Best Web Analytics
You have invested a great deal of time and money in setting up a well designed attractive website. How do you find out whether it was all worthwhile in the long run? The answer, of course, is to use a good web analytics tool to track your website’s statistics.
Given the number of web analytics tools available, however, choosing the right package will involve a certain amount of research to establish whether or not the tools will provide you with the information you require.
Which software to choose?
If your website is hosted by a shared hosting company it is possible that you will already have a built in statistics package such as AWStats available to you. Provided all you are needing is a general traffic analysis this should be quite sufficient. For more complex analysis, such as conversion tracking, however, you will probably want something a little less basic. Here are a few of the top web analytics packages for your consideration.
This is probably one of the best of the free analytic packages, offering far more to the user than basic tools such as AWStats. Once you have installed the Google Analytics code your statistics are displayed in an online reporting interface.
Information available include the number of visitors you receive and how often they visit your site; tracks the conversion rates over a number of pages and compares the behaviour of different visitors. Google also allows you to track the performance of any of your Google AdWords.
One disadvantages is that real time tracking is not possible with this tool and reports can be delayed for a number of hours. Another is the inability to obtain detailed reports about a single visit.
Stuffed Tracker is a website traffic/conversion analysis tool which can also be hosted on your server. It analyzes the behaviour of visitors to your website, the effectiveness of your advertising campaign, determines the conversion rates, tracks sales and calculates the return on your investment. The package also includes an online manual.
Each person’s requirements are unique and your final choice of a web analytic tool will depend upon the specific features you require, however my program of choice is Stuffed Tracker.
