Web analytics is perhaps the most important discipline for businesses online. In case you don’t know who and why visits you, buys your products and talks about you, you are blind on the Web.
Web analytics goes beyond simple SEO metrics.
It’s about
- usability
- conversions
- branding
among others.
Additionally, with the huge influence of social media, it’s more important than ever to monitor social media buzz. While some people still assume that there are no social media measurement tools there are already dozens out there.
So check out these 50+ advanced web analytics tools for business use. It’s the updated 2010 edition. Of course I assume that you know by now the industry standard solution Google Analytics.
This list has been first compiled in February, 2009 so I decided to update and republish it 18 months later. I’ve removed, added and changed numerous links.
Make sure not to miss the Social Media analytics solutions at the bottom of the list.
Free and/or Affordable Analytics Solutions
Search Analytics
- HitTail
- WordStream
- Eightfold Logic (formerly Enquisite)
- Raven
- Compete
- SERPanalytics
Heat Maps and Usability Tracking
Enterprise Analytics
- Omniture (by Adobe)
- Web Trends
- Yahoo! Web Analytics
- Truviso
- Snoobi
- CoreMetrics
- Unica
- Hitslink
- VisiStat
Hosted/Server Side Solutions
Twitter & Facebook Analytics
Social Media Analytics
- Trackur
- PostRank Analytics
- Alterian SM2
Enterprise Social Media Monitoring Tools
Thanks to the colleagues of @GuavaUK for suggesting CoreMetrics and Unica on Twitter. Also thanks to SEMPlanning.com for providing a huge list of social media buzz tracking tools I used while researching.
This post was first published on February 26th, 2009. It was last updated on August 20th, 2010.
Great place to find a place for the relevant players. I noticed you missed VisiStat.
http://www.visistat.com.
We would fit in the following categories: Free and Affordable Analytics Solutions, Heat Maps and Usability Tracking, Hosted/Server Side Solutions.
Please contact me with questions.
Tina Bean
VisiStat, Inc.
408-725-9377
This is a pretty comprehensive list for analyst and business owners alike. Not sure why Google Analytics is not included in the list of free analytics.
Thanks Tina: Looks neat. Which category would mostly aptly describe your service?
Sameer: GA is mentioned above the list ;-)
great post! still going through most of the links.
other suggestions:
Websitegrader.com – general seo analysis
Reviewmyweb.com – kind of like compete but offers more data
Clickheat – free heatmap – http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html
Twitalyzer – twitter analytics – http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/
How about hitslink since 1999? Definitely more advanced that most of the others but by no means free and not exactly cheap either.
Complete list, the only web analytics tool left is google analytics. Suitable for every business.
Noticed you also missed a company I work for: http://www.conversionruler.com which is a very easy-to-use, low-cost, but powerful solution used by small businesses and profesional PPC and SEM companies alike. Not many bells and whistles, but you get powerful details, and a 10M page-view per-month site is less than $1400 per month (which is a good deal, last I checked).
I have used Woopra too good we can track live visits and chat with visitors.
Nice place to find out a list of tools. I use all the tools from SERP Analytics. The free keyword tool is good and searches out many niche keywords with extra information to tell you about that keyword. -http://www.serpanalytics.com/tools/top_keywords
‘white horse likes red apples’
:)
WA tools are very useful and a necessary evil, but IMHO they provide too much data and not enough actionable information. What’s really useful is seeing the data compared over time and monitored within an exception analysis environment. Think manufacturing six-sigma control. See Dynamic Alert (www.dynamicalert.com) for more on this.
Another usability tool you should add to the list is Loop11 (www.Loop11.com).
I suggest Apache Logs Viewer. It’s a free tool to help you view and analyze apache log files.
You can generate bar/pie charts. You can also compute some important statistics on the hits to your web server.
http://www.apacheviewer.com
A good summary. See also this list of Top 10 Analytics Tools: http://www.digitalvinci.com/dv/post/Top-10-Web-Analytics-Tools-%28That-Are-Not-Google%29.aspx
And don’t forget the European award winning web analytics tool including IP addresses.
Check out their website at http://www.snoobi.com.
Thanks,
Jeroen
You might want to consider adding a category for video analytics services like Skytide too. Digital media companies use it to measure viewer engagement and quality of service and pinpoint where they are making and losing money.
It is very interesting list.i also use Google analytics and Yahoo analytics.Yahoo! Web Analytics is a highly customizable, enterprise-level website analytics system designed to help website businesses increase sales and visitor satisfaction, reduce marketing costs and gain new insight on online customers. Thanks for share the nice information with us.
Comprehensive list thanks for sharing. Where’s GA, it’s free as well, anyway, I’d love to try out new Analytics.
Thank you for the amazing resource of information, I will be sure to share it with my community.
ps. I love using Hootsuite
I noticed you failed to mention Heardable.com, http://heardable.com – a platform that measures the effectiveness of any brand online, in real-time. Our engine examine over 400 variables in 6 key subcategories: Sociable, Searchable, Measurable, Portable, Actionable and Shareable.
Cheers,
-Porsche
Excellent list – although some do the jobs of others and therefore both aren’t necessary!
Nice and exhaustive list !
Unfortunately you forgot to mention AT Internet and its tools XiTi, the European Enterprise Analytics leader
What about StatCounter? ;)
Honestly some of these I never heard of before..I guess I need to check them all out. Thanks Tad.
“TrafficColeman “Signing Off”
Hey, great list of tools to measure and analyse websites and their impact on marketing issues. Here is mine for social media and webmonitoting: http://www.social-media-expert.com/liste-social-media-monitoring-tools/
Thank for the list. Now I need to see which one helps me the most
I really love the new heat maps. Heat maps are very interesting and sometimes you can find ones that update INSTANTLY as users are viewing the site. Technology is truly amazing.
Have you thought about including a section on Call Tracking tools for your next edition? You can start here: http://www.google.com/analytics/apps/results?category=Phone%20Call%20Tracking
I certainly agree with what you said here, “Web analytics is perhaps the most important discipline for businesses online.” I agree very much because that is what I’ve learned in my business.
Excellent article, analytics is very important to see where improvements can be made. BTW thanks SEM Sensei for the link.
I really need to go beyond just checking Google Analytics every week. There’s so much more that I need to be tracking beyond just the people that visit my site. With social and PR and search merging closer and closer together every day, I really need to do more. It’s just hard to find the time to sit down, track, measure, and make decisions based on all these things.