There is a lot of confusion when it comes to choosing complete web analytics services. The thing is, these tools exist. However, they are few and very expensive.
To choose the best web analytics tool, you should first define the features that you want and then identify a service that offers them. In this article, we share with you the best analytics software in different categories.
Tool To Generate Traditional Web Analytics Reports
Without a doubt, Google Analytics is the best service in this category. It contains everything you might need in a web analytics tool.
Google Analytics is the industry benchmark for traditional web analytics.
You can use it for free so long as you have less than 5 million events annually or buy Adwords.
Tool That Offers Data Export
Again, Google Analytics reports give you the option to export data. You can either use the Google Analytics API or a tool like GA Data Grabber. With these tools, you can export data to Excel for further manipulation.
While you can export data directly out of Google Analytics, you can also use other tools to mine data such as GA Data Grabber.
Click Maps, Scroll Maps and Heat Maps
There are two things to keep in mind about map tools.
First is that there is one set of map tools that capture buttons and classic links. In case you use Silverlight or Flash or Javascript redirections, you will have to make massive customizations to your site.
Heat maps show you the areas of your site that attract a lot of interest in your audience based on clicks.
The second thing is that if a link appears at least once on a page, Google Analytics will find it difficult to differentiate between similar links. It will actually present the links differently, even if they are similar.
For click maps, you can use Crazy Egg and ClickTale. Crazy Egg is more affordable than ClickTale at $9 for 10,000 visits and $99 for 250,000 clicks. The insights you get from heat maps can be very important.
Funnel Analysis
There are some funnel steps that are not reported on the website. Assume you have a resource that people can download. You should have a tool to send you updates when offline conversions occur.
For funnel analysis, you can use tools like Tend, Mixpanel and ClickTale. The most important thing when choosing a funnel analysis tool is the cost.
MixPanel offers a free version for 10,000 or fewer events per month. They can increase the number of events to 175,000 per month if you place a link to their site on your homepage.
Funnel analytics tools help you see how your sales funnel is performing so that you can optimize it as necessary.
Another tip for reducing the cost of funnel analytics tools is instead of having the analytics tool look at all your pages, just have it monitor the very essential pages.
Let’s say that your funnel looks like this: Landing Page -> Click to Register -> Register. This way, you only receive a report when the user registers. By only monitoring events in this sequence, you reduce the number of events.
Behavioral Targeting
BT Buckets is a great tool for behavioral targeting. It works on top of Google Analytics and is free of charge. There are tools that are way more powerful than BT Buckets, but trust me, BT Buckets is ideal at the beginning.
Which Web Analytics Services Are Right For You?
As you can see, there are so many things that you can measure on your site. But these, of course, depends on your needs. In this article, you have seen the different web analytics services and the best tools in each category.
Geeks of Digital is a data analytics and content creation agency. Get in touch with Geeks of Digital today to get help setting up and using Google Analytics.
