Web Analytics

The companies listed to the left offer advertisers and / or web publishers software called web analytics.

This software collects, analyzes and / or reports data about visits and / or visitors to web sites. This can be on-site - i.e. data about your web site - or off-site - i.e. data about other web sites.

Collection and analysis of this data offers a few benefits:

1. You can use it to perform market research about your web site or business.
2. You can use it to increase sales on your web site.
3. You can use it to increase visits to your web site.
4. You can use it to target ad serving on other web sites to find better quality visitors to your web site.

Possible costs to consider in using web analytics:

1. Usage. Higher performance web analytics services usually require paying a monthly fee - calculated based on usage (typically measured in page views).

   
   

   Free alternatives like Google Analytics and StatCounter are available as well. The difference between "free" and "not free" - outside of price - is in the limits on usage, features offered and level of support provided.

   
   

2. Support. Free web analytics is a good choice when your market research needs or online sales process is relatively simple.

   
   

   Examples of either situation would be

   
   

   1. Not attempting to evaluate the success of your marketing beyond a top level Return on Investment (ROI) - e.g. Spending $100 on marketing produced $150 in sales.
   2. Not offering more than 20 or 30 products for sale on your site.
   3. Not having more than 10 categories of content on your site for visitors to browse through.
   4. Not needing to directly tie multiple types of online advertising to sales and account for the financial impact of each type of online advertising.
   5. Not needing to customize content in more than a few ways.

As a general rule, the more you complexity you have to manage in terms of analyzing data and using it to make changes to your web site and / or purchasing of online advertising to bring visitors to your site, the more likely you are to require a higher performance web analytics service.

While all of the companies listed to the left can be considered web analytics - many of them offer very different types of web analytics and can be used together as a set of services for your web site.

Browse Web Analytics sites

Use the following reference points to evaluate and compare web analytics:

Service Definition

What is the actual service(s) being offered outside of collecting and reporting data about web sites?

Reporting

This refers to ways to look at the data collected

What data is collected?
How many standard reports are offered?
How easy is to customize reporting?
How easy is to integrate this service with data provided by other web analytics services or data about online advertising?

Support

What APIs are available to use the service without needing to log into a web interface?
What kind of technical support is available to users?