In this section you will find a list of the Web Analytics tools providers in the online industry with the relevant contact numbers. If I miss some let me know.
Note: You will be redirected directly to the respective websites. List originaly populated on
seoptimize.com
Free and Affordable Analytics Solution
Search Analytics
Heat Maps and Usability Tracking
Enterprise Analytics
Hosted/Server Side Solutions
Twitter Analytics (for short Urls)
Social Media Analytics
Which Data Should You Analyze?
There's no point in looking for a tool without a sense of what you want to track. Needs can vary from simple traffic monitoring to complex analyses on the behavior of specific user groups, support for multivariate testing, and more.
What important metrics and figures should you keep in mind when selecting a Web analytics package?
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Hits. This is a metric that likely doesn't make sense for you to track, but you'll hear a lot about it regardless. A hit measures the number of requests for text, images, and files that your Web server receives for a given page. Despite what software packages may lead you to believe, hits are virtually meaningless when it comes to actually understanding what users are doing on your site. Because the number of hits a site receives depends on how it's organized, not how visitors interact with it, this metric is useful only in evaluating information such your server load.
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Visits. The most useful unit of measurement in site analytics is the number of visitors to a particular site or page. The trend in the overall number of visits to your site over time can give you insight into your site's popularity. Comparing the number of visits to each page is also a good way to identify which parts of your site are most useful to your visitors.
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Unique Visitors. This is the number of site visits by different users. If two people visit the site three times each, you'd have six visits by two unique visitors.
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Page Views. The number of times any page was viewed by any visitor. This is often divided by visits to give a page-views-per-visit figure that represents the average number of pages each visitor viewed on a single trip to your site. Increased page views can indicate a more interesting site, or simply one that requires people to jump through hoops to find what they need.
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Top Entry and Exit Pages. Just as they sound, these are the pages where most people enter your site (and don't assume it's the home page) and where most people leave it.
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Referrers. These are the external links that people follow to get to your site. For instance, if TechSoup links to Idealware's site, TechSoup would show up as a referrer in Idealware's Web stats. This metric can be very useful in tracking a big influx to your site or just in staying on top of who's talking about you.
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Search Keywords. Many stats packages can show the words or phrases people typed into search engines like Google or Yahoo in order to get to your site.
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Visitor Information. You can discover a lot about your visitors through analytics tools, including how many are new to the site, the country or region where they're located, the Web browser they're using, and much more.
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Click Paths. Also called click tracks, or click trees, these are graphical representations of typical journeys through your site. For instance, a click-path chart might show you that 20 percent of your home page visitors go on to click the Resources link, while 15 percent visit the About Us page, whereby 60 percent then leave the site and 10 percent go to the Board page ? and so on.
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Conversion. This is a complex statistic that typically needs to be customized in a tool or calculated by hand. Conversion tracks the number of people who did what you wanted them to do from a given starting point ? for instance, the number of users that went from a Donate link on your home page all the way through the donation process, or the percentage of people who viewed your home page and then signed up for your newsletter.
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Tracking Registered Users. If parts of your site require users to log in, a Web analytics tool can track exactly what those users did during each visit to the site. (Without a login, it’s not practical to link up data for a particular person from one visit to another.) This can allow for more detailed analyses and understanding of what different types of visitors are doing on your site.
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More Advanced Statistics. While the features listed above should be enough to get you going, powerful Web analytics tools support even more sophisticated analysis. There are professionals who make a living analyzing Web statistics; if you have a large site and the desire to do deep usage analysis, you may wish to consult with one of them.
The world of Web analytics is complicated by the fact that not every software package handles metrics in the same way. Determining what sequence of Web actions should be interpreted as a "visit" or a "unique visitor" is actually very complicated, and different tools calculate this differently. Don't be surprised if your metrics vary somewhat as you look at various tools.
Note: This is just a part of an article taken from techsoup.org, for more reading about analytics
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