The Top 10 Best Digital Web Analytics Tools 2016!
Trying to know your Web visitors can be a bit, well, confusing. Each and every specific visitor brings his own set of data that has to be collected, measured, analyzed and reported. If you don’t know what you’re looking at, it can feel a bit like being handed a Rubik’s Cube.
These free and paid tools allow you to track what keywords are sending you traffic, what keywords are profitable, and what keywords lose money. As soon as you start tracking results your campaigns get more efficient because you start focusing on the results.
Tracking where you already rank does not alert you to potential areas of opportunity that you have not yet focused on, but if you track conversions you know what those keywords are worth, and it is easier to rank for keywords related to words you already rank well for than it is to rank for a whole new basket of keywords.
While analytics are a must for any Internet marketer, it can be a bit daunting to know exactly which tool to use in order to track your results.
Here are some of the top 10 tools that you can use to gain more understanding about your website traffic.
Google Analytics
Is a very useful free tool for tracking site statistics. You get to see what keywords are bringing the most visitors to your pages and what aspects of your designs are turning them off. I use it to see which attorneys at our firm have the richest SEO, what practice groups are found during searches, what blog content is being read and what is being ignored. GA gives us a wonderful breakdown of what content on our site is being read, what is not, how long users are engaged with the content, and how users are finding and accessing our content.
Google Analytics Pros
It effectively identifies what pages on your site are generating your web traffic.
It does a good job of telling you how these users arrived on your site (i.e. search, direct, social media, etc.).
It exports data really well, so you can support and defend your communications and marketing strategies.
Google Analytics Cons
I was bummed that they moved some of the functions (keyword data, etc.) over to Google Webmaster tools. (On the bright side, this has prompted me to become more familiar with Google Search Console.)
A lot of functions are right there. But it’s hard to tell which functions are most important or what they offer.
Perhaps this is related to number 2, but the UX is fairly intimidating. All of these tools and subsets of tools are right in front of you, and it’s difficult to understand what ones are the most important. A simpler, streamlined format might be a better approach.
Clicky
There are no special resources needed to use Clicky – it works well for all the sites, providing up to date metrics on visitors and actions. It started out as analytics particularly suited to bloggers and it’s still very strong there, but I believe it can work in a wide range of scenarios as well.
- Clicky wins out because it’s extremely user-friendly and even a novice can quickly understand how to configure it to get meaningful data.
- If you’re managing multiple sites, the ease of copying your favorite dashboard views to another site is another big plus.
- And the bounce rate metric is different from any other I’ve seen – really great for tracking blog visitors who may look at a single article before going elsewhere.
It’s hard to find a negative feature about Clicky, but if I must pick one, it would be the fact that some reports are only available for limited periods, which means you can’t get a one year overview of all aspects of your site. That’s just nitpicking, though, as what Clicky offers is more than enough for most people.
KISSmetrics!
If you have a mobile or web application you MUST use this software to see how your users are using your product. I don’t have any experience with e-commerce sites, but I can imagine it must be awesome to see how much revenue a newsletter generates, and how your different segments are performing. Kissmetrics is used by marketing, sales and product development. When we first started using it, we got a lot of insights into how our users were using our product.
- The more events you track and properties you send along, the more you can see how specific users use your product/service. The user based timeline gives you a perfect start point to get in touch with users, because you can see where they get stuck.
- Tracking your traffic sources and how they influence conversions is awesome. You can get a perfect view of how much a traffic source contributes to revenue.
- Funnel reports give you more insights into micro and macro conversion steps and give you actionable data to work with.
- Customer support!
- Integrations with CRM
- Google Mobile Ads tracking (we’re driving signups through mobile display ads to our app on Google play, and cannot identify traffic source in KM). Mobile search and desktop ads are tracked perfectly
- Mail integration to send e-mails from KM to users
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is great if you have static content and want to be able to easily set up heatmaps and scrollmaps to see how people interact with your webpages across different devices types. Straightforward and reliable.
In circumstances when you want fast turnarounds, Crazy Egg isn’t the right tool as the visualisations often take the better part of a day to generate. It also doesn’t perform well if your site has dynamic content – either AJAX-driven or dynamically expanding.
