Over the past few years there has been an explosion in not only the number of analytical tools, but the power of each of them. Tools that used to be unique now compete against newer tools and services. Tools that used to be able to command a premium price no longer can due to the many free options available. Here are a few of the web site analysis tools you should consider for your business.
1. Google Analytics: Google Analytics (“GA”) is really pretty much is all you need to understand everything happening on your website. GA is the current standard for web analytics. Best of all, it’s free. If you have been a long time user, you have seen this tool evolve from a great way to understand traffic to the very powerful and comprehensive analytical tool it is today. Even if you have low-volume traffic, GA is easy to install (non-technical) and you gain significant and actionable insights about how people are interacting with your site. You can use GA to track email and other marketing campaigns and track how people convert to your paywall pages. It’s very robust. Current features include:
- Understand Your Customers & Visitors: Advanced Segments, App-Specific Metrics and Dimensions, Audience Data & Reporting, Custom Dimensions, Filters
- Trace Where They Go: App-Specific Metrics and Dimensions, Browser / OS, Flow Visualization, Map Overlay, Mobile Traffic, Social Reports, Traffic Sources, Universal Analytics
- Understand What They Do: Event Tracking, Flow Visualization, In-Page Analytics, Real-Time Reporting, Site Searc
- Goal Tracking: Advertising Reports,, App-Specific Metrics and Dimensions, Data-Driven Attribution, Ecommerce Reporting, Event Tracking, Goals, Multi-Channel Funnels
- Targeting: Advertising Reports, Real-Time Reporting, Remarketing
- Web Site Performance: Alerts and Intelligence Events, In-Page Analytics, Real-Time Reporting, Site-Speed analysis
- Testing: Advertising Reports, Content Experiments, Ecommerce Reporting
- Team Reporting Alerts and Intelligence Events, Annotations, Dashboards
Google Analytics is a tool we recommend all sites install and use. For most sites, GA will be all you need. While it is free, there is a premium version available that provides advanced data import and analysis, advanced segmentation, testing, remarketing reports and analysis. If you are a high-volume site, have $150,000 available to pay for GA Premium and need these advanced features, it’s worth considering.
So, after Google Analytics? What should you consider?
There are many of other tools on the market. We have kept our focus on tools that are geared for small and medium businesses vs. “enterprise-class” tools like Adobe Site Catalyst, Core Metrics. Webtrends, ComScore. KISSMetrics and others geared for very high-volume retail, publishing and other sites, with pricing to match.
2. Mouseflow: Mouseflow is a tool that that lets you record website visitors, and then like a movie, replay and examine their on-site behavior. Through the use of heatmaps showing where your visitors and subscribers click, scroll, drag their mouse or other actions, you can draw meaningful conclusions about why your visitors are behaving like they do. You can use this tool to understand how people interact with your site, fill out forms, where they abandon or engage, all to improve your site’s design, conversion rates and sales. Best of all, there is a free option! We highly recommend setting up a free account to begin learning the actual behavior behind the metrics you are seeing in your Google Analytics (or other tool) account.
- The Free Account supports 100 recorded sessions, 1 domain and 1 month of storage.
- Other Accounts range from $19 per month to $399 per month to custom pricing for companies needing more than 100K recorded sessions, 30 websites and 3 months of storage.
3. CrazyEgg: CrazyEgg provides visualizations of where people are clicking on your website, it provides scrolling information (to see if people are scrolling and how far), and allows basic segmentation of traffic so you can track how each segment views and clicks on your site. The visualization reports are akin to some of the features in Google Analytics (vs. MouseFlow) but they offer reports that Google doesn’t. CrazyEgg offers a 30-day free trial. (credit card required). We recommend you test the service to understand if the different visualization reports CrazyEgg offers can help your team develop pages that convert better. If it does, then it could be worth the investment.
- This is a subscription service that starts at $9/month but if you have more than a few pages or you need to measure mobile traffic, the monthly cost could go to $99/month or higher depending on traffic volume and number of pages tracked.
4. ChartBeat: ChartBeat provides powerful real-time analysis of your website in a visual dashboard. Why would your business need real-time analysis? A real-time view of your traffic enables you to understand things like: how people are reacting to new content, a spike in traffic from a new source, sudden increase in social media, or other things so you and your team can adjust and tweak content and/or pages on your site to make sure you site converts traffic as well as possible. When ChartBeat launched, Google did not offer real-time analysis but it does now and is quite robust. That said, ChartBeats reports and live dashboards are very powerful. ChartBeat has three versions, one for editorially-focused sites, another for ad-supported sites, and a third general version “for everyone else”. Each version has specific features that allow businesses, in real-time, to analyze and visualize traffic and conversion. If you are a publisher or subscription site with “solid” traffic (e.g. over 3M uniques per month), we recommend you take a look to understand if the editorial and/or the ad version can help you better manage and monetize your content and ad inventory.
- General Version plans start at $9.95 per month. This covers 2 log-ins, 5 sites and up to 1,000 concurrent people visiting your site
- Editorial Version plans are based on how much traffic your site has and how many editorial seats you need. The Editorial version for publishers starts at $299 per month.
- Ad Version tracks both display and sponsored content offerings, making it a helpful tool if you offer advertising products on your subscription site and want to give your advertisers ROI metrics and reports. Pricing is custom based on your traffic, offerings and if you are using other ChartBeat services, so you need to contact ChartBeat for a quote if interested.