In this post, we will discuss 100% free on and off site analytics tool that can provide you detailed insights about your customers and prospects.

Google Insights for Search – The only tool on the web that allows you to predict the future traffic volume of keyword and location based insight. You can use insights to identify the keywords that are trending down and will virtually become extinct and keywords are new and growing faster.

A super cool feature “secret” feature of insights is it can sometimes be used to identify investment opportunities. You can quickly compare real estate markets in Florida and Texas and identify better performing markets.

Quantcast – A pretty cool tool that provides quick demographics and traffic estimates on most websites. The key usage for the site is to find the right audience for marketing. Quantcast collects the log data from the websites that participate in their measurement program. The data collection is based on third party cookies.

Compete – Compete is a top competitive analysis tool that allows you to spy on your competitor traffic and search analytics. The traffic estimates are far more accurate in comparison to Quantcast. Their data collection method is based on daily browsing activity of their panel of 2 million panelists.

Compete’s search analytics data is fairly usable, and you can instantly get the share of the search visit for any keyword.

Twitter Analyzer – Measuring twitter conversations has become extremely important for every organization. Twitter analytics provides great details on the offsite customer / visitor behavior. Twitter Analyzer is a must use extremely powerful Twitter analytics tool. It not only measures the growth rate of your follower and friends but also provides detailed measurement of chats, popularity, reach, links, hashtags, follower geo location, groups and more.

Bit.ly – Bitly was originally designed as a url shortener but it is now commonly used for real time click tracking and campaign measurement. Bitly is the hottest social media url shortner and campaign tracking tool. One of the coolest features of bit.ly is it allows the tracking of competitor campaigns.

To perform a competitive analysis simply find your competitor’s bit.ly url from Twitter search or Facebook pages and type bitlyurl+ in your browser window. Voila! You now have real time insights into your competitor’s campaigns.

Google Ad planner – Google Ad planner is similar to Quantcast. but it offers additional data like ‘audience interest’, ‘keywords searched for’ and sub domain level tracking.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Admob Mobile Analytics – Google recently acquired Abmob, a company that is specialized in mobile ads and analytics. Admob analytics allows the user to install code on their mobile website and get detailed analytics reports. Users can instant access all web analytics reports like visitor location, mobile device types and time spent on the mobile site. The analytics package is completely free because the company makes money by selling ad space on mobile sites.

Open Site Explorer – Open site explorer is the best link analytics and seo metrics tool on the planet. The free version allows you to download data for up to 1000 links. You can perform advanced seo competitive analysis and compare data between two sites. Data can be exported in CSV format for further segmentation and pivoting in excel.

Pear Analytics – Pear Analytics offers a complete SEO scan of your website and provide insights on how you can optimize your site for search ranking. The analytics engine is powered by some of the most popular search ranking factors. The software is capable of identifying 404 issues, title and meta issues, css and missing sitemap issues.

Google Analytics – The #1 free web analytics tool is becoming the biggest competitor to enterprise analytics. With new features like mobile tracking, advanced analysis tools, and analytics intelligence more businesses are thinking twice before investing in paid solutions.

Google analytics recently added asynchronous tracking that loads the analytics code in the backend improving the site load time.

Hope you enjoyed the post. Please share your thoughts, feedbacks and comments on what you think are some of the top analytics tools.

Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -

Top 10 Outrageous Web Analytics Myths..Debunked
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Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports

Top 10 Absolutely Free Web and SEO Analytics Tools is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

It is interesting that web analytics is all about data but very fewer infographics have been created on web analytics concepts. Here are some of the most popular web analytics and seo infographics.

#1. Unica Anlaytics – The top in the category of the web analytics infographics, this Unica infograph explains the web analytics process and how use it for campaign optimization.

Source: http://lp.unica.com/infographic/

#2. UXD Stress Fields – A super cool way to show how tech, web development and business decision makers can work together. Web analytics cannot operate in a silo, and it is absolutely important to connect your tech and web development team with the business analyst.

