Four Must-Have Web Stat Tools
6.10.06 @ 8:52 amA week ago, I wrote about the importance of empirical data for designing on the web. I thought it may be helpful to spell out a few tools I have been using to peer into who is coming to my blog and what they are doing once they get there. If you are like me, web statistics is something you take very seriously, but only enough to spend modest amounts of time and money on. Companies like Web Side Story offer insanely robust web analytics tools, but the learning curve and cost are out of this world. Honestly, for a person like myself, using HBX would be like killing a fly with a bomb. The good news is that there is a myriad of great tools out there for a minimal amount of money that can really give you great traffic data for your site.
The traffic analysis features you need for a site vary on what type of site you have. From my perspective, there are four features that are absolutely necessary and one that is only crucial if your site relies heavily on RSS feeds (such as a blog). The four features that are extremely important are 1) realtime traffic monitoring, 2) advanced data querying/filtering features, 3) heatmap/traffic visualization tools and 4) campaign creation and monitoring. If your site takes advantage of feeds, then it is important to monitor who is using them and what they are viewing. Once again, this is only important if you have syndicated feeds and consider them an important part of your traffic.
If we want to have all these tools, you most likely are not going to be able to get it all from one source without paying quite a bit of money. No problem though, it just takes a little more effort on our part, but in the end we have a great suite of tools on the cheap.
Mint
The simplicity and flexibility of Mint is by far its greatest strength. Mint’s interface is clear, easy to use and presents the most valuable information at a quick glance. The software sits on your server and stores its information in your MySQL database - meaning your data is accessible at any time for whatever reason. Another great feature is the plethora of free plugins (named peppers) that are available to put into your copy of Mint. The great things about Mint are also its weakness however. The data is presented simply but without any filtering or date-range features. This basically makes it impossible to do any detailed side-by-side comparisons of data from different points of time. That being said, Mint is by far the most my accessed statistics tool I use. Ninety percent of the time, all I want to know is how many views/uniques I am getting today and Mint serves it up better than any other.
Key Points
- $30 - Free updates
- Tons of plugins
- Realtime information
- Data sits on your server
Google Analytics
If any of you have used Urchin in the past and liked the features it offered but were not too keen on the price, then you are in for good news. Google purchased Urchin and made its software available to the public for free under the name of Google Analytics. Google Analytics offers an amazing amount of information about your traffic as well as an ample amount of data filtering. The problem is, the data is not realtime nor is the interface as intuitive as Mint. In short, if I want basic information about my traffic, I’ll use Mint. If, let’s say, I am interested in comparing the ratio of page views to uniques in three month chunks over the course of a year, I would use Google Analytics. The other very powerful aspect of Google Analytics is the ability to create campaigns and goals. If you are interested in drawing users to specific actions (such as signing up for a mailing list), you can see where people enter and where they exit in the process. This can be extremely valuable in order to find traffic or goal bottlenecks.
Key Points
- Free
- Very powerful querying
- Huge diversity of information
- Built-in Adsense statistics (if you’re into that)
- Campaign feature
CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg, which just launched its live version is an absolutely priceless tool to get a completely different analysis of your site - where people are (and are not) clicking on your site. If you are a believer of multiple access points in web interfaces, then you can see which points are actively being clicked and which are not. Of course, you cannot tell if the user got the expected result of their click, but you get the next best thing. I had the opportunity to use CrazyEgg while it was in its beta and it was already a great tool for page analysis. However, I am blown away by the amount of improvements they made in such a short time. This tool, especially since there is a free version, is a must-have. I have already gained a tremendous amount from using this service since I have a literal guidemap of what people are clicking and where they are doing it.
Key Points
- Free to $100/month
- Top-notch click tracking of pages on your website
- Realtime information
- Track of multiple projects concurrently
FeedBurner
I will be honest, I have neglected the traffic coming from my feed up to this point. Up until a couple weeks ago, I was unaware that there were any statistical measuring tools for feeds in particular. FeedBurner gives you a nice tool to view how many people are viewing your feeds for a relatively low price of $5 per month - I can skip a latte-and-a-half for that. I am still a little confused about the meaning of a couple different figures, but I think that has more to do with the fact that I have just recently started using it. Without this tool, I had no way to gauge the amount of subscribers nor would I know if my efforts to increase subscriptions were working.
Key Points
- $4.95/month
- Realtime information
- Comprehensive information of what users are viewing your feed with and what they are viewing.
