Google Analytics is the go-to platform for countless of marketers, because it’s totally free, chock-full of features, and comes with the clout of the Google brand name.
After you enter the Google Analytics code into your website’s HTML, the service will measure certain goals for you, including which pages a visitor clicks on, how long they stay, and the actions they take.
As Kissmetrics points out, one of Google Analytics’ best features—especially for retail sites and marketers tracking purchases—is the Goal Funnel, with which you can set up a string of URLs that a consumer clicks through when purchasing an item. You can find out not only how many people are going through the process of making a purchase, but also how many are leaving it at a certain stage. This information will allow marketers to fine-tune their strategies and make the purchasing experience simpler for the consumer.
Google will also report the keywords people search that bring them to your site, as well as which devices and browsers they are using—not to mention from where they are being referred.
When it comes to customizing data, you can track certain campaigns that are driving traffic to your site, create your own reports with hand-picked metrics, and set up custom alerts to have your insights delivered at certain times.
Possibly the most frequent complaint about using Google Analytics is the information can be messy and the interface problematic to navigate. However, Google is working to counter these complaints with new tools like Data Studio, which lets users turn data into shareable, visually engaging reports. While the platform still may not be the most intuitive, you should be more comfortable with the settings after a month or so, and, in turn, get the most out of Google’s free service.
Bitly may be best known as a free link shortener, but its features do more than just save character space. Once you’ve shortened links—and possibly even added a vanity URL shortener—Bitly gives you the tools to efficiently share those links and analyze their performances.
For example, Bitly reports how many clicks each link generated and when people clicked, down to the hour. The report will also include which platforms people used to share the link so you know if most of your traffic is coming from LinkedIn, Facebook, and so on.
On the stats page, Bitly gathers results from all of your links so you can assess how your collection of content has performed in the past hour, day, week, and month.
Bitly may not provide as much comprehensive information as Google Analytics, but if you’re already taking advantage of its free link shortener and clean interface, you might as well use the perks that come with the package.
Piwik’s free software comes with a forewarning: You’re required to download the program and host it on your own server. Piwik offers comparable features to other popular analytics programs, including keyword search, visitor maps, and event tracking, but what sets it apart from its competitors is its unlimited data storage and mobile app.
The Piwik dashboard is rather involved, which can be either a pro or con depending on how much time you want to put in. The setup also requires some patience and the ability to install the necessary tags on your website. Once you get comfortable with Piwik, however, you can customize it to your liking, since the dashboard is full of widgets that can be arranged for most analytical needs.
Piwik also offers the ability to set up automatic email reports so you can stay updated on your content’s performance and optimize accordingly.
Open Web Analytics (OWA) is an open-source software, just like Piwik. Similarly, there is no limit on the amount of data you can store or the number of websites you can measure through the program.
OWA provides information very similar to what you’ll see on its competitors’ platforms, such as views, referral sites, unique visits, and visitor location. Additionally, OWA can measure the click-stream of each visitor, pinpointing exactly where they click on your page.
As Divi Fernando points out on the Woorank blog, OWA offers three distinct features that many analytics programs like Google’s do not. The first is heat maps, which track where visitors click on your site. The second is the ability to record mouse movements so you can see how visitors navigate your pages and officially become conversions. Third, the program provides Document Object Model (DOM) click tracking, which uses code snippets to report when visitors click on specified links, buttons, and images.
More bloggers are starting to profess their love for Clicky, an analytics program that prides itself on offering up-to-the-minute results. For this reason, I think it’s necessary to include Clicky on this list despite the fact that for most it won’t be free. You won’t be required to pay for Clicky’s service if you have one website that receives fewer than 3,000 page views per day, but after that pricing can range from $9.99 to $79.99 per month.
At first glance, Clicky has something very attractive to offer—similar in-depth results to Google Analytics, but with a much cleaner interface. After all, what’s the use of mining data from your website performance if you can’t understand and interpret the information?
Clicky clearly lists every visitor, including when they visited, where they were referred from, where they’re located, how long they stayed on your page, and what actions they took. Clicky also provides heat maps in real time, not just for a collection of visitors, but for each individual. This is a feature normally offered only by analytics programs that specialize in heat map information, such as Crazy Egg, setting Clicky apart from its biggest competitors.
Clicky also offers an integration with Twitter that makes it easy to monitor Twitter mentions of your account, website, or any keyword or URL. As Clicky’s website points out, Twitter’s built-in search only goes back about a week, but Clicky can provide an almost unlimited history of tweets, including summary reports of activity by user, hashtags, links, and sentiment.
Written by Amanda Walgrove
Originally posted on contently.com