Source: http://informationarchitects.jp/the-spectrum-of-user-experience-1/

#3. SEO FAQs guide – This highly popular seo infographic can be used to learn the basics of search engine optimization in few minutes. Kudos to the designer who has incorporated the small on and off page optimization nuances with such clarity.

Source: http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2010/04/13/seo-in-pictures-our-seo-infographic/

#4. Actionable Analytics - Here is a simple display of web analytics measurement framework. The designer has captured all the facets of buying cycle and connected it with the web measurement strategy.

Source: http://actionable-analytics.com/2009/07/how-to-build-a-digital-measurement-framework/

#5. Google’s Analytics - A dark humorous way of showing how much data Google captures through different analytics measurement techniques. Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics software and is one of the key tools of Google’s data capture portfolio.

Source: http://smashingcrunch.com/images/fear-google-true-power-of-analytics-user-data-infographic

Original Source: Onlineschools.org

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.

Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -
Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close
Top 5 Coolest Web Analytics iPhone Apps
Copy My Actionable Google Analytics Advanced Segments
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Top 5 Amazing Web Analytics and SEO Infographics is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

#1 Web analytics is accurate – Web analytics is all about direction and insights. It is funny that we are still worried about the accuracy of analytics reports. We can spend days arguing with the marketing and sales managers on why the reports are accurate even though we all know that web analytics can never be accurate. Instead of focusing on this let’s start focusing on insights.

All web analytics reports are directional and getting insights is the key to web analytics success. Focus on direction, build trends, and apply statistical significance to the trends to get meaningful takeaways.

#2 Site Visitors delete cookies – It is extremely important to understand the difference between the first and third party. First party cookies are cookies from the host domain i.e. your domain. Top analytics tools (Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends) all install first party cookies in order to measure the repeat visitors. The deletion / block rate for first party cookies is atleast 50% lower than the third party cookies.

Having said that, studies have shown that web analytics software cookie (first or third party) will be deleted no matter what. This is the truth about the tag based web analytics industry, and we have to accept it. This does not mean that we should stop trusting the reports and ignore them. The analytics reports are power packed and actionable because it can provide you insights if you follow the direction. As mentioned above the directional aspect of web analytics is unmatched.

So, stop worrying about cookie deletion rate and focus on the trend.

#3 Users disable Java scripts – A major myth that goes around the market is about the blocking of the java script and thus prevent the execution of analytics tags. Java is an integral part of web and disabling java on the web browser can limit the accessibility to a large number of services on the internet.

Still not convinced? Here is a good study conducted by few developers showing why only 3-5% of the users disable java scripts.

#4 Google Analytics data for search ranking - Google analytics data is not used by Google to evaluate search rankings. Here is a quick video from Matt Cutt’s (head of Googles webspam team). In this video, Matt debunks the myth about Google using GA data for SEO or search ranking.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#5 Data addiction = actionable insights – Are you lost in data collection, integrations, and data obsession? If you are a pro analyst then you know that data dump, web integrations, data warehouse are critical issues. Please don’t get carried away by data addiction and focus on analytics priorities. Ask yourself “what is the most important and high priority task / project for you in next 5 days/ 5 months.?” Is it business growth insights or painstaking integrations? Is it few key recommendations to your management or never ending analysis?

I agree, analytics integrations can sometimes make your job lot easier but in most cases integrating your CRM and analytics tool is painful. Use excel reports and MS Access for connecting the dots. Leave the integrations for your web developer and business intelligence teams.

#6 Analytics code hampers site performance – I cannot deny that java scripts can increase the web page load time. However, there several options available to minimize the code impact on the site performance.

1. Open a Google webmaster tools account. Google has recently added a cool web performance measurement tool in the webmaster tools. It is the only free tool that measures your site performance relative to other sites on the internet and displays your historical performance in a trend line.

2. Install Yslow and Google page speed Firefox plugins. These plugins can instantly provide you detailed reports on how you can improve your site performance.

3. If you are using Google analytics then switch to asynchronous tracking. Asynchronous tag allows the browser to continue loading the web page while the tag is loaded in the background. This decreases the page load time.