To Spend or Not to Spend
For those of you not interested in spending money, you are in good luck as Google Analytics is free and CrazyEgg has a free package. I know that web statistics can be somewhat of a luxury, so the option exists to spend no money whatsoever for two great services. Of all the services, I would consider Mint the fifth wheel as Google Analytics provides the same data Mint does (excluding some data provided by various Mint peppers). I say this with a bit of hesitation as I still find Mint to be the most useful tool for regularly viewing my traffic data. Nonetheless, if you wanted to pinch pennies and your site extensively uses feeds, I would suggest saving the $30 on Mint and purchasing the FeedBurner service instead. However, if you are willing to drop a few extra bones for traffic data on your site, these four tools can work together to give you top notch coverage of how many visits you are getting, when they are coming, where they are coming from and what they end up doing once they get there.
New Web Tools on the Horizon
Two tools that I am looking forward to getting my hands on in the near future are MeasureMap, a web stats tool built specifically for blogs and ClickTale, a service that records mouse movement and clicking which you can view as a movie. ClickTale has a private beta that you can sign up for - I am crossing my fingers that I get a chance to give it a spin.
Conclusion
If you are interested in getting more data about the traffic that comes to your site, there really is no excuse to not be getting it. At the very least, there are two very solid services you can get for free and two others that are very well-priced. From that point, it really is up to you - you should have more good data than you know what to do with. You may think you have a good idea of what people do at your site and where they go. After using these tools, you’ll be much closer actually to knowing.CrazyEgg, feedburner, google analytics, mint, web analytics web statistics
October 6th, 2006 at 11:36 am
$0.00 in Comment Love for October
You forgot: Slimstat –> http://wettone.com/code/slimstat
October 6th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Nice link - it seems like quite a powerful tool. I honestly had never heard of it until now but I’m definitely interested.
Anyone else heard of this tool? Any feedback?
October 6th, 2006 at 11:48 am
$0.00 in Comment Love for October
we use slimstat on logopond.com, its a great tracking system if for nothing else the ablility see live stats and not 24 hour turnarround. a bit slow and cumbersome on load time, but the information you get outweights that in my book.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:57 am
This whole slimstat thing is becoming more and more intriguing. I’ll have to give it a serious look. I couldn’t find a price on the site so I’m assuming it’s free. Is that a correct assumption?
October 6th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
$0.00 in Comment Love for October
Thanks for the thoughtful post. I wrote an article today about the four tools I use to monitor my blog and some of the issues I have with this approach that I thought you might enjoy:
http://www.smallbusiness20.com/Blog/tabid/6307/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/1065/WebsiteAnalyticsIsAnyoneElseFrustrated.aspx
Brian.
October 7th, 2006 at 5:56 am
$0.00 in Comment Love for October
Great writeup, P.J. — I’ve used each of the services but really not thought about using them all together to get the maximum benefit. How do you feel about both Analytics and CrazyEgg depending on a script from a server other than yours — have you seen any degradation in your site performance?
October 8th, 2006 at 4:31 am
WordPress database error: [Lost connection to MySQL server during query]
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE wp_comments.comment_author_email='contact@stevetucker.co.uk' AND wp_comments.comment_date < '2008-10-14 13:00:40' AND wp_comments.comment_date > '2008-10-01 08:00:00'PJ you never fail to impress me with your enthusiasm for sharing useful insights and information. Thanks again for another great post.
October 9th, 2006 at 8:59 am
$0.00 in Comment Love for October
This was very informative for me. I’ve been using Google Analytics and have been very happy with the quality and level of results it gives. I have also used clickdensity.com’s service which is similar to crazyegg, and was also happy with those results: the one thing about those click trackers is that fluid layouts and the like can skew the data, but it still gives a good idea of where people click.
I have to say that I am very intrigued by what mint has to offer, and it seems very scalable and fast which is great. I am sure that they will release a feature to provide more date range filtering, at least I would hope so as it would probably increase their competitive standing.
Anyway, thanks for the info, now we have fewer excuses to ignore our data points
October 9th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Jon - Not enough to notice at least. The way that I look at it is that those numbers that are being provided to me are then used to try to make a better user experience throughout the site. My hope is that the small delay (if any) that those scripts cause to the loading of the site will be offset by informed UI design executions that aid in user experience. That is at least what I am telling myself.
Steve - Thanks so much man, I really appreciate the kind words.
Kimmy - Mint is definitely worth the $30 in my opinion. Once the data resides in your hands, you can end up doing all sorts of cool things with it. I am frankly just too basy to actually do that though.
October 10th, 2006 at 12:32 am
$0.00 in Comment Love for October
I just use some free log parser script now, but earlier I have used Onestat where I really liked the ability to trace scenarios of order flows etc. Must check Google analytics and see if it does the trick.
In addition to stats I think my most valuble tool is a site monitor, so I can see uptime and response time and know that my visitors actually can use the site. Right now I have settled for the monitoring services of Pingdom.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
$0.00 in Comment Love for October
If you are interested in navigational pathways the tool Theme may be interesting. See www.noldus.com/theme. Theme will detect navigation patterns based on loggings. It can extract the main pahtways, it ignores sidestaps and random variation in timing. Perhaps include in a next review?