NetApplications HitsLink Review
Today we want to review a web analytics solution called HitsLink by Net Applications. Browsing through many real-time web analytics solutions, I must say that there are only few professional products that are attracting the big companies and grabbing the headlines. One of the uprising Web Analytics solutions that grab a lot of attention in 2009, was HitsLink.
HitsLink provides online, real-time reporting statistics with lots of features. HitsLink has three major packages: HitsLink Professional, Enterprise and Platinum. Every one of them includes its previous package’s features and adds more quality features to the package.
HitsLink Packages Overview
HitsLink Professional – the basic web analytics solution is targeted to small site/companies, who search for a cheap paid SaaS Web Analytics solutions. Even though that we are talking about a basic package, is still gotten plenty interesting and useful features.
- Real-time statistics – HitsLink professional provides a comprehensive real-time visitors’ statistics. All the traffic on your site will be monitored in real time, so can get a clear live view about how is visiting your website at that very moment.
- Understands 300 Search Engines – HitsLink professional has been programmed to follow over 300 search engines. A large variety of analytics software and SaaS solutions do not identify many search engines. Some of them just recognize the major ones like Google, Yahoo!, Baidu (Chinese), Yandex (Russian) and few others. Having the option to read the keywords from which the visitor came from is a big advantage for your online business optimization requirements for success and understanding global markets.
- Visitor navigation paths – HitsLink let you view and understand your visitor’s behavior by providing in-depth visitor navigation path analysis. Every website owner, webmaster or Analytics expert, should understand the implications of bad web design. If you have an e-commerce website, you should follow and analyze the visitors’ navigation routes, so you can better design your website to raise your website’s conversion rates.
- User management for security – Every HitsLink product allows the website manager to secure his analytics data by create permissions user groups.
Of course you will get hundreds of distinctive visitor’s related statistics, so you can clearly and really understand what’s going on your websites and take that costly information to optimize your online website/business marketing strategies.
HitsLink Enterprise – An upgrade real-time web analytics solution to the HitsLink Professional offering by Net Applications. Further enhancing and optimizing your SaaS real-time web analytical experience and providing more analytical tools to deepen your understanding on your website/company’s behavior. Again, HitsLink Enterprise contains all the features that the ‘Professional’ package has and adds more ‘Enterprise’ to it.
- Campaign tracking – HitsLink Enterprise lets you accumulate email and PPC campaign statistics, and keep track of leads. It helps you better comprehend which email or PPC advertising campaign performs better.
- Events – It collects valuable website statistics data related to events on your website, for example, file downloads, filling forms, trials, etc.
- Identify fraudulent clicks – A very effective algorithm that identifies fraudulent clicks on campaign banner or links. We can’t turn over our head to the fact that many advertisers are losing money because of malevolent acts made by competitors or just bored Internet surfers. Having a tool like this, gives you a line of defense to stay protected against click frauds.
HitsLink Platinum – An upgrade to the ‘Enterprise’ version, HitsLink Platinum is the most modern, fully featured real-time web analytics solution in the line of HitsLink web analytics products.
- Dynamic segmentation in Real time – Segmentation is the way to identify subsets of potential buyers within a market (in our case, your website), that has similar needs and behavior of a potential buyer. Using Dynamic segmentation in real time, you can view, analyze and create segment, based on real-time analytical data, which is being collected and displayed to you in real-time.
- Funnel Analysis – This feature enables the site owner to get a higher level view of what is happening in his site. Being able to see how visitors convert to sales (or not), gives you a better understanding on how to improve, and what to improve in your website, in order to optimize the visitor’s experience and make smart decisions that will lead to more conversions in terms of leads, transactions and revenue. The funnel analysis report will give you just that, and we can see such features in more and more Enterprise web analytics solutions on the market these days.
- Overlay click map - A special feature that allows you to analyze a specific web page for user clicks. You can actually see the number of clicks the user clicked on a single link on a page as an overlay.
- Export reoprts – You can export any type of report to to Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe PDF, CSV, RTF, TDF and even WordPerfect document format.
- Multivariate (A/B) testing – A/B tests are being performed in order to determine which web content performs better than the other and test its effectiveness Also called multi-variable testing, this robust feature enables you to optimize your website appearance and check out which combination leads to conversion. Every visitor gets to see a different variation and the system will test which of the variations performs better. This is a truly highly valued enterprise feature, which you get with the HitsLink Platinum plan.
- and much more…
The HitsLink web analytics system is Easy to Use, the only thing that you’ll need to do is to implement HTML code in each page that you want to track your visitors. After that, the system starts gathering data and logging it, and you can see it right away in your dashboard and reports.
Trial & Pricing
First of all, you need to know that you can see a live demonstration of HitsLink web analytics solution online at their website, in order to really comprehend how the system looks and behaves.
HitsLink offers a FREE 30 Day Trial(no credit card required) that you can use with any product that you choose to try (Professional, Enterprise, Platinum). The prices start from as low as $9.95/month for the Professional version, $14.95/month for the Enterprise version and up to $499.95 for the Platinum version (price may change, so make sure that you checkout the updated prices on HitsLink’s pricing page). As you can see, the Platinum version is intended for high-traffic websites and offer the best analytic tools that HitsLink provides. The relatively high price for the Platinum package, assures that you get what you paid for: realtime dynamic segmentation, Geo-Trageting and demographic segmentation, Multivariate (A/B) testing, Multi-campaign analysis, 1 Million Pageviews/month included in the package and much more.
Product Traning
HitsLink offers dedicated product training, which includes Webinars and Flash Videos, though currently at the time of writing this review, only one video appears at the video training section, Dashboard Overview.
More From NetApplications
NetApplications offer various product that you should at least consider taking a look at, like Surveys and SharePost Social Bookmarking. Some other professional services that NetApplications offers are: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Website Optimization, Custom projects and Analytics consulting, when you purchase HitsLink Web Analytics and want help on how to implement the software and help your company achieve its business goals.
NetApplications’ Market Share Service
NetApplications also provides market share statistics about browsers, operating systems and search engines. The insight data provides by NetApplications will help you further understand Internet trends that you should be aware about. It utilizes a unique algorithm for collecting data by monitoring its website visitor’s data and also from live stats customers. NetApplications’ market-share data is provided for its visitors free of charge on a monthly basis.
Whether you decide to use NetApplications APIs or understand visitors’s segmentation and improving your company’s marketing effectiveness, NetApplication will be there for you and bring its top-notch support to its clients. Some of NetApplication’s clients are: The New York Times, VeriSign, Fortune, ComputerWorld, Nokia, Alexa, Yahoo, Opera, Forbes, Adobe, Disney and others.
Reliable & Advanced Real-Time Web Analytics Solution
HitsLink is a truly flexible and valuable real-time web analytics tool. Backing up by a large known and trusted company like NetApplications, you are sure to get both Basic & Enterprise real-time analytics solutions, which will be suitable for any web analytics purposes, for any type of business.
Considering the Free 30-Day Trial for any chosen HitsLink package, you have nothing to lose, and on the contrary, you can gain a lead over your competitors. By using HitsLink real-time web analytics products, you will get a clear intelligent view on what’s happening inside your online business and take all this information and use it to your advantage, therefore achieving more conversions and achieving your business strategies’ goals faster then ever.
Here are some learning videos, which will demonstrate you the products even further:
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