Basics on Web Analytics Choices

I occasionally answer some questions on LinkedIn and this AM I decided to answer a question on the best Web Analytics tools to use.  I put together the following introductory outline to web analytics.

There are three main ways to track web visitors – each with its advantages:

1. Software as a Service (Saas) Adding a snippet of javascript to every page on your web site and all the visitor information is saved on the vendor’s servers. You access all your data via a web based interface to the vendor’s servers.
2. Enterprise software – Saving visitor logs on your servers and parsing the data to analyze the log files
3. Panel Software – Data is collected from Internet Service Provider (ISP) routers and may also be collected from panels where users agree to have all their Internet usage tracked. This is essentially a large survey of data – not an actual tracking of visitors.

To give you an understanding of my perspective, my experience is based on using web logs from 1997-2000 and using SaaS from 2000-today.

• Is privacy an issue – some companies have rules against external hosting of data. If so – then you need Enterprise software
• Are you concerned about minimizing your internal IT time – SaaS is a HUGE value here
• Are you most interested in comparisons to other sites – than Panel software is of value
• Do you want reporting and analytic s tools – SaaS products have, by far, built in better reporting tools
• Log files will give you a 99-100% sample of visitors, SaaS tools will give you a 95-998% plus sample of visitors and panel tools will give you a 1-5% sample of visitors. In a short answer I can’t give all the details on this – you will need to do some googling / more research
• Do you want integration of statistics with other e-commerce and analytical data – like outbound email campaigns and search engine marketing.  Some of the SaaS vendors have integration with these other vendors and more vendors are adding this integration.
• Do you plan on doing A/B testing of your site and search engine optimization – again the SaaS vendors will have more support/options than the Enterprise logfile
• Do you plan on year over year comparisons – if so consider the IT requirements of enterprise logfiles versus SaaS.
• How quickly do you need to see visitor counts?  – Some of the systems can provide data in real time, some are on a few hour delay and some aggregate and deliver the next day.

The following is a list of some major (not all) vendors

Leading SaaS Vendors

• Omniture – www.omniture.com
  Leading enterprise level vendor – particularly with the acquisition of WebSideStory and Visual Sciences.   They have a large user community and growing integration with their Genesis plaform.
• Coremetrics – www.coremetrics.com
• Google – www.googleanalytics.com (FREE)
  Leading vendor in terms of number of users, but mostly tiny sites (blogs) to small/medium web sites.
• Lyris HQ ClickTracks  -www.lyris.com
  A product I was unfamiliar with till writing this summary.  Looks to have great integration with the Lyris family of products which include email and search marketing tools.   A real strong contendor if you are looking for a suite of products.
• Webtrends – www.webtrends.com
  They have their roots as a Enterpise log application (which they still offer) but branched into the hosted option as well.  Solid product – but the company has had a rough history.  They survived an acquisition by a company that nearly put them out of business.  More recently much of the senior team departed en masse.
• IndexTools – www.indextools.com
  Bought by Yahoo, in limbo right now as to paid/free future.

Leading Enterprise Software Vendors

• AWstats – awstats.sourceforge.net
• Webalizer – www.mrunix.net/webalizer

Panel Software

• Hitwise – www.hitwise.com
• Comscore – www.comscore.com