Selecting the Right Website Statistics Package for You

By Rod Jacka

It is a very rare person who isn't interested to know how many visitors went to their website. Most website owners or managers are usually keen to see just how popular their website is. In my experience, they also usually want to know what their visitors do when they get there.

With hundreds of different web-reporting products and online services available, just how do you chose the right one for you?

To help you along the way, here is a brief overview of the needs of various groups and some things that you might consider to ask during the evaluation process.

But before you even start to evaluate the tools, ask the fundamental question. Who will use the reports and what will they do with this information?

The level of investment that you make in the web statistics reporting tool should be directly linked to:

• Who will use the tool
• How deeply will they use it (after all who uses every feature of Microsoft Office?)
• Which reports are absolutely critical and which are nice to have
• How many analysts will use this tool as a substantial part of their role.

Whilst there are many tools on the market and selecting between them can be quite confusing, in my experience there are 4 broad groups of end users.

1) Simple Facts

This group mostly just wants to see how many visitors come to their site, what pages they see and a few other basic facts about their website. They don't run any online advertising campaigns and just need the most basic of reports.

This group just needs a basic free or low cost tool but with some professional features.

If this group describes you, I encourage you to look deeper at the benefits of web analytics.

The most common tools used by this group are the free tools that their web-hosting provider has set up on their behalf. These usually include AWStats, Webalizer, Analog and others. Each of these are good tools to report on what they are designed to do, but they are not recommended as they don't have the accuracy in tracking visitors that is available in other free tools on the market. They also have a more technical bias which makes them difficult for most marketing professionals to understand the meaning of the reports.

Google Analytics is by far the recommended tool for this group as it offers all of the basic reports in a customised dashboard. It can even email this dashboard to a list of people every day, week or month. Once you get the basics of this tool, it will grow with you as you develop more and more skills in analysing your website and marketing.

2) Campaign Trackers

This group usually advertises using Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, banner ads, email and other mediums. They generally want to know what the results of their advertising campaigns are and how they can improve them.

This group definitely needs a tool that can separate out visitors from advertising campaigns from the other visitors to the website.

The selected tool should provide detailed reporting on what happened after the visitor clicked from an advertising campaign. Key reports include providing statistics by:

• Medium (e.g. paid search, organic, banners, email, etc)
• Campaign
• Keyword (paid vs. organic)

It is also likely that this group will want to track the outcomes on the website such as leads generated, sales made, etc by each campaign.

A lot of free tools do not provide this functionality, however Google Analytics provides a wide range of reports that do. If you are looking for software, then Lyris HQ, ClickTracks Optimizer or Professional & Urchin are excellent choices.

3) Deep Divers

This group is definitely numbers driven. Looking at every aspect of their website on a regular basis, they need all the bells and whistles available. Often there will be more than one person on the team dedicated to providing reports and analysis for other team members.

It is likely that they operate in a highly competitive market and are looking to squeeze every last cent out of their online initiatives.

Members of this group will have specific needs in the reports provided by their tools. E.g., you may need to see the products that you sell on your site broken down by the keywords that visitors used when purchasing each product.

This is the high end of web analytics and there are a number of providers including Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, and others who specialise in providing the specific feature sets for this end of the market. Where the budgets don't permit investing in these or analysts on staff are limited, tools such as Lyris HQ, ClickTracks Professional JDC or Urchin 6 provide cost effective solutions that will give this group most of what they want.

4) Private and Secure

Keeping data to themselves is a big issue for this group. They definitely don't want their data to go outside of their organisation. Typically members of this group are in the financial sector or are analysing private websites such as Intranets.

Owning the software is really the only option for this group as they can control when and where the data is collected and what they do with it.

Recommended products for this group include Urchin & ClickTracks Professional.

Other considerations

Some other factors that you should consider when selecting a web-reporting tool are:

Log files vs JavaScript Browser Based Data Collection

JavaScript based data collection is generally considered to be more accurate in tracking visitor sessions than log files on their own. Neither log files or browser based data collection is perfect, however JavaScript is the preferred option as it uses cookies to more accurately track visitors. For a more detailed explanation, please see our article "Is Your Web Statistics Software Providing Accurate Results?".

Urchin does provide a unique hybrid solution that uses both JavaScript and your web server log files to get the best of both worlds.

Software vs. Service

Do you prefer to own the software and have a initially larger investment with savings made over time or prefer to lease access to the software. Whilst the cost of a professional software package can be significant, the cost savings over time often outweigh the initial price paid.

Integration

How easily can you integrate the software into other systems. Does the software automatically import your Google AdWords campaigns? Does it have a feature to automatically load the reports into your intranet? Does it talk to other vendors?

Integration is a tricky issue and we encourage you to talk to our sales team to discuss your needs.

Ecommerce

How easily will the product integrate with your shopping cart? Can you get the necessary reports that you need to evaluate your performance?

Selecting a web analytics tool is a difficult exercise. If you would like assistance with this or need to draft a selection criteria please call our sales team.

Further Reading:

Avinash Kaushik's blog article on comparing vendor tools is a very useful resource you can find at:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/08/ web-analytics-vendor-tools-comparison-and-one-challenge.html