No matter how good your website looks, it’s only as good as the data that proves it was successful. This week’s browseworthy links highlight free web analytics tools. Web analytic tools allow you to track and evaluate what’s working on your website – and more importantly, what’s not working.

 

Google Analytics - This is the 300-pound gorilla of the tracking space. Google Analytics provides just about all the data you could every want, 100% free. You can evaluate content, advertisements, mobile stats and conversions.

 

GoingUp - GoingUp provides just about everything Google Analytics does, and a little more. GoingUp provides heatmap tracking in addition to the typical analytics data, meaning you can actually see where people are clicking on a graphical display. This can give you a lot of useful information about your user’s behavior.

Piwik - Piwik is an open source self-hosted tracking solution that provides all the functionality that Google Analytics does. If you prefer to have your tracking hosted on your own servers rather than risk having it on someone else’s server, Piwik is a great choice. The code is written by hundreds of dedicated developers all over the world and they have a strong reputation for building great software.

StatCounter – StatCounter offers free accounts for sites with less than 250,000 page visits per month.  You can create projects, track entry pages and exit pages, browser stats, return visits, and more.  You can set it up to email reports to you on a regular schedule. If you are feeling overwhelmed with Google Analytics, StatCounter is great starting place.

 

 Compete - Compete is a competitive research platform that allows you to spy on your competitor’s keywords and traffic statistics. Though their data isn’t “accurate” per se, it can still give you a very good gauge on where their traffic is coming from, as well as what kinds of keywords are working for them. There is a fee for complete access to Compete, but the free version gives you a limited number of keywords and traffic sources – enough to get a very good sense of what your competitors are up to.

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