- Provides heatmaps that shows you the elements on your site that are and aren’t performing well.
- Provides scrollmaps so you can see how far down a page users are scrolling and which content never gets seen.
- Screenshots show you how your website looks across a variety of different devices.
- Provides a type of clickmap called confetti that enables you visualise clicks by segments – device, new/returning visitors, campaigns and other metrics.
- Visualisations are limited – CrazyEgg doesn’t offer attention maps or mousemove maps like some products.
- Screenshots can take the better part of a day to generate. If you’ve got large traffic and want quick insights, CrazyEgg isn’t the right tool.
- No automation – if you want to run a set of heatmaps regularly to keep track of frequently changing content, this needs to be done manually.
- No integrations with A/B testing tools, which would be very helpful.
- Customer support experiences haven’t been great. All requests seem to be managed by one person, who isn’t interested in helping fix bugs and is generally unhelpful.
Piwik Analytics
This software can be installed manually or via a third party installer. Those less happy with coding may prefer to check availability of Piwik via the web host before choosing it as a preferred option. That aside, the important issue when choosing any analytics package is whether it tracks the range of data that you need. Piwik is very rich in this respect.
- One of Piwik’s strengths is the provision of customizable widgets for different bits of analytics data. The ability to add and remove them, change dates and more makes this a flexible way to visualize data.
- The visitor log section is also rich, providing date, keywords, actions and more in a single table, which makes it easy to identify your most effective content.
- And the visitor actions table includes both bounce rate and time on site, so you can quickly tell which pages have the most engagement.
- Data display is a strength for Piwik, as you have access to overview charts while simultaneously being able to drill deeper.
- My impression is that you can do more with goals in other analytics packages, though the basic functionality works well in Piwik.
- The WordPressintegration can be buggy. Though it worked well most of the time, in one case I had to remove the Piwik code to fix a site error.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is well-suited for quick analysis of our website/mobile app especially at a summarized level. Where we start using other tools is when we have to get really granular, such as at a single customer level, though this is partly a product of how our pages are tagged.
- Next Page Flow reports provide a quick and easy way to see what path customers are taking on the website.
- The flexibility that creating segments gives the user for analysis purposes is great. A lot of insights can be generated when different segments are compared.
- The web interface allows for users to quickly pick up on how to use Adobe Analytics, which is a huge advantage over just pointing people to where the raw data can be found since middle management and executives shouldn’t be spending time coding and trying to get the data into a visually useful format.
- Because it is a web interface, sometimes it’s just slow. This could be on the user’s side, or on Adobe’s side, but it does get annoying when reports or dashboards take a long time to load.
- A lot of the things I use AA for I learned myself as it was pretty intuitive, but there are many other features that I didn’t really understand what they were for or how to utilize them.
Mixpanel Analytics
Mixpanel provides a great way to track web site visitors and allows you to segment users based on where they came from and the actions they took on your site. It would be great to be able to visualize more than three months of your data.
- Funnels feature – it allows us to easily track if users are using our website in the way we intended them to. It’s very simple to create a funnel on Mixpanel and it’s easy to visualize the funnel with the Mixpanel interface. We often use the funnels feature to help us increase conversions on our site.
- Segmentation feature – it allows us to segment our users based on where they came from and the actions they took on our site. For example, we often use the segmentation feature to track where our users are coming from by segmenting by utm parameters, initial referring domain, city, etc. Mixpanel also has a great interface for segmentation, allowing us to visualize the data in different types of graphs and time frames.
- Explore feature – we can create profiles on Mixpanel for each of our users. This is very helpful when we support a customer; we can quickly view their Mixpanel profile to understand what actions they took on the website, what device they are using, when they first joined the website, etc. which helps us better support our users.
- Mixpanel restricts the time frame of how you can visualize your data in the Funnels, Segmentation and Retention features. For example, when you view your unique data in the Funnels and Segmentation features, you can only visualize your data for a maximum of a 3 month time frame. This makes it frustrating when you want to visualize your data for more than a 3 month time frame and requires you to manually add the time frames together. Furthermore, the Retention feature only allows you to measure the retention of a user for a maximum of 1 year.
