Web Analytics tools is a great tool that gives you insight into your site’s behavior and performance. A good knowledge of your site’s visitors will give you an edge to determine how to make your site successful. Trying to understand your web visitors has never been easy; it’s always a complicated concept. Each visitor’s behavior is independent and different from the other and each set of data has to be collected, analyzed and reported.
Every webmaster requires web analytics tools to understand the behavior and performance of his website. When you know what is working and what isn’t, and what trends. You can always replicate it and increase your site’s potential. The best way to effectively do this is to have a good statistics tool working in the background, gathering data, analyzing and reporting them in real-time.
There are so many web analytics tools out there both paid and free, but figuring out which to use is always tricky. My advice will be to use any web analytics tool you can easily understand its data representation and reports. While some web analytics tools have simple interface some are quite complicated, so your best web analytics tool will be any tool you can easily understand.
I am going to share my favorite web analytics tools with you in this article. I have chosen them as my favorite for obvious reasons. I chose them to track Hits, Visits, Unique visitors, Page views, visitor’s location, traffic sources, click paths, conversions, top entry pages and Exit pages, time on site, bounce rates, and keyword activities etc. So let’s get started with the list…
Web Analytics Tools:
Google Analytics: This is my number one and most popular web analytics tool for site owners. Google analytics provides you with deep insight about your site like Visits, Unique visitors, page views, duration of visit, bounce rate, traffic sources, traffic locations, visitors flow, conversions, landing pages, social analytics among other things. The wealth of data available on Google Analytics is admirably balanced by a well-executed user interface. Google Analytics Intelligence report is indeed a necessary web analytics tool for every webmaster.
Must Read: Why bloggers should use Google Analytics Intelligence Events
StatCounter: StatCounter is yet another awesome web analytics tool that provides great insight on your blog. StatCounter provides you with important reports necessary to make your site succeed online. With StatCounter web analytics tool you can keep track of your entry and exit pages, keyword analysis, source of traffic, search engine wars, visitors path and length, number of returning visitors, etc.
AWStats: AWStats come pre-installed on most cPanels. AWStats provides more insight than most web analytics tools and its best job is helping you determine if someone is hotlinking files from your site which consumes your bandwidth in addition to providing you with the basic reports other web analytics tools provides.
Woopra: Woopra is an awesome web analytics tool that offers real-time analytics tracking of your site. I have chosen it as one of my favorites because of this, an edge it has over some other web analytics tools. Its live chat feature can help you chat in real-time with your site visitors, you can take advantage of this feature to interact with your customers in an e-commerce site. Woopra provides both free and premium plans.
Webalizer: Webalizer just like AWStats comes pre-installed in some web hosting packages. It is a fast analytics tool. Webalizer may not provide you with some necessary information about your site, but I have included it in my favorite list of web analytics tools because it provides unique and excellent insight.
Have you used any of the above listed web analytics tools? What was your experience with them? Did I miss your favorite web analytics tool? Mind sharing with me your favorite web analytics tool? Use the comment form below to share your views. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feeds.
I’m for awstats. I don’t believe in google analytics.
Hello Mavtrevor,
I love statcounter because it gives detailed analysis and gives your ways to increase your website traffic. i also love google analytics but they do not give on the hour traffic but they are also great. these are the two analytic tools i am using. thanks
Google Analytics is indeed an awesome wen analytics tool, and i bet most webmaster use it to gain insight into their site’s performance. Thanks for the article its indeed a nice share.
Thanks for your comment….GA is my favorite though.
GA and StatCounter are great web analytics tools and i use then as well…
AWStat is awesome i use it when i want to get in-dept details of my site’s performance.
My problem with all these stats solutions is that “they all give different reports”, wordpress stats could say you had 1200 visitors for example, google analytices could say 1500, cystats 2500 etc, which should i believe in? They all look and sound like politicians to me!
I always felt so till i understood why they vary. Some analytics tools dont consider bot & crawler traffics while others do.
I think that Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tool for web analytics. But nevertheless, I prefer to use some analytical services. One-side information is not the best option for good analytic work so use different sources of information.
Yes i totally believe you, different tools could provide you with different insights and better understanding of your site.