10 Promising Free Web Analytics Tools

Web analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your web content’s data in order to glean meaningful information about how your site is being utilized by your users. There are plenty of Web analytics applications out there, and you probably already know the big guns such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and remote-site services such as Alexa and Compete.

We go off the trodden path and explore a few lesser-known Web analytics options. In this article, you’ll find 10 excellent and free tools and applications to help you gather and analyze data about your web content.

1. Piwik

Go to Live Demonstration of Piwik.

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.

2. FireStats

Go to Live Demonstration of FireStats.

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.

3. Snoop

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.

4. Yahoo! Web Analytics

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.

5. BBClone

Go to Live Demonstration of 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.

6. Woopra

Woopra is a Web analytics application written in Java. It’s split into two parts which includes a desktop application for data analysis/exploration and a web service to monitor website statistics. Woopra has a robust user interface, an intuitive management system that allows you to run it on multiple sites and domains, and even a chat feature so that you can gather non-numerical information by talking to your site users. Woopra is currently in beta and requires you to request for a private beta registration.

7. JAWStats

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.

8. 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.

9. MochiBot

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.

10. Grape Web Statistics

Go to Live Demonstration of Grape Web Statistics.

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.

Let’s talk about it.

What Web analytics software do you use, and why? Do you have any extensive experience in using any of the above application? Share it with all of us in the comments!

Source: 10 Promising Free Web Analytics Tools

Web Analytics: Google vs. Yahoo

Google Analytics & Yahoo Web Analytics Comparison

The last 12 months have seen the Google Analytics (GA) product evolve into a serious contender for a do-it-all product for most businesses, a period that has also seen Yahoo! get serious with analytics through the purchase of the not-so-well-know European product called Indextools - the decision by Yahoo! to make the Indextools product free with a rebrand into Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA) has turned the free market into a rich, dynamic, competitive space that’s seeing incredible product innovation.

Insightr Consulting are certified in Google Analytics through the Individual Certification programme as well as being a pioneer member of the Yahoo Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN). Our clients use a mixture of Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalyst and Yahoo Web Analytics, with the majority of new businesses adopting either GA or YWA. In Singapore where we are based (and indeed across Asia) budgets for analytics are not as formalised as they are in markets like the US and Europe, so free tools are very popular here.

This article is the outcome of over 5 weeks work carrying out a feature by feature comparison of the Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics products - a project that required a large overhaul after Google announced new features on the 20th October (more examples of the product innovation we’re seeing). Yahoo Web Analytics is still a largely unknown product to business and analysts alike as the product is only available through the YWACN or via Yahoo! advertising sales teams - this comparison should give you a pretty good feel for what you’re missing.

As our friends at Yahoo would say, this is perhaps an unfair comparison - as Indextools always liked to think of the old product as 80% of Omniture at 10% of the price. They weren’t wrong. In fact as an Omniture Site Catalyst user for over 7 years (how many of you can recall SC7?) the Yahoo offering is in many ways more powerful than Site Catalyst; especially when it comes to ‘advanced’ features such as segmentation which for Site Catalyst are only available with an additional “Discover on Demand” license.

Some of you will disagree with our analysis, and particularly with our scoring system - we’re hoping that the comparison is a thought starter and something that will lead to your consideration of the YWA product as a tool worth considering. We feel the scores are fair based on our usage of products and the way our clients will use them.

So, here’s the presentation - it’s best if you view it in full screen otherwise the screenshots will be too small. We apologise for the low quality of some of the screenshots - this was required to keep the file size down. It’s also a long document, over 50 pages - but that’s because both of these tools are powerful and are feature packed! We hope you enjoy it and get value from our work:

If you like the look of Yahoo Web Analytics, and in light of the fact that you’ll need to go through a Yahoo! consultant to get access we’re offering a Google Analytics to Yahoo Web Analytics migration package for a fixed US$2,500 project cost. Here’s what we’re offering:

Insightr: The ultimate comparison between Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics; http://j.mp/2wenKg

Advanced Filtering in Google Analytics

Advanced Filtering in Google Analytics simplifies narrowing down data in the reports table by allowing threshold filters to be created. Instead of creating standard profile filters or weeding through rows and rows of data, Advanced Filters can be created on the fly for any report.

Here is another in-depth look at one of our recently announced new features: Advanced Filters (or Advanced Table Filters), written by the excellent team at LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.

For the daily user, Advanced Filters may be the most useful new feature of the bundle of new features, in terms of streamlining your actual process once you access a report and are actively doing analysis. They are found at the bottom of the table in any report. As a habitual poweruser, I've been clamoring for it for years, and it has made my process so much simpler. It's the equivalent of replacing a screwdriver with a powerdrill.

You no longer need to export your data to slice and dice it to see your desired subsets. Now, you can set a filter while looking at a certain report to get the information you want, without having to exit and create a filter or advanced segment. Within seconds, you can whittle down a massive data table to look at a subset that is important to you.

One example already given in this tutorial video is to show just the keywords that have a low bounce rate (less than 30%) and that referred at least 25 visits. Right away, you've found high value and high traffic keywords. We're using this feature almost every time we look at a data table in a report. It makes you feel much more command over your data.

Here are three more interesting uses of the new Advanced Table Filtering:

Looking for specific non-branded keywords

Sometimes, it helps to see keywords that contain a certain word or phrase, but exclude the brand name. Taking a company called DeLallo Italian Foods, for example. If I wanted to see all the keywords that contain the word Italian food but exclude the brand name DeLallo, I could easily use the advanced filters for this. Previously, I would have done this using regular expressions in the filter:

Filter Keyword: containing ^(?=.*italian food)(?!.*(delallo)).*

No more! Now, we don't need to do this! Now, it is so easy with the advanced filters. Just filter for Keyword containing Italian food and excluding DeLallo.

And presto! Your report is updated. And, at any time, you can edit this filter to further refine it, or delete it altogether.

Landing Pages, Sorted by Bounce Rate

Has this ever happened to you - you're looking at your Top Landing Pages report, and you sort by bounce rate, only to have a bunch of pages with 1 entrance clogging the top of the report? With advanced filters, you can filter out those pages with a low number of entrances to get a better look at which landing pages with significant traffic have a high bounce rate. All you have to do is filter by Entrances greater than 50 (or whatever threshhold floats your bounce-rate-boat).

Top Content, Sorted by $ Index

Another similar use for sites with e-commerce or a goal value enabled is when you're looking at the Top Content report, sorted by $ Index. What you're trying to find are the pages that have the highest value - those that are viewed during a visit that results in a conversion. Again, it's common to get a lot of pages at the top that have a low number of pageviews.

First, it helps to filter out those pages that have a low number of pageviews. But once you do that, you'll likely see the pages with the highest $ Index are pages of your shopping cart or checkout process. We can filter out these pages with the advanced filters too - just add a new condition below your first filter that excludes pages that contain the word cart (or checkout, etc.) in the URL.

These three examples give you a taste of Advanced Table Filtering for your analytics, but they just scratch the surface. Once you explore your own analytics, I’m sure you’ll find many more uses of this flexible and powerful new feature. You'll really notice it's use when you find you're happily lingering for 5 extra minutes, using this new interface feature to easily gain insights and ask questions that would've taken you an hour before and possibly a data export. Pure wizardry. :)

Courtesy: Google Analytics