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Paid Web Analytics, does it worth the price tag?

(5 posts) (4 voices)

Started 1 year ago by Andrew Mandelson
Latest reply from Guy L.

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paid web analytics

Andrew Mandelson
Member

I know that some of you are thinking to yourself "Why should I pay for Web Analytics product when I can get it for FREE?!". There are many reason why someone can consider buying a web analytics solution. I most of the cases when you are buying a web analytics product, you will get features that you will not find on any other free Web analytics solution. Because if the features would have been alike, nobody would have to buy any paid web analytics solution.

Many web analytics vendors are working very hard to try to "invent the wheel", but really, there are so many feature that Google analytics don't have, that you don't have to be a rocket science to come out with great ideas and implement it in your own web analytics solution.

A few months ago, Google has presented some newly developed features that many people thought that Google will not present them, at least not so fast. Take for example one of the most important features, "Advanced Segments" or "Segmentation". Until then, everyone used Google Analytics and watched the data not segmentaized, but presented as one group of collected information. By looking at the data that was collected from all your website visitors according to date, you just cannot get a real value when you try to analyze the data for all this group of visitors.

So many companies has realized the value of developing paid web analytics software, and they offer features that many Google Analytics users can just dream of. So is it worth the price tags, well, its all depend on your needs. For me, I am perfectly satisfied with Google Analytics and I don't need the real-time advantage for example. But many companies will find the paid web analytics solutions very useful and worth the extra price tag.

Posted 1 year ago #
Guy L.
Member

Web analytics vendors are popping out every few days or so. Mannn! - you can get lost by just watching the table list of all the available vendors of web analyitcs. When I first decided to choose a web analytics application, you should first write all the features that you want and need in the web analytic platform. There are many features.

For example, you can considering features like: visits, Pageview, new visitors, average number of visits per hour, custom reports, https (SSL) support, gelolocalization, ranking per search engine, exit pages, goals, etc. There are hundreds of features that you can find on every web analytics software our there. In the most part, you will not need all of them, and you actually use only few of them. Because many vendors want to "show-off" all their features, many customers think that that the best web analytics product is the one with the largest amount of features. The truth is far from that.

Take for example "advanced segments". Google has released this feature a few months ago, and in many aspects, this feature is a must-have one, which I am sure that many other web analytics vendors will imitate it. So this feature is one that you will probably use the most, even Google Analytics' Custom reports is a highly valuable feature. I had a change to use many web analytics products, and many of them (70%), I have decided to drop and continue my search for a better product. In the market of web analytics, you have around 10 best web analytics solutions, both SaaS and software. The SaaS solution are the most popular among them. I personally prefer using Google analytics because it is a free solution and gave me on the features I need in order to get the best Insight.

Here is a list of many web analytics vendors that you can find by searching the web.
http://www.terrylund.com/vendorListing.shtml

Try to find unbiased comparison sites that will help you see the whole picture. If you trust the vendors table of features and comparison, you will probably be lost. Many web analytics vendors are emphasizing their web analytics products main features, so the best thing to do is to compare web analytics products in other 3rd party sites.

Posted 1 year ago #
Mira Larosh
Member

BTW, I have read about Dynamic content personalization, and as far as I understand is that "regular" web analytics products don't give you the Dynamic content personalization feature. I mean, in order to really make a difference, you will need what called "actionable analytics" that will allow you to change the content of your website in real-time, based on segments. There are some free web analytics vendors who offer Dynamic content personalization, but there are some problems implementing it.

In order for the content to be scanned by search engine like Google and count that change as part of the page, the dynamic content personalization need to take place on the server side code and not in JavaScript. Most of current actionable analytics SaaS solutions are built upon Javascript. This is probably the easiest way to target as many customers, because the implementation it easier, because their clients just need to put a Javascript code inside their HTML pages that they want to track and thats it.

So if I were you, I would search for "actionable analytics" or "Dynamic content personization" in order to really get a grasp on the latest web analytics software that can really make a change for your website.

Posted 1 year ago #
Jerome Dawson
Member

Is it very simple, you just need to do the math right. By using dynamic content personalization kind of analytics, you can really elevate ROI and Conversion rate, so you will cover the expenses of many paid web analytics software in no time. I guess.

Posted 1 year ago #
Guy L.
Member

When you decide that you want to change and use other paid web analytics software with your website, you should know that you will have to spend lot of time comparing between various web analytic software in order to get familiar with the newest and the leaders in the field of web analytics solutions. When you compare between them, you should carefully see that the feature that you need are in there, like Advanced segmentation, custom reports, real-time web statistics, visitor's demographic data, etc. There are several niche of web analytics products: Free, Consumer and Enterprise web analytics solutions.
At the top 3 on the enterprise section, you can find Webtrends, Coremetrics and Adobe Omniture. The prices for the eneterprise solutions rae very high compared to the consumers ones. I mean, you can find enterprise solutions starting from $4000 at least. On the other hand, when purchasing consumer paid web analytics SaaS/software, you will pay around $25-50. So you can see that its not so hard, first set up a price that you are willing to spend on web analytics software, and after that search within that niche of products.

Lets take for example the paid consumer prices real-time web analytics products. In there you can find some very popular products, including Clicky (GetClicky), Woopra and GoingUp!. All of those three leading SaaS/Software web analytics products give you real-time (live) web stats. Woopra real-time analytics is more of a Software then a Software-as-a-Service solution. I prefer using SaaS web analytics, but some website owners want their data to stay confidential, and they prefer the Software product..

Posted 1 year ago #

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