thefunnel

Before you even start looking at different web analytics vendors you should first figure out what you want to measure and why (your measurement objective). Your objectives obviously need to be connected to the higher level business objectives, but they also need to prove the value of what you’re doing on the web, otherwise your analytics system might be short lived. So talk to your stakeholders to figure out what is important to them. If they can’t articulate this you could try to educate them, but it could also mean that deep analytics is not perceived as critical enough, so it might be better to go light. Secondly you need to create a robust process to manage your measurement system. If you don’t have the resources and no one can be convinced to follow the process, the risk for failure is significant, regardless of what technology you’re using. When you have the process in place it’s best to first do a small pilot for testing purposes, using a free ware or another low cost alternative. Thirdly, select the tool. In selecting the tool depending on objectives and resources you could go either the enterprise or the specialized route. If you select an enterprise tool, such as Omniture, Unica, Webtrends, Core Metrics or Google analytics, you’ll end up with a very data rich environment, but it will also require you to have resources, money and skills to get everything configured the way you want it and that you (or your stakeholders) can understand what is going on. On the other hand if you select a specialist tool you have a lot to choose from,  it will be inexpensive, configuration will be relatively easy, but you’ll probably be limited to what’s in the tool. Here’s a few examples of some specialized tools. Google analytics – particularly good if you want to combine analytics with paid search (Adwords). Crazyegg – for building heatmaps and tracking clicks. Woopra – tracking, statistics and analysis with a plug-in for WP blogs. Mixpanel – provides real time tracking. Quantcast – provides a way to see / estimate your site demographics. Clictale – watch a video of your site users experience at the fraction of the price compared to Tealeaf. Kissmetrics – is a fairly new product focusing on easy tracking of funnels and conversions.