Web Tracking Applications

One of the greatest advantages of using the internet to market your products and services lies in the fact that online activity related to your web presence can be easily measured. The corollary of this though, is that you have to put in the effort required to do the measuring.

Tracking Your Metrics

The more accurately you can measure the activity on your site, the more successful you can be online. Find out who visited your site, why they visited, and how satisfied they were by what they found there, and you’ll be able to hang on to what works, and rework what doesn’t.

Luckily for you, there are several tracking applications, (some free, some not), that you can use to keep up with exactly what’s happening on your website. Accurate tracking of your website data can be a key factor in your online success.

So for your convenience, we’ve put together this list of popular applications for tracking your website data.

Google Analytics

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google Analytics is the leader in tracking applications. Free, accurate, and easy to install, Google Analytics is a great tool, especially when used in conjunction with one or two others.

Check it out at http://www.google.com/analytics

Index Tools (Yahoo)

Recently acquired by Yahoo, Index Tools provides a free, full featured analytics solution with new features that provide insight into the demographics and category interests of your website visitors.

Find out more about Yahoo Index Tools at http://web.analytics.yahoo.com

Mint

An extensible, self-hosted website analytics program, Mint is not free. Licenses cost US$30 for the program, which measures visits, referrers, popular pages and searches among other data.

You can visit Mint’s website at http://www.haveamint.com.

Enquisite

An SEO analysis and optimisation program, Enquisite isn’t strictly an analytics application in terms of measuring visitor behaviour. There are several variations on the Enquisite theme. Enquisite Campaign is designed to help you maximise traffic flow from organic search results, while Enquisite Optimizer focuses on keyword measurement, including the related site metrics.

Like Mint, Enquisite is not free, although you can sign up for a 30 day trial period.

Visit http://www.enquisite.com to find out more about their products.

Quantcast

Quantcast offers some free services, and some services for which you have to pay. One of their free services allows you to build a detailed audience profile, identifying not only your audience demographics, but also information related to the other types of sites your audience visits.

Find out more about Quantcast at http://www.quantcast.com

Doubleclick

A part of Google since 2008, Doubleclick offers technology products and services that are sold primarily to advertising agencies and media companies, that allow clients to measure, target, deliver, and report on their interactive advertising campaigns.

Visit their website at http://www.doubleclick.com

Omniture

Omniture is a company focused on CMO’s and Online Marketers, that offers a variety of products focused on measuring visitor acquisition, conversion, and online analytics.

Visit http://www.omniture.com for an overview of their various offerings.

Web Trends

One of the first online analytics and web tracking companies, Web Trends sells a series of powerful enterprise analytics products, that help you analyse, and interpret, your site metrics.

Check out http://www.webtrends.com for an overview of the various systems they have available.

AWstats

AWStats is a free open source tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics from your log files, and displays them in a graphic format. It shows you all possible information contained in your logs, and can analyze log files from all major server tools as well as many others.

Find out more at http://awstats.sourceforge.net

Technorati

While not an analytics tool in itself by any means, some firms use Technorati nonetheless, primarily as a means of keeping up to date with some of the latest social media trends. Technorati is effectively a search engine that specialises in blogs. Keeping an eye on the blogosphere can provide valuable early warnings for big companies, but its use isn’t very applicable for most firms.

Try Technorati at http://technorati.com

Lotame

An online intelligence company that provides behavioural targeting and analytics services, Lotame aggregates social media data allowing its clients to effectively target their consumer audience.

Visit http://www.lotame.com to find out more about their services.

Tribal Fusion

A site representation company and advertising network, Tribal Fusion partners with web publishers to provide advertisers with targeted advertisement placements, which they subsequently track.

Find out more at http://www.tribalfusion.com

SiteMeter

Site Meter is a service which provides counter and tracking information by logging IP addresses and using JavaScript or HTML to track visitor information. It provides site owners with information about their visitors, including how they reached the site. SiteMeter is available both as a free Basic service, and a paid Premium service.

Visit http://www.sitemeter.com for more information.

Audience Science

Audience Science provides advertisers and publishers with the user information that allows them to target advertisements based on behavioural data. This makes it possible to focus their advertising on the people most likely to be interested in it.

Find out more about Audience Science on their website, at http://www.audiencescience.com

Going Up

A free statistics, analytics and search engine optimisation tool, Going Up integrates with other tools in an easy to use interface that shows you how your website is performing.

http://www.goingup.com

Crazy Egg

A paid service that provides comprehensive analytics data, combined with visual elements to make interpretation and action simpler.

Visit http://crazyegg.com for an overview of their products and services.