Popular web analytics tools for online businesses

Analytics   |   
Published January 12, 2015   |   
Baiju NT

Web analytics tools are used by online businesses and market researchers to collect and measure web traffic data for the purpose of understanding and improving the effectiveness of a website. The most commonly used metrics in web analytics reports are: unique visitors, visits, time on page, time on site, bounce Rate, visitors geolocation, exit rate and conversion rate. Measuring the metrics and user behaviour is crucial to know what works and what doesn’t. Further, it’s necessary to implement an effect strategy for the longer term. Here are some of the popular web analytics tools that you can use to gain more understanding about your website traffic.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics, a free service offered by Internet giant Google, is one of the most popular analytics tools available on the web, which can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. Integrated with the Internet’s largest paid search platform, Google Adwords, it also tracks display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral.
Woopra
Unlike Google Analytics which takes hours to update, Woopra offers real-time analytics tracking. It is a desktop application that tracks page views and gives live feeds about your visitors, including from where they access the website, what pages they are currently on, where they’ve been on your site and their web browser. It can monitor more than one website simultaneously. It also features live chat, which allows you to talk to your customers when they’re on your site.
ChartBeat
ChartBeat is another real-time web analytics tool used to monitor the user engagement. One of the biggest differences with Chartbeat is that it continually pings every few seconds to see if the page is still open and therefore, it has a far more accurate reading of which pages are actually getting engagement from readers, as opposed to simply being open in a browser tab somewhere.
Mint
Mint is a server-based web analytics tool that tracks traffic trends, HTTP referrers and search trends. Mint is self-hosted and it costs a flat rate of $30 per website. You get the benefit of real-time stats, which you don’t get with the free Google Analytics. And Peppermill, a part of Mint, lets you make any adjustments to make it more compatible for your use with tons of free add-ons.
Piwik
Piwik is an open-source analytics tool that provides real-time and detailed reports on your website visitors. It is a PHP MySQL software program that you can download and install on your own webserver. It has a “plugin” system that allows for utmost extensibility and customization. It can track many websites.
Traffic & Trends of websites
WebTrends Analytics
Webtrends Analytics is a platform for digital marketers to have a comprehensive look at how visitors are interacting with the website. It can measure website activity, mobile app activity and how customers interact with your Facebook page. Besides, Webtrends offers a variety of new solutions, in addition to their core expertise in website analytics.
comScore Digital Analytix
comScore Digital Analytix is a powerful web analytics solution to track and measure specific details of your visitors’ demographics. It is capable of reporting and segmentation in real time. In addition, StreamSense is an excellent add-on for video counting. And large sites can be broken into several separate entities for faster and more accurate reporting.
SiteMeter
SiteMeter is an analytic program for webmasters to keep a track of visitors coming to the website. It can measure the website’s visitors, what websites they are coming from, and where they are going to on your site. Sitemeter offers two version: Free and Premium.
Marketing Automation & conversion metrics
HubSpot
HubSpot is a marketing software platform that includes all the tools you need to do inbound marketing. With HubSpot, you have access to integrated metrics that span your contacts database, marketing content and website traffic – all in one platform.
Optimizely
Optimizely is a website optimization platform enabling A/B and multivariate testing for users to enhance their websites. It enables users with and without technical expertise to make dynamic changes to their websites, test the variations to live traffic, gather immediate results, and start achieving goals.
CoreMetrics
Coremetrics is a cloud-based digital analytics product that helps marketers understand how visitors are interacting with the website, mobile, and social presences. It helps marketers increase visitor reacquisition and retention rates, improve multichannel strategy formation and implementation, and optimize budget allocation and marketing mix, including email marketing, mobile marketing, display advertising and social media marketing.
KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics is a powerful web analytics solution that helps marketers increase customer acquisition and retention rates. KISSmetrics analytics is focused on people. Most people use KISSmetrics to track individual people.
Online Conversion Insights
Online Conversion Insights, one of Millward Brown Digital’s latest tools, offers you the ability to know what your competitors’ conversion rates are and increase your online conversion rates, improve shopper engagement, and grow your online market share.
Keywords, SEO, PPC & Competitor research
Webmaster Tool
Webmaster Tool is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results. It makes sure that Google can access your content. It submits new content for crawling and removes content you don’t want shown in search results.
SEOmoz
SEOmoz is used primarily for the SEO rank tracking function and the Link Analysis. You can track rankings for targeted keywords, and compare those rankings against competitors. This tool gives a brief idea about the level of competition for the keyword based on the top 10 ranking pages.
SproutSocial
Sprout Social is a social media management system (SMMS) with functionality for multiple person teams and a focus on engagement, publishing and analytics. It currently offers users the ability to integrate with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Zendesk and UserVoice.
Google AdWords
Google AdWords is an online advertising service that places advertising copy at the top, bottom, or beside, the list of search results Google displays for a particular search query.
User behaviour & flow
CrazyEgg
Crazy Egg offers the power of Heatmap technology to give you a visual picture of what site visitors are doing on your Web pages. It shows you where people are moving their mouse on the page and where they click.
Mouseflow
Mouseflow is a detailed heat map solution that not only generates a heat map of clicks, but also of every mouse click and movement, scrolling and keystrokes. You can view heat maps from different time periods so that you can see the effect of changes that you make on your page.
Clicky
Clicky is a real-time analytics solution to see up-to-the-minute activity on your site. You can compare snapshots of time on your site — such as the last 30 days or even last year. It also comes with a Twitter analytics tool that can help you monitor what people are saying about your company in the Twitterverse. Clicky’s data is real-time, so you don’t have to wait around to generate reports you may need.