Most people at small to mid-size companies don’t think too much about analytics and are happy to let Google Analytics do all their day to day reporting. We think Google Analytics is a great product but it shouldn’t be the only tool you use.
Below are some innovative web analytics tools built with SEO, conversion rate optimisation & social media in mind for you to try.
BVLD Status
BLVD is somewhat of a revolution because not only does it offer real time conversion reports for social bookmarking buttons & sales, traffic data and configurable alerts for traffic spikes via social sites such as Digg but it’s Keyword Vitals feature shows show live web traffic data side-by-side with live & average keyword rankings. What we wouldn’t give for that in Google Analytics!
Analytics 360
Analytics 360 for Wordpress is a plugin developed by email software company MailChimp to show Google Analytics traffic data and email list data within the Wordpress dashboard.
The plugin allows you to visualise your site’s traffic trends and see how blog posts and email campaigns affect overall traffic. You can also isolate traffic coming directly to your site from email campaigns with the “campaign traffic” tab and chart the growth of your mailing list over time.
Click Tale
Click Tale is great for a number of reasons. The first is the visitor movies feature which uses JavaScript to record your visitors mouse movements and form inputs and lets you replay their visits in real time.
My favourite feature though is the conversion rate analytics product which shows exactly where visitors are dropping out of your web forms and which fields are taking the longest to complete. Click Tale also recently added Crazy Egg style heat maps to show where your visitors are clicking and hovering with their mouse making it a really well rounded piece of software.
Going Up
Another analytics tool to integrate rankings into traffic reports is Going Up with a well rounded AJAX system running on PHP rather than JavaScript.
The addition of Alexa rankings and some dubious quotes about PageRank are the only things that let this system down.
Powerful graphing shows each keyword for each search engine you’ve chosen to see if your site is “going up” or “going down”? The keyword position monitor is also linked into our traffic system so you can quickly add keywords that people are using to get to your site and monitor them too. In addition, we’ve integrated Google’s keyword sandbox api to show related keywords that you may not be monitoring already.
Keyword Position plays an important role in your pagerank. Pagerank gauges the overall quality of your page and helps increase traffic. Traffic increases your sites relevance, which in turn helps your search engine rankings, which helps you reach your target audience.
Know any other interesting analytics tools? Add your links in the comments.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Patrick I often pick up the scent of your articles on Twitter and am always glad I stopped by. I always moved on that there are not tons of comments here. More smart people should be stopping by and leaving comments.
As I read this post, I kept wondering which of the tools were free, as GA is, and which were paid, or had a paid option. i guess you encourage further investigation.
Thanks for doing the leg work. I always enjoyed Crazy Egg when it first came out.
Which do you prefer Patrick? Goingup or Blvdstatus?
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The sort of people who read this blog probably have better things to do with their time than leave comments on the posts. Aaron Wall once told me that the quantity of comments on a post is inversely proportional to how good the post was.
More comments from Patrick AltoftThank you for this list. They can help all people who want to have “cool” results at search engine
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Greg I think BLVD is probably the better option.
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Thanks for the post and for sharing the web analytics tools, its really awesome.
More comments from tag44We’ve recently implemented Click Tale. As you say, it is a very well rounded tool however a few things I would point out to consider ahead of implementing:
1) They advertise a simple integration of one line of JS to start tracking. This is true of basic pages, however if you run an ecommerce site and want to track secure pages the implementation is a little more onerous
2) We run a PHP site on the fairly common Zend framework, however Click Tale didn’t have any experience of implementing their tracking on the ZEND framework and we had to work with them closely to get it working correctly. This was several hours work. Click Tale were very supportive but nonetheless it wasn’t as easy as suggested on their site
3) We found we needed to up our subscription to the $250 a month plan to get sufficient data to draw meaningful conclusions. At the lower price points we just weren’t capturing enough sessions for statistical validity. Go into this with your eyes open, there is a free service but its only really sufficient as a live demo, you’ll need to upgrade to get real value, though you can of course drop your subscription down again when you have the data you need
4) Allow time for someone to sit and watch the visitor movies. Even replayed at double-speed this is a time consuming task. You’d be wise to set up various ‘events’ to allow you to filter your movies (so for example you only watch movies of those customers who hit error pages, or dropped out at a given point).
5) I would still recommend it in spite of the above.
Great tools, thanks a lot!
My reservations here with a seo-focused piece of software like BLVD is that it is run by a SEO company.
“the quantity of comments on a post is inversely proportional to how good the post was.” … particularly true if the piece is well researched and in depth and time consuming to get through.
people most commonly comment on stuff that is one or more of the following…
- controversial
- misinformed
- basic
- reductionistic black/white garbage
and the reason for that, I think, is those who know the least often yell loudest
I have had a look at Analytics 360 before. I am really impressed with Click Tale – despite the fact that I could feel “Big Brother” hanging over my shoulder as I watched their video
Good list — thanks for sharing!
I’d add Visistat to that list, they have heatmaps, SERP tracking, keyword trends, etc.
Also, UserFly is a poor man’s Click Tale, sans conversion funnels.
Greg,
We don’t mine or do anything with the data. The only monitoring we do is data use and server stuff. It is all in our Terms, I would think having an seo behind an anlytics company is more a plus than a minus as it can lead to some very specific solutions in the space.
blvdstatus.com rocks. great addition to GA.
blvdstatus ROCKS. Very handy, especially as SEO companies can rebrand for their customers and have their own logins, etc.
Like the “going up” tool. Trying this on one of my sites at the moment. Cheers.
Going up has a much more friendly user interface but like you say, their comments on pagerank and the way they describe certain things makes it seem like an application for beginners.
hey dude
Great stuff! i got a lot of inspiration from this post
i went through this page four times
it is very interesting ….
am learning for social work
Thanks
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