When picking up a Web Analytics software, you should make a comparison between several analytics products, and later on decide which product you want to use or purchase later. There are many products of web analytics to choose from, starting from free SaaS web analytics and towards to real-time web statistics and analysis of your visitor’s data.
In order to decide which web analytics solution is the best for you and for your business, you should take a look at some basic decision points.
Free or Paid Web analytics – There are the free analytics solutions and paid ones. Whether you decide to go with a paid web analytics solution, you need to comprehend what are the advantages of using a paid analytics software in comparison to free analytics software. Usually the paid analytics software will give you the option to hire a consultant in a low price with the analytics software. That means that some companies give a complete solution for your business, starting from web analytics tutorials (Text, Video, Webinars etc.) for the software and professional consultant for website owners and webmasters who use their web analytics product. It means that they will do all the ‘dirty job’ and will come with a solution to different problems, which your company encounters during the user of the software.
On the other hand, some webmasters and business owners prefer using the self-hosted or free method. That means that you only want the software and want to deal with all the details by yourself, without any instructor/consultant telling you what to do and charging money for it. Some people are really fast learners, and all they need is just to look at the User Interface in order to learn what they should do next and how to use the web analytics software without a special guidance.
Live (real-time) Statistics- You probably know and have been living through the fact that Google analytics (free analytics software from goggle) doesn’t give you real time statistics. You will see that statistics that had been tracked, only few hours or minutes later. It is really cool to see real-time live analytics information running in front of your screen. Even though, that type of software usually cost more than traditional web analytics software, because the host of the analytics software needs special hardware in order to give this service for its customer and become cost effective. One of the latest Live web analysis software is Woopra. I have been using woopra for a long time now. I love woopra because it gives you the ability to see who is visiting my site in real time.
Woopra has some cool features, one of them is the ability of chatting with your web site visitors in real time. That means that when you see a visitor at some page, and you want to talk to him, all you need to do is to press a button and ‘Boom!’ you are talking with your visitor at that same spot. Woopra is a really cool live web analytics software, and I advise everyone who wants to taste how real time web analytics products will be in the future, to check woopra out.
Anayltic Features – There are tons of features for every web analytics product on the market. Some of the features are about bot/spider monitoring, mobile access, email reports, campaign RIO, conversion, the ability to export the data to files (PDF, CSV, XML, Excel, Word, HTML). If you are searching for traffic stats, you should probably make sure that the analytic software gives you the widest range of information about your visitors: visitor history, page views, exit links, time spent on page, time spent on the site, visitor path while surfing, etc. You can visit the website TopTenReviews.com and see in-depth comparison and reviews about all the products. If you want to compare the products’ side-by-side you should check the TopTenReviews.com website to gain more info about all the web analytics product options (free and paid), which are on the market.
The leading names in the web analytics field are: Coremetrics, Omniture, WebTrends, Unica, HitsLink, VisiStat, Google Analytics, OneStat, Clicky, GoStats and others. Those are the top names in the market of web analytics software and services (SaaS). This leads us to the SaaS vs Software web analytics solutions.
SaaS or Enterprise logfile analyzer software – Google, for example, is a SaaS analytic solution. That means that all the data that is collected through your website is on the cloud (Google datacenters/servers). If you want to see the data, you should sign in to your account and view it online using your browser or mobile phone. On the other hand, you can use a Enterprise logfile analyzer software that you can install on your server. The second one (logfile analyzer software) has a benefit of the data stay private and not on other company’s servers. Of course you need the right knowledge to take care of this intelligence and for many webmasters and site owners, the SaaS (Software as a service) is the best solution that gives them less headache and they can jump right it in and start using it out of the box.
You probably know the benefits of using Google analytics in comparison to another analytics self hosted solution. You don’t need to worry about a thing, all the data is kept secured on Google servers and the access for this data is free of charge. I can we won’t see HP using Google analytics, and I guess that they have their own data collection tracker for their website, hosted on their servers for total privacy and security. However, just to let you know that there are many large and medium companies, which decide to use free SaaS solutions too. SaaS web analytics solution is perfect for private users with blogs and small to large websites, but if you want the best possible solution, you should try to find out more information about Paid SaaS web analytics solutions.
Vs. Google Analytics – The main edge of using Google analytics is the fact that you can integrate some other modules of Google with Analytics. For example, you can combine between Google Analytics and Adword and keep track on how Google your ads are doing and see keywords entrances using the google analytics platform with congestion with analytics. Google improves the features and UI all the time. The competition is pretty intense, but no other company can give a free robust web analytics solution like Google can. Just before few months ago, Google introduced ‘Segmentation’, the ability to build a customer (visitor) segment and use it to identify special customers. Google Analytics is a robust platform that will greatly satisfy a lot of customers that do not need anything more than that free solution.
There are many more options that will help you compare between web analytics products, just make sure that your are writing down all the important features that you or your company need.
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