Web Analytics Software

During the infancy of the Internet, few companies showed interest in anything beyond rudimentary questions on web traffic like the number of visitors and load on websites. Things changed with businesses moving online and wanting to know more about their customers and their purchasing preferences. Hosting service providers, as a value add offered basic Web Analytics Packages but the scene changed with serious and focused solutions builders. Web Analytics is an evolving industry where basic log analyzers coexist with intenseweb applications and free solutions compete with expensive hosted solutions. Web Analysis software and tools outpaced online commerce growth and numbers between 160 and 200 presently, catering to a wide audience and needs.

In addition to online web analytics software, We have our own proprietary web traffic analysis software for measuring website traffic. We can also create customized modules in case the available tools do not meet your analytical requirements.

Here are some of the more popular web analytics software

Google Analytics

The latest entrant to the web analytics software market is Google Analytics, a hosted page-tagging based solution. Google acquired Urchin, a web analytics firm in early 2006 and launched a hosted service renaming it as Google Analytics and keeping up to reputation offered free. Google’s new offering can give rival solutions a run for their money.

Advantages
- It is FREE, powerful and sophisticated
- Google Analytics is integrated with Google Ad words and also works with various marketing campaigns like referral ads, links and e-mail newsletters
- It’s a full-fledged web analytics tool, even though it is offered free
Disadvantages
- Setting up the configuration would require experienced professionals
- As it is a free service only limited support can be expected
- The database cannot be accessed directly for data manipulation
- The reports are not real time and might have lag time of even 12 hrs
Web Trends

Web Trends is to the Web analytics world as Google is to search engines. The grand old man of the Analytics kingdom comes from the league of higher end applications and has been around for a long time. The latest much improved version is available as Web Trends Analytics 8. After crossing the initial configuration hurdle, its amazing features and large choice of reports makes it ideal for large online businesses.

Advantages
- Web Trends packs powerful features like profiles. Based on various parameters, profiles can be configured for reports for each stake holder in the organization
- Drill down is a useful feature to study reports on relative parameters. Parameters can set at two levels, primary and secondary and can also be multi-level based on the requirement
- A comprehensive database of organizations helps Lead Generation websites to identify and study prospective customer visits
- Web Trends has a wide array of reports and great flexibility to customize it to suit requirements
Disadvantages
- Web Trends is a drag on hardware and the enterprise version would require at least 4 GB of RAM and a dual processor machine
- The initial configuration requires expertise
- It is one of the more expensive tools in the market
- Pricing is on number of page views, thus can be substantial with a large visitor count
Sawmill

Sawmill is a generic log analyzer and very flexible. The help file lists more than 500 different log file formats that it can recognize. Sawmill runs as a web server and has options to store data in your existing database or in a proprietary database format.

Advantages
- The best part is affordability, starting at $99(Current Price)
- With a large variety of filters it is highly customizable
- Sawmill works real time and a great feature to drill down based on parameters
- The open database facilitates integration with other applications
Disadvantages
- User Interface is quite unpleasant and some features can be difficult to locate
- The real time calculation makes it slow with each drill down
- Not very easy to learn
- Lacks sophistication.
Click Tracks

Click Tracks is one of our favorite tools and the easiest to learn. Our customers are immediately impressed by its interface and especially the site overlay. Plenty of tools claim site overlay feature, but Click Tracks does a really good job of it. Click Tracks is best used to study behavior rather than generate hard numbers. If you need 100 reports to be generated, you are probably better off with tools like Web Trends. But if you want to do a quick behavioral analysis, Click Tracks is the best.

Advantages
- Inexpensive – compared to the big boys, Click Tracks is highly affordable. We find their optimization version the best value for money
- Site overlay – see the behavior of people right on top of your website screens
- Labels – Another great feature of Click Tracks is the ability to quickly segment visitors
- Fast – Click Tracks imports log files in no time. If you have log files with you available, you can start using Click Tracks in less than an hour
Disadvantages
- We have found that with large amounts of data, Click Tracks tends to be slow
- Limited reports – if your requirement is to generate a lot of reports that has to be presented to different people, Click Tracks is not suitable
- Even though Click Tracks imports log files fast, subsequent queries take a long time. For example, if you change the data range of your analysis, you might have to wait anything between a few minutes to a few hours depending on the size of your log file and the date range.