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Best of what’s free: Google Analytics

Perhaps the most important rule of online marketing is to ensure that everything you do to drive visitors to your site ends up being tracked. Even if you do not run any online marketing campaigns, you still need to track traffic on your web site to find out whether your goals for visitors are being met.

If I were to have a top-3 list of free analytics tools that are available to most website owners, it would probably go something like this:

1. Google Analytics
   • Advantages:
     • Integrates directly into Google Adwords and is able to track other paid search traffic natively
     • Is easy to install in most content management systems, blogs, and e-commerce solutions
     • Ridiculously fast, user friendly, intuitive interface
     • Can easily be utilized as redundancy for paid solutions or as a “second opinion”
   • Disadvantages:
     • Some corporations may not want to share detailed revenue information with Google (I don’t necessarily blame them)
     • If for whatever reason the service fails, you have no recourse because it is *free*
     • Good things are rarely free of charge, so how long before Google implements a subscription fee?
2. Webalizer
   • Web hosting companies usually offer some kind of statistics program in their control panel.
   • If your web host does not have a control panel, they likely have statistics available on your hosted domain within a private directory, call your hosting company for more information.
3. Content Management System Stats or Plug-ins
   • Many open-source solutions such as Joomla and WordPress will have a plethora of plug-ins available that process raw server logs, OR accommodate simple Google Adwords integration.
   • E-commerce solutions such as OS Commerce and Zen Cart have pretty decent reporting options by default. Vast contributor communities support these platforms, so plug-ins are readily available, put through the paces, and updated on a routine basis.

For those of us that require additional tracking features, an endless array of software vendors eagerly await your marketing spend. We’ll review each of these paid solutions separately and in greater detail in coming weeks.

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