Four Handy Web Analytics Tools
What's missing from 'SAP Analytics'? - the 'Web'
Let's leave the commentary on the question in the subtitle for a separate post and focus this one on a few interesting free web analytics tools.
1- a web analytics vendor discovery tool. Enter the URL of a site and this online tool will tell you which web analytics package the site is using. Beware of false negatives - not every web analytics tool is searched for (pardon the ending of a sentence with a preposition).
2- "WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, an extension (for Firefox) aimed at web analytics implementation specialists, web analysts and savvy web surfers who want to understand how their behavior is being analyzed."
3- RobotReplay and their so-called cinelytics (cinema + analytics). This session cam and playback tool is really handy but I'd check your TOS and Privacy statement before adding this java script to a commercial site. This tool sounds a lot like TeaLeaf Technologies, an SAP Labs spin out of Robert Wenig's back in 1999, but it is completely hosted and currently free. UPDATE - did I mention the servers occasionally crash? Still a promising offering.
4- Oh yeah, of course, there is Google Analytics. Arguably Google's smartest acquisition (2005). I recently had a conversation with Paul Muret one of the founders of Urchin (now Google Analytics). He made an interesting comment to my observation that GA was cleaning up at the bottom-end of the market and appeared to be moving up the stack into higher value areas (site map overlays, A/B, multivariate testing etc). He nodded and said (not a direct quote but you'll get the idea), yeah it's nice to be promoting a free product when the competition is asking you to investing 100k$+ (presumably on Omniture/VisualSciences/WebTrends) and even if companies decide to use a web analytics tool from another provider, Google still benefits as those companies are more likely to invest in search engine marketing.
