Web analytics and 23 tools to study every possible hole to enter your website
web analytics is all about measuring traffic on websites and pages. There are numerous web analytic tools now in the market, a huge number of them are free and a few are paid versions usally provided by internet analytic companies that gives you complete freedom to understand and analyse your website traffic.
Such applications usually measures
-unique visitors
-Ips
-bots
-Search engines
-and much much more
Major free web analytics Service providers or tools
1. AWStats comes pre-installed by many web hosting companies. Additionally, if you’re setting up your own servers, you can download it for your personal use. AWStats goes deeper into the referring sites’ information than most analytics packages, and is a perfect tool for monitoring whether someone is hotlinking files from your site. Besides being a great detective tool for bandwidth thieves, it offers all of the usual useful tools that you might expect from a statistics package.
2. eLogic provides three levels of service based on your exact needs. If you need to track only one or two pages, they offer a stat counter that just offers you the most basic of reports. Their Webstats BASIC package is also free, but gives you more the usual tools you expect like referring sites, a history, demographics, and more. Finally if you’re a business or a larger site, you may sign up for their subscription program, Webstats PRO, that will give you a full history and more extensive tools.
3. Google Analytics is arguably the most popular analytics package available for individual site owners. Google Analytics (or plain old “GA”) allows you to dig down deep into your stats to see breakdowns of individual regions, states/provinces, cities and numerous other items to better identify your site visitors. The wealth of data available is admirably balanced by a well-executed user interface, but it can still be overwhelming. The package integrates with AdWords and has ecommerce-specific tools to track sales.
4. ShinyStat was initially designed to monitor visits to Italian web sites. Now it is available to sites all over the world, and offers software packages for the individual user, the professional user who needs to track marketing, and a business owner who needs to monitor sales and ROI. There is also a level of service for ISPs to install and include with their hosting accounts.
5. SiteMeter has a free version for smaller bloggers with up to 100,000 monthly visitors that offers all of the usual tools a webmaster can expect such as tracking referrals, visit durations and so on. If you are launching a larger site and need more tools, there is a paid version based on your volume of visitors.
6. StatCounter might have a rather plain interface, but it deftly handles multi-author blogs, allowing you to easily assign unique codes to each author. While it is free and does work, you have to click on a link to see each analytic result on a separate page. Despite its unpolished looks, the site does offer you clearly readable stats on things such as keywords, traffic sources, and other useful information.
7. W3Counter comes in a free and paid version. With a free W3Counter account, you can track up to 5,000 page views a day across 10 websites and see all of the usual stats. In addition, you get a bonus that you can share your stats with anyone you like via widgets for your blog or an API that lets you build new tools. For sites with higher traffic, you can go for the Pro account that allows you to track up to 1 million views a month
8. W3Perl differs from other analytics packages in that it doesn’t just measure web traffic, but also can parse the log files of email and RSS to measure just about anything you choose. You can set up the administration interface for web access and gain real-time stats from there.
9. Webalizer is written in C, which means that it is extremely fast and portable, and is a favorite choice of people who host their own servers. Many web hosts have this analytics package pre-installed for your use inside of their control panel. Webalizer doesn’t allow you to dive terribly in-depth into your data like some other packages, but it provides an excellent overview.
10. Woopra is currently in a closed beta test, but it offers you a wealth of data for those who can get in. Real-time data are streamed from your site that appear on a map letting you graphically see where readers are coming from, what keywords brought them in, and referring sites. Woopra offers you a unique ability to open up a chat window with visitors of your choice as they browse your site. An unusual feature of this service is that the data is presented to you in a desktop application. WordPress users can install a plugin that lets them see this data in the dashboard of their blog.
11. Piwik is an open-source Web analytics application developed using PHP and MySQL. It has a “plugins” system that allows for utmost extensibility and customization. Install only the plugins you need or go overboard and install them all – the choice is up to you. The plugins system, as you can imagine, also opens up possibilities for you to create your own custom extensions. This thing’s lightweight – the download’s only 1.9MB.
