Analytics Resources
What are web analytics?
Web Analytics are tools that provide important statistics about your website. They can let you know such things as: the number of visitors that came to your site, what pages the visitors viewed, how long they stayed, how they browsed the site and the links they clicked. By knowing this information, you can analyze and improve your site to provide more value to your visitors and increase traffic and conversions.
Analytics Resources
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet is a company that gathers statistics about web sites from users who have installed the Alexa toolbar on their browser and on their website. They then report the ranking of a site’s popularity, called the “Alexa Ranking.” There is no consensus on whether the Alexa Ranking is accurate, yet many see a high Alexa Ranking of a website as a measure of success.
ClickTale
ClickTale captures your site visitor’s actions so you can know exactly how people behave on specific web pages. This is known as in-page analytics. ClickTale provides real-time movies of a visitor’s entire browsing session, including heat maps of where visitors look and how far they scroll. The software is hosted so you add a few lines of tracking code to your web pages to make it work.
Compete
Robust tools for comparing analytics of competing sites with nice charts for displaying data.
Google Analytics
Google has the best free tools that most people use to track and analyze their website’s traffic. After signing up, Google will provide a snippet of code that you must place in all the pages you want tracked. If you are using WordPress, there are analytics wizards that allow you to place the code on your site. The person who writes the blog described next is the premier expert in helping people use Google Analytics and analytics in general.
Occam’s Razor
Understanding the workings of Google is important if you want your site to get high rankings in Google’s search engine. This blog provides very relevant information in a friendly and conversational tone by Google’s Web Analytics expert, Avanish Koushik. He is author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.
Rank Checker
You can use Rank Checker to find out how well a website ranks on Google, Yahoo and MSN for specific keywords.
ROI Revolution Blog
This company provides valuable information on analytics through free webinars and other formats.
Urchin
This free software is similar to and provided by Google Analytics. Google advertises it as good for sites that are behind a firewall or within an Intranet. Because you host it on your own site, however, there are additional options that you don’t get with the hosted version.
