Web Analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to a Website. The use of Web analytics is said to enable a business to attract more visitors, retain or attract new customers for goods or services, or to increase the dollar volume each customer spends. Web analytics is often used as part of customer relationship management analytics (CRM analytics). The objective is to promote specific products to those customers most likely to buy them, and to determine which products a specific customer is most likely to purchase. This can help to improve the ratio of revenue to marketing costs.
Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how changes traffic to a website after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views.
We have complied some of the best free web analytics tools. Some of them are mentioned below:-
1. Google Analytics –
Google Analytics is leader among free analytics tools, and with good reason. Analytics is free to use on any website with no limits on pageviews that can be tracked or reports that can be generated. Basic users can get info on how many visitors and pageviews their site is receiving, what sources are sending the traffic, what search phrases are resulting in visitors, and other basic information like bounce rate.
2. Google Webmaster Tools –
Google Webmaster Tools is a great tool for maximizing your site’s visibility on the search engines. You can see how Google crawls and indexes your site. Identify specific problems the spiders are having accessing your site. Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there. Tell Google about your pages with Sitemaps: which pages are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also specify you would like the URLs Google indexes to appear. You can connect your Webmaster Tools account directly to your Google Analytics account.
3. AWStats –
AWStats is one of the most popular alternatives to Google Analytics, and it comes installed on many hosting accounts. It is completely free and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. AWStats provides detailed information on your visitors, browsers used, operating systems used, and screen size in addition to typical stats like visitor and pageview counts.
4. Piwick –
Piwick is an open-source real time analytics program. Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics and is already used on more than 150,000 websites. Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own web server. Because of this, the installation process is a little more involved than Google Analytics, but for those who do not like the idea of sharing all of their data with Google, Piwick is a good alternative.
5. 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. FireStats has an excellent API that will assist you in creating your own custom apps or publishing platform components based on your FireStats data.
6. Yahoo –
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 would expect from a comprehensive Web analytics tool such as pretty graphs, custom-designed reports and real-time data tracking.
7. Website Grader –
One of the newest free tools to hit the web, HubSpot’s Website Grader gives you a detailed look at numerous variables for an overall assessment of how well your site is working. It identifies some basic SEO problems and measures your popularity in social media.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
