Web Analytics: So Many Choices

Web analytics can provide an immense amount of data and metrics regarding how well your website works. It provides critical information on how it’s being utilized by consumers and their behavior while visiting. Web analytics can have an enormous impact on a business’ online presence, and by that, the data collected can be used in making critical adjustments to its website, how it interacts with visitors, and if a marketing campaign is working.

To access this data, a business would need to turn to various companies that provide web analytic tools. To date, Google Analytics (GA) has been touted as the best of the best when it comes to web analytic tools. Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet. It is a great way for a business with a website or anyone with a blog to measure traffic on the site. It can assist in answering important questions:

• How long are visitors spending on my blog?
• Are users sharing my blog on social media?
• How  people visit my blog/website?
• Where is the traffic coming from to my site?
• Which pages are receiving the most traffic?
•  How many visitors have I converted into sales?
• Where did my converting visitors come from and go on my website?
• How can I improve my website's speed?

Is Google Analytics the only option available for businesses?  It isn’t!  There are many others such as but not limited to the following:

• Clicky
• KISSmetrics
• Bitly
• Piwik
•  GoSquared
• Woopra
• Mixpanel
• FoxMetrics
• GoingUp

For this discussion, we will focus on KISSmetrics.  The company says it is a very easy to use, insightful web analytics package that sets your sights on metrics that matter (e.g., your bottom line).  KISSmetrics is a paid analytic tool that makes it easy to track your customer process and discover areas where you are losing potential customers, for small and mid-size companies.  People wonder if the ‘KISS’ in it’s name is an acronym for ‘Keep It Simple Stupid,” but the company boasts about the ease and simplicity of its usage.

Here is a brief  demo video on KISSmetrics:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zdfjah%K4A


A few features of Kissmetrics:

• Analyzes changes in user behavior
• Timeline view of visitors
•  Easy-to-understand visual format
•  Track URLS by adding parameters

One of the most important features is “Path Report,” which will help you analyze the pattern of user interaction with your site. A few features, which are essential to Google Analytics, like “Traffic Data” are missing in Kissmetrics.

"When it comes to tracking individuals, you can tie inproperties in KISSmetrics to a single visitor. For example, a new customer is a writer and used a 10 percent off coupon, found you on LinkedIn via your company page services link, and works for a Fortune 100. If you “tell” all of that information to KISSmetrics by associating properties with this customer, KISSmetrics will remember it. You can then use it to create advanced segments and data slices on your data".

Cost KISSmetrics is not a replica of Google Analytics. Yes, they both are analytics tools, but they each have their own benefits (KISSmetrics, n.d).  One advantage that Google Analytics offers that KISSmetric doesn’t is cost.  A starter company can begin looking at 500,000 events with KISSmetrics for $150 per month while Google Analytics is free for users up to a certain point.

Reporting: An event is similar to the Google Analytics event, but it's a little more defined with KISSmetrics. KISSmetrics will only report the events the user has selected to review, like watching a video, shopping cart activity, or page views. Google Analytics will give its users various metrics in addition to the events the user has selected.

When it comes to tracking visitors (the number of actual people who visited the site) and visits (the number of times the website was visited regardless of repeat visitors), Google Analytics is the best tool if these are the main events you want to track. While KISSmetrics can track visitors, it's not feasible to pay for the service if this is all the reporting you need. There are several free web analytic tools that could be better utilized.

Google Analytics is key when tracking bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who navigate away from a particular website after viewing only one page), time on page (the average amount of time all visitors to a page spend on that particular page), and exits (for page views, the rate that each page is last accessed in a session). Google Analytics has better reporting for these metrics. You cannot currently track these events in KISSmetrics.

KISSmetrics is great at tracking users and, combined with Google Analytics, adds an extra layer of people tracking that GA lacks. "Google Analytics is one of many services that KISSmetrics works well withvia API integration, and the setup is simple".

Here is a detailed info graph comparing Google Analytics and KISSmetrics.