TopTenReview website compared the best web analytics platforms in one of its reviews. When looking at the comparison, I could observe lots of features. When putting a mouse over the features, you can see a brief description on every feature. In this article, I want to explain about each feature, when comparing web analytics software side-by-side. Let’s start.
Web Analytics Features
Multiple Site Monitoring – this features means that by signing up or buying the product, you will not be limited for tracking one site, but more than one. Some web analytics companies give you the option to track an unlimited amount of sites. If you are going to buy a Web analytics platform, you should pay a great deal of attention to that feature, because if not, it can cost you a lost more than you think.
Customizable Dashboard – A dashboard is a main screen where you can see a summary of several modules that the web analytics platform supplies. In some advanced online website analytics software or SaaS, you have the option to customize the dashboard as you like, inserting and removing information widgets with ease, like Google analytics for example. Usually the first thing that you see when logged in to the service, is the dashboard. The best thing is that you can organize every piece of information and have the options utilize it when needed.
Bot/Spider filtering – Many website analytics products do not offer you the option to see if a crawler (bot) has visited your website, and all the attention is given to the human visitor himself. Some more advanced website analytics tools, give you the option to see in the statistics, if a crawler (Google robot, for example) has entered the website and where did it visits, exactly has if it was a regular (human) visitor. Of course in order to get ‘real‘ comprehensive statistics of what people are doing on your website, you should have the option to filter out the Bot/Spider results so you can clearly see what affects your website or blog. In most of the time, when you have the option to monitor spiders by default, you will have the option to postpone it or filtered it as when you like to.
Mobile Browser Monitoring – There is nothing more friendly than giving the customer the option to watch his website statistics details using his mobile phone from anywhere. Usually we are using our laptop computer or desktop computer to access the Internet and watch our website/s statistics. If you have a mobile phone (smartphone), and you want to know what’s happening on your website while on the train or bus, for example, you should check out if the analytics platform support mobile browsing. Some analytics software will give you simple intuitive interface for reading and controlling the analytics interface, and some are more detailed and more advanced, that give you robust control, like the same that you have like you were sitting near the computer.
HTTPS Compatible – some Javascript trackers that you get with your website analytics company have problems tracking and working with secure connection (SSL), also known as HTTPS protocol. Most of the trackers(like Google’s Urchin) will work great on HTTPS connection, but just make sure that it works without bugs and the company that you buy the web analytics from, write the fact that it supports HTTPS tracking.
Multi-Language Support – You can see it in two ways: 1) you can choose between several User Interface languages or 2) the interface supports UTF-8 encoding. Well, for the first part, you should probably check out which languages are supported for the UI, maybe there is a support for your mother tongue language, which is cool. Regarding the second part, most of the web analytics solutions support UTF-8, but don’t forget to check it out, because if your website is in a foreign language, some information like ‘Keywords’ or page names will not display correctly if they are encoded in UTF-8, but the platform does not support Unicode characters.
Bounce Rates – Bounce rate is shown in percents, and what it actually presenting, is the percent of people who left your website after before 3 seconds after entering it. This is calculated and presented for you in most of the website analytics software, but some do not have this calculated feature, and if it is important to you, make sure that you if this feature exists.
Email Reports – Some web analytics platforms have a module that let you send analysis data reports (unprocessed data or chart data) through email. Some even give you the ability to send it to your Facebook or Google’s gmail contacts (and others).
Real-time Data – using this feature you will be able to see the visitors browsing your website in real time. We are not talking about the face of the visitor course, but the data that is being transmitted to the servers will be presented to you almost in real time, maybe a second or two afterward. That will give you a live view of the traffic that you are experiencing on your website or blog right now. You can see each user navigating through pages in your site. Furthermore, what they are doing and how much time they spend on each page, where they are coming from (IP/Country) etc. Clicky and Woopra are among the real-time web analysis software on the market, but you can also find among them: Coremetrics, Omniture, WebTrends, HitsLink, VisiStat, OneStat, Gostats and others. This is a very cool and useful feature, and I recommend looking at it carefully and decide whether you want live/real-time statistics for your website, or maybe it is not important for you.
Campaign Tracking – tracking a campaign (like Google Analytics Campaign tracking) is really important, especially if you are advertising in another website, and you want to track a banner performance in terms of a conversion rate, for example. All you need to do is to supply the analysis engine (tracker) the parameter or URL that reflects that traffic from that specific campaign, and the analysis engine will grab that data and track its performance, so you can make sure that you know exactly which campaign is performing the best.
File Exporting – This is a very popular feature in most web analytics platforms. You have the option to export specific reports, charts and other tabular data to several file types, like: PDF, CSV, XML, Excel, Word or HTML.
Traffic Stats – In TopTenReviews you should check to see if all the traffic stats features that you want, exist. Take, for example: Page Views, Entry Pages, Exit Links, Time spent on the site, time spent on page, average visits per day, unique visitors, most popular pages, visitor path, etc. Traffic stats are important because they collect and present the data collected in an easy-to-read way.
These are only few of the important features that you should know and understand before choosing which platform you want to buy/use. I recommend that you should at least read the above list and understand about those features before jumping and deciding which one to get. Many people just work with Google Analytics free website analysis software. You should know that there are many reasons why other paid platforms exist. For more information and comparison between web analytics software, visit TopTenReviews.
