The SENSIBLE MARKETING Blog for Startups & Small Business

Most site owners now are probably tracking conversion rates and looking at statistics, but when it comes to trying to enhance those results it is often trial and error. Optimizing your website can be tough business since you can’t “see” your customers online. Analytics packages like Google Analytics and IndexTools (recently acquired by Yahoo!) do a good job letting you see how many visitors are coming and going on your site by tracking every page request. Standard web statistic packages compete based on who can offer the most statistics, the most colorful graphs and trying to wrap usability around all that information.

There are a couple other optimization services that I hear about quite a bit: Atlas, Map Surface, Omniture, WebTrends, ClickTale and Click Density… just to name a few. These services can be expensive.

Is there a better (and less expensive) way for small business?

For this blog, I use Google Analytics, Hitslink and CrazyEgg to measure and actually see what users are doing when they visit my blog. Once you set-up your custom dashboards and reports, you can have the data and reports emailed to you automatically. Best of all, I spend a grand total of $14.95 per month and enjoy a few extra features the expensive services don’t offer!

CrazyEgg for instance, has a feature “Confetti” that lets you easily see where every visitor clicked on your site and what brought them there. Confetti overlays your site, showing each visitor’s click as a colored dot. The colors stand for the categories you sort the clicks by: operating system, browser, window size, time before clicking, and what search term brought them to the page. It even shows you clicks that weren’t on links, so you know if your users are expecting a link where there isn’t one. You can see the results in aggregate as a bar chart or click on individual dots to find out more information about a particular user. For instance, you can use Confetti to see how users from different referrals behave, and settle the debate over exactly how many of those Digg users click on your ads.

Hitslink has a great user navigation component and they have an email notification tool that alerts you when someone from the same IP address visits your site repeatedly (great to combat click fraud!). With Hitslink, you can easily see your search engine rankings for your search terms on top search engines and compare these to your competitors. For those of you who invest in Pay-Per-Click Ads or other internet advertising, Hitslink offers robust conversion tracking of PPC campaigns and more. Better than Google Analytics in this regard, Hitslink tracks across all search engines and ad-serving networks - e.g. Google, Yahoo, AdBright, etc. — all the way to orders and even revenue.

Check out these screenshots and see the great, easy-to-interpret reporting I get by for this blog.  As you can see, I know your every move…where you came from…and in some cases…where you’re going.   Best of all, I’ve spent less than $15 bucks! 

P.S.  If you’re using a great open-source or inexpensive analytics tool for your site, please comment and share your experience and results!

Filed under: analytics, clicktracks analysis, clicktracks optimizer, customer targeting, digital marketing, dynamic search, log analysis, log file analysis, marketing warehouse, on demand, online behavior profiling, online marketing, page views, performance dashboards, site metrics, tracking software, traffic analysis, web analysis, web analytics, web log analysis, web marketing, web metrics, web reporting, web site analysis, web site statistics, web site traffic analysis, web statistics, web stats, web traffic analysis, web traffic statistics, web trend software, webmaster tools, webposition, webposition gold, website design, website optimization, website statistics, website stats, website tracking, website visitor behavior, website visitors, webtrends, webtrends analytics