SEO, eCommerce, & Blogging

UPDATE: There is a free, open source analytics application that appears to rival Google Analytics: Piwik. Check out the demo or read a review with screenshots.

Here is a great list of free Analytics tools for your website from Alex Pooley’s Blog » The Problem With Website Analytics Software:

• 103bees - Much cleaner interface than Google’s Analytics. Emphasizes what people are searching to get to your site. Read more here and here.
• HitTail - They try to help you decide what to write about next by processing what people are searching to get to your site. It’s a cool idea, but the algorithms are closed with little hint of what’s going on, so I’m left not knowing how to interpret my “suggestions”. For all I know it could just be a trained monkey picking stuff for me to write. Read more here.
• Clicky - This is a neat little package that has more emphasis on following your readers around your blog. It provides details on sessions, and what sort of things were clicked. Definitely worth checking out.
• FeedBurner - I’m sure you know about FeedBurner. They recently increased the free services to include more metrics. FeedBurner has great detail on how people are reading your feeds. FeedBurner also tracks outgoing links which is handy to have. But I usually use the next package on the list for that information.
• MyBlogLog - You can see part of this service running on the right of my blog with the pictures of people passing through the blog. MyBlogLog is not really an analytics package, yet it forms part of my primary analytics tooling. This is probably saying something about the existing analytics packages! The thing I like about MyBlogLog’s statistics is that you can very quickly see how people are finding your pages, what they are landing on, and how they are leaving. I would like to see other “real” analytics packages take this viewport and allow me to drill down.

I use all of these except Clicky, which I intend to try soon.

Filed under: All Posts, Blogging, SEO