4. For other analytics solutions, limit the use of onclick function to reduce server call connections. Tag only those pages that can provide insightful and actionable data.

#7 Unique visitors are absolutely unique – Your unique visitor reports are not really unique. It varies depending on the time frame you are looking at. You will have different data for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly unique visitor reports because of the way unique visitor is calculated. Using visits report with new and returning visitor segment will provide you more insights that you can ever imagine from unique visitor reports.

#8 Time on page is accurate – The time on page can only be calculated if the web site visitor navigates to another page on the same website. What this means is you will never be able to figure out how much time a web visitor spent on the last page of the website. Stop worrying about the time on page metric and focus on conversion and task completion. A task completion could be clickling the link to the next page, subscribing to RSS feeds, clicking the buy now button or anything that page is motivating the users to do.

#9 Free Analytics = Enterprise Analytics – Investing in paid analytics solution is not a bad decision atall. You might have been motivated by someone on why you should never pay for analytics. The truth is far from accurate. Google Analytics is one of the best free tools out there, but it does not provide enterprise level capabilities that are required for advanced business analytics.

Here are the top 5 reasons why paid enterprise solutions win over free solutions-

1. Support – Paid solutions comes with support hours so you don’t have to spend time fixing analytics issues.

2. Custom Metrics – Paid solutions allow you to create custom metrics on the fly. You can create your own task completion and conversion metrics.

3. Multi-dimensional Timeline – Advanced solutions like Omniture Discover and Coremetircs Explore allows you to compare data from more than two time segments. Google Analytics can only provide two dimensional timeline comparison.

4. Analytics integrations – Web integrations become easier with the enterprise analytics provider because of their partnerships with email, crm, live chat and other service providers. Usually they provide integration hours or detailed documentation.

5. Campaign Attribution – Enterprise analytics providers store all the data on the data warehouses. The data can be accessible anytime and both first and last click is captured in most cases (depending on your settings). You can use this data to design a campaign attribution dashboard and allocate funds efficiently.

#10 Dedicated web analyst is not required – Paying $100K to your enterprise web analytics provider and expecting them to provide you all the answer is not going to work. Web analysis is the core of online marketing and without proper analysis and recommendations your business could come to a dead end.

Even though I love enterprise analytics I cannot stress enough that a dedicated analytics team is a must. Intelligent recommendations may be the future of web analytics but without an expert eye to decipher data and implement recommendations you won’t get results.

Hiring a web analytics expert is more important than investing in paid analytics tools and services. Period!

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.

Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -
Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close
Top 5 Coolest Web Analytics iPhone Apps
Copy My Actionable Google Analytics Advanced Segments
Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports

Top 10 Outrageous Web Analytics Myths..Debunked! is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Before we begin, here is a quick video that explains how to create advanced segments in Google Analytics.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#1 Visits with Zero Goal Completion (copy segment) – Conversion should be the ultimate goal for your website. Using zero goal completion segment you can instant identify the traffic sources for all the non performing traffic. You can also identify the pathing data and optimize site navigation.

#2 True Backlinks (copy segment) – Backlinks are the key to organic search ranking and traffic. Banner placements on third party sites can skew your referral traffic data. Banner/text placement with direct links will show up as referrals in your referral report along with true backlinks from referring websites. This segment will exclude all the banner site traffic from the referral traffic.

#3 Partner referrals (copy segment) – Partner referral segment allows you to evaulate the performance of your channel partners. You can view the traffic and conversion data for the partner websites.

#4 Visitor Engagement (copy segment) – This segment allows you to measure the visitor engagement on your site. Visitors are more engaged if they visit multiple pages on your site.

#5 Early Adopters (copy segment) – The idea behind this segment is to find out all the marketing initiatives that are successful in driving visitors who convert on their first visit. Apply this segment and find out the keywords that are consistently driving leads / sales on the first visit.

Hope you enjoyed this post. Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.

Copy My Actionable Google Analytics Advanced Segments is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog