A Comprehensive Comparative Analysis of Widely Used Web Analytics Tools

The digital marketing industry is dedicated to pushing your website or blog to the top of SERPs. However, measuring the success of a project is anything but straightforward. It consists of several factors like organic search, paid advertising, referral advertising, social media marketing and more. Observing the number of subscribers or purchases doesn’t tell the complete picture.

This is where analytics play an important role. They help you identify how visible your website is. Analytical tools provide you a clear picture of user behavior and other crucial metrics, such as site visibility and the level of interaction between the visitors and your website.

Why should you use web analytics tools?

Just imagine going through numerous online sales records just to track how many times a particular page was shared or how many comments you received on each post. Web analytics tools present such data in a well-structured format, making it easier for you to measure your site’s performance.

Web analytics tools incorporate data—like shares, comments, purchases, and page views—to help you identify the visitor sources. These tools improve the decision-making process and allow you to focus your efforts on creating an improved strategy for your business.

When we talk about web analytics, Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics tool. However, if we look closely, there can be multiple reasons to use alternatives tools:

• You are not getting all the data you need from Google Analytics
• You want to use multiple analytics programs and pit them against one another for accurate results

In this blog post, we will take a look at the key features of popular web analytics platforms so you can choose the one that best fits your needs.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a benchmark web analytics tool that is effective for a wide range of purposes to help you take informed decisions based on statistical data. It is often underused by enterprises despite its capabilities. You can measure your advertising ROI, compare data, track activity across different channels and more.

Key features:

• Supports traffic measurement campaigns
• Tracks metrics that matter; destination, duration, event, and pages
• Generates detailed audience reports based on demographics, geolocation and browsing behavior
• Follows visitors’ actions every step of the way with flow visualization
• Creates custom reports that slice data according to user requirements

Adobe Analytics

Formerly known as Omniture, Adobe Analytics is a powerful web analytics tool with a wide range of uses.

Key features:

• Easily add extra metrics in reports with an option to create calculated metrics using mathematical functions
• Filter data based on different parameters by creating multiple segments
• Split data into multiple graphs and get a detailed idea about ongoing trends with advanced data visualization
• Save reports in personal accounts with the Bookmark function and share them with other users
• Create customized dashboards for every existing report with an option to share, print and download dashboards
• Record and analyze visitor’s journey through pathing reports – most flexible ones being Path Finder and All Paths

Evergage

Evergage combines machine learning with detailed behavioral analytics and customer data. It allows you to understand user intention to deliver a personalized experience.

Key features of Evergage include:

• Capture a visitor’s source, browsing behavior, and intent on websites and applications easily
• Combine click-tracking with monitoring to get a clear idea about user’s time spent, scrolling, hovering, inactivity and more
• Segment visitors, accounts and users using insights from past and current sessions along with internal and external data sources
• Seamlessly deliver personalized messages, experiences and content segmented in real-time and anywhere on a page
• Showcase recommendations to individuals based on their preferences with machine learning algorithms
• Conduct A/B and multivariate testing for different audiences to get the best results for cross-channel experiences

Webtrends

Webtrends is a new analytics solution that can be used to harness big data to get actionable customer intelligence. Its capabilities can be used to accelerate your marketing programs.

Key features of Webtrends include:

• Take control of reporting, ad hoc data, and segmentation with a unified view of data across different domains, devices, and digital channels
• Get unlimited collection variables that can be used in endless dimensions to generate detailed reports
• Identify unique users in all reports across different domains by applying custom measures to historical data
• View all measures and dimensions in real-time with the option of report customization and saved segments
• Use standard custom parameters to create different segments on the fly and apply them to reports and collection in real-time

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics is an open-source web analytics solution. It is written in PHP and utilizes a MySQL database that makes it compatible with a wide range of web servers. It is often compared to Google Analytics because anyone can install and run it on their host.

Key features of Open Web Analytics include:

• Track page views, visits, unique and repeat visitors over time with multiple website support
• Leverage a full MVC based framework that allows developers to extend the tool’s entities, reports, events, and graphics by touching the base components
• Easily write events to data asynchronously and run the tool on different front-end web servers as developers write to a remote database
• Identify visitors based on their WordPress username or email address through different page types with a myriad of WordPress features
• Enable easy tracking for articles, special pages and categories for all visitors using their name and email address with MediaWiki specific features

 
To Wrap Up
Now that you have an idea about widely used web analytics tools available in the market, you can take an informed decision before you decide to get one for your business. Whatever tool you choose, you will be able to effectively measure the performance of your website and create marketing strategies based on data.

Are you looking forward to driving a successful campaign?