

Ask HN: Analytics package - paolomaffei

I couldn't find a honest comparison of some of the bigger web analytics softwares (Google Analytics is the main example) compared to the newer ones (I believe there are at least 2 company on HN doing this).<p>We have a lot of small (1-50k of monthly pageviews) websites, given the small websites size is there really something cool we can do with web analytics?
Needless to say we're currently using Google Analytics and just looking at how many users/pageviews we make each month, no more analysis.
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win_ini
The purpose of analytics is to give you insight as to how your web site (or
app) performs with visitors (or users). This insight is really only valuable
if you DO something with that collected insight. ie: Optimize your
site/process on an ongoing basis.

An important aspect that you left out from your question is: What is your goal
for your website? \- Convert visitors to subcribers of your product?

\- get visitors to spend more time on your site, thus allowing you to deliver
more ads/impressions?

\- get more returning visitors

\- Sell more of your products in an ecommerce/shopping cart scenario

In each of these scenarios - there may be better software that Google
Analytics, but you will want to establish what your primary goal is for using
analytics software.

Webtrends, Omniture, and others allow you to monitor social media, video views
and other multimedia aspects of a site - and also allow you to integrate them
with other platforms (such as email. For example Omniture + an email provider
can allow you to send an email to visitors who put 2 or more items into a
shopping cart, but then leave without checking out...)

If you just want to see pageviews, and use that as a measuring stick for now -
Google Analytics should be fine. You can also use its "goals" features to
track when someone fills in a form, or acts in a certain way on your site to
determine new measurable metrics to help guide you as you design/redesign your
site to benefit your business.

Let us know what sort of scenarios you are dealing with - and what you want
your visitors to do more of....the community can then give you a better
answer.

Some analytics comparisons i found here:
[http://webanalytics.globalthoughtz.com/index.php/web-
analyti...](http://webanalytics.globalthoughtz.com/index.php/web-analytics-
comparison/)

One final plug: Marketing Automation (ie: Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot...) software
blurs the line between web analytics software and email marketing vendors - it
is very useful for creating automated welcome programs, maintaining subscriber
status, and capturing form submissions - as well as "closing the loop" on
marketing ROI. These are especially useful if your product is anything that
has a considered purchase cycle (ie: not an impulse buy)

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ndimopoulos
Analytics is basically a statistical analysis of your log files.

I believe there are two aspects of what you can do with analytics:

1\. You can actually get the log files for yourself and use a log analysis
from a security and performance point of view. You can check which pages are
being asked, what are the queries passed etc. This way you can check whether
there are any loopholes in your code, vulnerabilities, scripts that are being
accessed a lot, resources that need to be cached etc. Google Analytics gives
you some of that data (top queries, etc.) but not from a security perspective.

2\. You can plot data over time for each website and use them for marketing
purposes i.e. growth over time

I hope the above helps.

