Finding and implementing the analytics program that fits your needs and the needs of your site the best can prove to be a daunting task. There are many choices out there everything from free hosted solutions to paid hosted solutions, and on to the other side of the spectrum open source analytics software to paid analytics software. As you can see there are already quite a few selections in front of us, but wait there’s more… Well let me cover that later, first let’s get into what specific things each of them do, and what kind of metrics will best be utilized for your site.
First let me talk about the whole analytics market, as you can see from above and if you have done any searching around you probably have noticed that there is no shortage of vendors out there. So what’s the difference between all of these services? Well to be brutally honest there is not much difference between, they are all pretty much the same thing wrapped in different packages. Although some may offer a few different tracking metrics, and others may not have the ability to track visitors without JavaScript. If you are looking to track mobile visitors that’s a whole other subject altogether, I’ll have to cover that in another post.
When it comes down to choosing the right analytics solution for your site, this should be an in depth process, and then implementing it within your site becomes a whole other thing as well. But let’s not get off track here, when choosing a solution you should look into each in depth to see what specific features each offer. Through this process you should be able to find the one that offers all the metrics that you will need to analyze your site, where your visitors come from where there go and which sites deliver you the most traffic. I would recommend to you, that you only choose one program as it’s hard enough to get one implemented and working correctly let alone two, and if you have all that much more data to sift through compiling reports can even prove that much more difficult. Just imagine if you were (or maybe you are) putting these reports for someone else that may not understand all this data, this could potentially do more harm then it would good. So in these cases I think that you would be much better off by selecting and implementing just one solution.
Paid is not always better
A trap that most people often fall into is thinking that paid is always better this however is simply not the case at least not always. Most of the paid tools will deliver you the same metrics as the free ones, with some exceptions in there of course.
In most cases the only difference is the wording, the paid companies use sales and marketing tactics to make there products sound special so that you spend your hard earned money on their product that you could possibly have gotten for free. Another problem with paid analytics is once again that they are trying to sell you on there product, meaning that getting some of the new cutting edge features may cost you some extra money, where as a program like Google or Yahoo analytics would possibly be offering these some features for free very soon.
These paid solutions can become quite pricey depending on the size of your site and how much traffic you receive. Prices can be starting as low as a few hundred dollars, but are more likely to be in the thousands or even possibly into the millions! That is a lot of money to be spending on website analysis, and if it’s not helping to improve the site by leaps and bounds that’s unnecessary money coming out of your paycheck!
If you are just starting to venture into the wonderful world of web analytics I would highly recommend that you start out with a free solution either hosted or you host it yourself and experiment with what it has to offer. I think that you will find that the free programs that are out there are powerful enough to retrieve the data you need to make the necessary changes to your site and your marketing plan.
Case studies or just do it?
Another problem that you may run into if you are working for a company, is cost and implementation problems. Business owners always want case studies to prove that doing something will be cost effective and of course increase the overall profit of the business. While this is often times a good idea, it may not be so in this case. If you are having trouble selling your boss on the idea of web analytics, of course you should probably go the route of the free solution, but also try to make your boss understand that he has nothing to lose except some of your time while you get everthing implemented and working properly. Also let your boss know how much you and the rest of the team (if you have a team) will be able to improve the site, get more (targeted) visitors, and increase the amount of time people spend on the site. Hearing that should excite your boss enough so that they will now allow you to start using analytics on the site.
One man army or something else?
If you are just running a small site and have a small budget this may not be for you, but in this world it’s always good to have someone else there with you to keep your ideas and everything fresh. If you are not constantly coming up with new ideas and methods to track your visitors your site will probably not see any significant gains in conversions.
If you have a small budget and can not afford to hire anyone else on, you have other options. You could hire a professional consultant to help look over your data with you and recommend changes, or finding new sources of traffic for your website. If you choose to go this route it’s important that you make sure that whoever you choose has some experience with web analysis, and that they are current with everything that’s happen with web analytics. If they are not you should continue your search until you find someone who is, as you will not want to be wasting your hard earned money on someone that will not be of any great help.
Alright I am afraid that I may have gotten a little off topic there, but back to the point that I originally wanted to make. Most of the paid analytics solutions will offer you a set amount of consulting services, while this may sound great the consult that helps you out may not be the best qualified to help in analyzing your site. Don’t get me wrong these consultants are highly qualified (they have to be in order to hold that job), but what I am trying to get at is that they may not know your industry as well as you do and that may put a damper on the analysis they come up with.
Of course if you go the free web analytics route the money you save by not paying for the software could be spent on hiring a professional consultant. By taking this route you could also seek out someone that is not only highly qualified but they may also have experience working in your field, that in my opinion will make their analysis of your data that much better.
How is the data gathered
There are many different ways to go about gathering the analytics data for your website. Most of the programs use JavaScript tags to gather the data, which is fine unless your visitors have JavaScript turned off. In that case you will not be receiving any data or information about your visitors.
There are other solutions out there that collect the data in many different ways, some may use pixel tracking (a 1×1 pixel is printed onto the page in order to gather the necessary data for the program to produce data).
Others may monitor the networks activity either through the port or some other method, allow you to accurately track your visitors even if they have all there JavaScript turned off. This is also a good way to track mobile users.
Deciding what audience you have and whether or not their browsers have JavaScript, should be an important consideration when looking for an analytics solution.
Alright I hope that this post give you a little bit of insight into choosing the analytics software that’s right for you and your site. It’s hard to cover this topic in just a little blog post as there is so much information to be covered. I tried to give a broad and general overlook of which might be better for you in this post. I was thinking that I might compile a list of all the analytics software out there, with the features they offer as well as pricing information. Did I miss something that I should have covered? Feel free to add it in the comments below or let me know and I will get it added on, or create a new post covering it.