12. FireStats is a simple and straight-forward Web analytics application written in PHP/MySQL. It supports numerous platforms and set-ups including C# sites, Django sites, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and several others. Are you a resourceful developer who needs moar cowbell? FireStats has an excellent API that will assist you in creating your own custom apps or publishing platform components (imagine: displaying the top 10 most downloaded files in your WordPress site) based on your FireStats data.
13. Snoop is a desktop-based application that runs on the Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista platforms. It sits nicely on your system status bar/system tray, notifying you with audible sounds whenever something happens. Another outstanding Snoop feature is the Name Tags option which allows you to “tag” visitors for easier identification. So when Joe over at the accounting department visits your site, you’ll instantly know.
14. Yahoo! Web analytics is Yahoo!’s alternative to the dominant Google Analytics. It’s an enterprise-level, robust web-based third-party solution which makes accessing data easy especially for multiple-user groups. It’s got all the things you’d expect from a comprehensive Web analytics tool such as pretty graphs, custom-designed (and printable) reports, and real-time data tracking.
15. BBClone : If you’re looking for a simple, server-side web application that doesn’t rely on third-party services to monitor your data, check out BBClone – a PHP-based server application that gives you a detailed overview of website traffic and visitor data. It supports language localization for 32 languages like English, Chinese, German, and Japanese. It easily integrates with popular publishing platforms like Drupal, WordPress, and Textpattern. Since it’s logfile-based, it doesn’t require you to use a server-side relational database.
16. JAWStats is a server-based Web analytics application that runs with the popular AWStats (in fact, if you’re on a shared hosting plan – AWStats is probably already installed). JAWStats does two things to extend AWStats – it improves performance by reducing server resource usage and improves the user interface a little bit. With that said, you can’t go wrong with just using AWStats either if you’re happy with it.
17. 4Q: A large part of Web analytics deals with number-crunching and numerical data. Raw numbers tells only part of the story and it’s often helpful to perform analytics by way of interacting with actual users. 4Q developer Avinash Kaushik puts it perfectly when he said: “Web analytics is good at the ‘What’. It is not good at the ‘Why’”.4Q is a simple surveying application focused on improving your traditional numerical Web analytics by supplementing it with actual user feedback. Check out this YouTube video on how easy it is to set up 4Q.
18. MochiBot is a free Web analytics/tracking tool especially designed for Flash assets. With MochiBot, you can see who’s sharing your Flash content, how many times people view your content, as well as helping you track where your Flash content is to prevent piracy and content theft. Installing MochiBot is a breeze; you simply copy a few lines of ActionScript code in the .FLA files you want to monitor.
19. Grape Web Statistics is a simple, open-source application geared towards web developers. It has a clean and usable interface and has an Extensions API to extend and customize your installation. It uses PHP for the backend and you can run it on any operating system that runs PHP.
20. ClickTale literally records the actions and activity of visitors. The website owner can then analyze the video footage to understand user behavior and increase the usability of the site.
21. MyBlogLog is essentially a social network for blogs. However, the service also provides valuable statistics; including onsite clicking habits and referral information. Owned by Yahoo.
22. CrazyEgg provides the ability to track, evaluate, and optimize your site based on where your visitors click. Heatmaps and overlays quickly provide perspective into user behavior and habits.
23. Clicky is a clean, all-encompassing analytics package. The service is tailored for small websites and blogs. It’s easy to implement and contains advanced features such as real-time visitor tracking and in-depth content analysis.
Whohoo…It took me half a day to review so many of them, Now its up to you to make your choice, all of them are really nice works by their respective developers. but Try using the ones you liked post visiting their website.
All the best analysing your website traffic and doing better than yesterday ! Also I would really really Love to hear from you Guys about the article and your choices.
[ratings]
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7 Responses to “Web analytics and 23 tools to study every possible hole to enter your website”
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Wooohh Thats a Big Big list… thanks a ton for such a lot of Analytic options. My choice is Piwik that i use, its nice, opensource, effective and has a very rich interface
cheers
Bill
Wooohh Thats a Big Big list… thanks a ton for such a lot of Analytic options. My choice is Piwik that i use, its nice, opensource, effective and has a very rich interface
cheers
Bill
you are most welcome my friend !
cheers
Josh
you are most welcome my friend !
cheers
Josh
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