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Yesterday (7/22/08) was an eventful day for us. Roy Russo, the CEO of LoopFuse, took offense to my review and decided to address it by launching an adorable DOS attack. Though it wasn’t effective, it still shocked us so much that last night we decided it must not be Roy Russo at all, but someone with a vendetta trying to scapegoat him. As a result, we unapproved the comments until we could confirm it was him.
Well, we called him and he confirmed it. The comments below are really from Roy Russo. I know, we couldn’t believe it either. Check out our account of the LoopFuse incident.
To monitor the success of your SEO and internet marketing efforts, having a web analytics program is essential. Below I review four programs that I spent a month (each) testing for usability and functionality.
I’m not getting any kind of kickback for reviewing these web analytics programs (nor are the links here paid referral links). All of the programs reviewed here have free trial periods, so try them yourself and let me know what you think!
LoopFuse offers more functionality than I ended up using. I didn’t integrate our CRM program. We don’t have registered users, so I didn’t set up registered user tracking.
That being said, there are certain features that every analytics program should offer easy access to. A basic “recent visitors” view with company/ISP name, location, referrer, operating system, browser, number of page visits, etc. is essential. LoopFuse doesn’t provide access to this information in one place. If you want to see visits listed by company name, for instance, you have to choose that view and you can’t access any of the other relevant information. Talk about making my job harder!
The interface is the least intuitive of everything I tried. The drop-down menus are small and difficult to use (the menus are 3-4 clicks deep, and one false click means starting over… so many wasted clicks). You can’t view the clickstream for visitors either, only their entry and exit pages.
Price: $300 a month for their “self-serve” package.
Trial Period: 15 days.
Final Impressions: the advanced functionality that LoopFuse offers may be great, but the basic functionality is counter-intuitive. It’s like a Thai restaurant that makes terrible pahd thai. Would you really want to try their attempt at salmon pahd king?
Hitslink, though clunky, does offer more convenient access to the visitor information I mentioned above. You can view the visit time, location, organization/ISP and referrer from recent visitors. To view details like OS and browser, you can click on a link that pops up a new window. To see an individual users page views, you have to click on a link that navigates you away from the recent visitors page. Not ideal, but at least the information is freely available.
Price: Starts at $9.95 a month, but that package would only be viable if you have less than 10 visitors a day (and those visitors only visit three pages). If you get 100-200 visitors a day, you’d be looking at paying $29.99 a month.
Trial Period: 30 days.
Final Impressions: The text is too small, making the data more difficult to process. The interface is clunky and not the most aesthetically pleasing. But it did have all the features I was looking for.
Opentracker is a solid website analytics program. The recent visitors view shows users that are currently active on the site, idle users, and offline users via green, yellow and red person icons respectively. Looking at user details is simple–just mouse over the person icon. A simple clickstream view shows the visitor’s page views and time spent on a given page.
Price: $19.95 a month will cover any website with less than 500 visitors a day.
Trial Period: 28 days.
Final Impressions: Opentracker is pretty intuitive. It was the first website analytics program I tried, and I was pining away for it. That is, until I tried…
Oh, Clicky. You are truly the best website analytics program I can find. The dashboard view is completely customizable. You can add widgets and rearrange them based on your own user preferences. None of the other programs I reviewed had this functionality.
From my personalized dashboard, I can easily see an overview of the day’s traffic, including:
The interface is clean, readable and very easy to use. One of my favorite features, Spy, shows you website page views in real time. I often leave it up all day, glancing at it every hour or so. Clicky also has iGoogle and Netvibes plugins so you can watch your traffic from your customized homepage.
Powerful naming and filtering functionality allows you to gain an even deeper understanding of user behavior on your website.
Price: $9.99 a month will serve a site with up to 5000 visitors a day.
Trial Period: 21 days.
Final Impressions: By far the best analytics program, it also happens to be the cheapest of all those I reviewed. I fully recommend trying it out.
So, what’s your favorite web analytics program? If I’m missing an outstanding program, I’d love to check it out.
