Having your very own visitor tracking utility, allowing webmasters to keep tabs on traffic to their site, including visitor numbers, traffic sources, visitor behaviour & trends, times spent on the site and a host of other information gathered via two pieces of JavaScript embedded in the source-code.
What could possibly make this particular utility stand out in such a large crowd of competitors?
But first... What is Web Analytics?
Unlike other free visitor trackers, which insist on displaying annoying and often amateurish badges or buttons when they are being used, Web Analytics simply runs quietly in the background, gathering the necessary information without any visible signs of its presence.
Which brings me quite neatly to Web Analytics' first major plus-point; the price.
What webmasters are effectively getting, is a fully fledged visitor tracking utility without all the irritations and limitations normally associated with free products of this type.
What makes Web Analytics special though?
Although Web Analytics boasts all the features and statistical data to be expected from a top-class keyword analysis and statistics tracker, it also features a number of additional tools which put it ahead of the most of the pack where ease-of-use and depth-of-information is concerned.
1. The Map Overlay
Essentially, this feature brings up a map of the world, highlighting the countries a site's visitors stem from. Clicking on a country produces a close-up view, along with a geographical breakdown according to the region and/or city from which visitors accessed the site.
2. The Site Overlay
This is conceivably Web Analytics' single most important feature from a webmaster's or online business owner's perspective, as it provides a hands-on view of visitor behaviour. When clicked, 'Site Overlay' opens the tracked web site in a new window and, after a moment's loading time, overlays each link on the screen with a bar, containing information about clicks to the target page and goal values reached [more about goal values in a moment].
3. Goals and Funnels
The 'Goals & Funnels' feature allows users to set up specific goals for their site, such as tracking a visitor to the 'Thank you for your enquiry' page for instance. It also allows the user to set up specific monetary values for each goal, and thus track the site's financial performance and profitability during any given period of time.
The term 'Funnels' refers to the specific path a visitor takes to reach the goal's target page. Since most web sites sell a number of different product ranges or feature a number of ways to enquire, all of which lead to a single 'Thank You' page, the funnel allows for the tracking of each individual path with a minimum of fuss.
4. Graphical Representations
A great many visitor trackers out there will present the collected information in a certain way, be it a list, graph, pie chart, flow-chart or whatever. Whilst all these methods of presentation are of course valid, it is nevertheless a fact that most users are different, and a pie-chart is not necessarily ideal for those users preferring to work with graphs or vice versa. |