- The notification feature allows you to send notifications only based on ‘people’ properties. It would be very helpful if Mixpanel allowed us to send notifications based on the ‘events’ users took on the website.
Webtrends Analytics
Webtrends Analytics is great at showing increasing or decreasing usage month over month and showing what pages of the web site are getting the most usage. However, for Webtrends on Premises, memory usage is a big problem and there doesn’t seem to be an upgrade path for Webtrends on Premises.
- In terms of simple web site usage, Webtrends is excellent at showing increasing or decreasing usage month over month.
- Webtrends is very good at showing what pages of the web site are getting the most usage, what are the most successful downloads
- Webtrends is also very good at showing the geographic location of the clients. It is pretty good at showing what organizations the clients belong to as well.
- For Webtrends on Premises, Memory usage is a big problem. And even powerful servers with copious amounts of physical memory – does not help for Webtrends
- There doesn’t seem to be an upgrade path for Webtrends on Premises. It is stuck at version 9.2b, and there are currently no plans to upgrade. Companies that want the latest features must instead use the hosted version, Webtrends on Demand. Companies may save on salaries, but they will need to pay Webtrends lots of money, if they are big users of the software.
- Webtrends for SharePoint requires a Professional Services contract to do properly – Webtrends does not share the documentation. Some of the other add-ons have the same, or similar, issue.
ClickTale
ClickTale provides additional heat map capabilities to Crazy Egg heat maps such as scroll reach, mouse movements, clicks and a summary report. The ability to watch visitor recordings for certain visitor segments is also invaluable. The tool also makes it very easy to build and segment conversion funnels. Education is required to get the full value.
- Heat Maps – we used and liked CrazyEgg in the past, and it was a cheaper tool that was easy to use. ClickTale gives us additional capabilities with better data about scroll reach, mouse movements, clicks and a summary report that shows what parts of our pages are getting attention. A product manager asked us yesterday for insights on how his product page was performing, and we were easily able to send him the reports in the heat map section.
- Visitor recordings – We get good data on our website using analytics tools like GA, HubSpotand ClickTale, but it is very helpful to watch actual visitor recordings for certain visitor segments. If we add a new page or new feature to our website and notice a trend, we can easily drill down and watch visitors and see how they are interacting with the page.
- Conversion funnels – We do a lot of our analysis in Google Analyticsand you can set up conversion funnels in GA if you know how to do it. The problem is you can’t segment the data and the aggregated data is not as helpful. ClickTale makes it very simple to do conversion funnels, and you can segment them with just a few clicks.
- Education – there is a ton of data available in ClickTale, but unless you know what you are doing, it provides little insight to the business. You can’t simply send executives heat maps, conversion funnels, or visitor recordings and expect them to know what to do with the data. I recommend they make a serious investment in education for end-users so that companies can get the full value out of the data the tool can provide.
- Set up – The set up can be easy for ClickTale, but ours was more difficult because of our CMS, use of HubSpot forms and CTAs, and our extensive use of GA. Getting all of that to work together is not always straightforward, and we had a difficult time getting it all set up. I recommend ClickTale make some investment in better tools to help customers get set up. They may have done that over the past 10 months since our initial setup.
Go Squared
GoSquared provides great real-time statistics and trends and allows us to see current trends and product engagement. The interface is easy to use and understand. It would be great to be able to get historical data. .
GoSquared is used by our representatives to easily connect and track our customer for our energy trading portal. It allows us to see our customers interest and therefore allows us to provide better and faster service to them. Our system needs to be fast and responsive, so does our analytic system, and GoSquared delivers this by providing real time information.
- Provides real-time statistics and trends which is invaluable to representative to establish solid connections with our customers
- Allows us to see current trends and product engagement. Also allows us to compare unique visitor counts with relevant dates.
- You can go big as you need, and pay as you need with instantly upgradable and affordable plans.
- Customizable dashboard is a great add-on for representatives to remove screen clutter and have clean information
- You can always directly communicate with your customers by integrating another component to your site.
It would be better if it would have some kind of history, so we can dig further information.
This are the genuine reviews from the web analytics industry experts who have hands on experience with on the above mentioned tools!
Source and Pros & Cons : Internet – trustradius.com
