored, as opposed to page tagging which records visits only when a page is successfully retrieved
• Logs also store search engines spiders visits in their stats which is useful when performing SEO
• Page taggers can record information that the logs can not: screen size, price of goods purchased by visitors and so on
• Advanced interactions such as flash movie actions performed by the users can be stored with page taggers but not with server logs
• If you do not own the server then the only available option is the JavaScript insertion in the pages

Other options to collect the visitors data are available but not highly used. These include package sniffing (analysis of the data transfers between the website server and the "outside world") or the use of scripts on the server side that sends the information right before a page is sent to the user

Why analyze your website traffic and logs?

The results shown in website analytics are of great importance from a commercial stand point. The data collected can show where a user decided to make a purchase, which are the pages that are visited the most, what actions are more appealing for visitors and results in marketing campaigns such as email marketing, lead generation can also be tracked. Business objectives can be easily correlated with the logs analysis

Features

Web Logs Analysis Tools are of two types: most of the analyzer do past parsing reporting on a scheduled basis and there are also real time reports generated when requested

The type of data that a log analyzer can report:

1. Number of visits (also number of uniques visits)
2. Visits duration and last visits
3. Authenticated users
4. Information can be organized by day and by hour
5. GeoLocation of host's visitors
6. Hosts list
7. Most viewed, entry and exit pages
8. Operating System and browser used
9. Robots from search engines that visited the website
10. Search engines, key phrases and keywords used by visitors that landed on that specific page
11. HTTP errors
12. Conversion Tracking , navigation (more advance tools)

Top Competitors

Google Analytics Google here, Google there, Google everywhere. They are the biggest, they rule the web so they can quickly give you stats for free too. You include a small script in your home page and everything else is taken care of. You'll see everything you want to know about your website. It's easy to play with, to get reports. Just two small drawbacks: it does not see visits from visitors with JavaScript enabled and you can not see real time data, but a couple of hours old. If you are new to this space then for sure this is the best web analytics tool that you'll love

Clicky is a fun but strong analytical tool. It says on its home page that if you mange to get your jaw from the floor after you play with the free version you can start playing $2 to get the real thing. The Spy feature of their site tells you what your visitors ate for breakfast and who they'll meet tonight. It's super addictive

• Urchin (version 5) analyzes your web server logs fast and clean. It's commercial but it's simple to use and its technology was aquired by Google. It does not segment your visitors, it does not give geoLocation reporting and it does not compare two sets of data but it does import cost data from other engines other than Google

• Affinium NetInsight is an enterprise solution ready to monitor more than 5 websites, in any method you want. You can sync your data with any BI or CRM system so you can build powerful but simple reports. It gives you precious reports for your marketing team

StatCounter is old in its space and it knows what it does. You get juicy information about your visitors and you won't miss a single one. Ah, and it's FREE

SiteMeter is a very popular web based tool that has a free version for smaller sites. The interface is not very modern but you'll find all the information it reports very accurate and useful

• Mint is powered by plugins that makes it a good popular web reports piece of software. For one time fee of $30 you can download Mint and then don't forget to install Pepper with it so that the real fun begins

• Quantcast is a tool that competes with Alexa, but to have your public stats you have to include their script in your pages

• FeedBurner product was recently bought by Google. It's a great analytic tool for blogs as it gives you stats on your feeds also but it can be used on any site as well. FREE

• WebTrends Analytics custom product is great for large websites that need special care. Microsoft uses them to track their stats

• AWStats it's a good GPL licensed tool that gives you real time data fast but doesn't know to show you daily traffic

How to Choose

When you decide you want to monitor your website, to choose the right analytics tool you have to know:

• How much do you want to spend with the installation process
• If you want to spend money or not on the tool
• What you do with the final data
• How big your site is (in terms of traffic)
• What kind of data you want to see (visitors, landing keywords, exit pages, actions, visitors path, bounce rates, referrals, monitor campaigns)
• If you want to count every single visitor or +/- a few doesn't really matter

Installation

When it comes to installation, you can whether download the tool and install yourself or you can just add a simple script in your homepage (or every page depending on the tool) and leave all the work for the analytical tool to handle. Some of the stats tracking software that are packaged in a download bundle are very easy to install, like Mint, but the easiness of the user interface will cost you some money. Google Analytics is the fastest to setup as you just have to use your gmail account, take your code, put it in your home page and you are done. If you want to see which tools are downloadble and which generate the results on their hosted server you can filter the list of Analytics tools on our site with the attribute hosted or download in "Provided as" section

Free or not Most of the tools out there are free, or offer a free version. If you have a lite site when it come s to traffic then you don't worry about costs cause there are plenty of analytics software tools that you can try. If your site gets a lot of attention then you might consider a customized solution like ]WebTrends or a paid version of Clicky To see which tools in the products tab is free or not use the filtering and choose the license you need

Data reports Usually, on hosted websites the data reports dashboard can be seen in any browser. You may want to export them in different kind of file formats but if they only export them in html or csv you can use another software product to convert them. Use ITerating search for any tools that may help

Features The basic features as number of visitors and time spent on page you'll find with any analytical tool. If you want a full package of features then you'll appreciate Google's product

Counting all the visitors Some of your visitors might have JavaScripts disabled so some of the tools that use page tagging to track your traffic will not count them. Google Analytics skips them but Clicky doesn't

After you decide what you need, make sure to filter ITerating list of website analytics tools to get the most of it. After you are happily tracking your stats come and tell us what you found! ITerating uses both Clicky and Google Analytics to track the traffic (as you can see in the home page source)

Commnunities

• Web Analytics Forum
• Web Analytics and Traffic Forum

See Also

• List with Analytics software tools and user reviews
• Log Analyzers
• Other Software tools for your website