5 SEO Focussed Web Analytics Tools

Patrick I often pick up the scent of your articles on Twitter and am always glad I stopped by. I always moved on that there are not tons of comments here. More smart people should be stopping by and leaving comments.

As I read this post, I kept wondering which of the tools were free, as GA is, and which were paid, or had a paid option. i guess you encourage further investigation.

Thanks for doing the leg work. I always enjoyed Crazy Egg when it first came out.

The sort of people who read this blog probably have better things to do with their time than leave comments on the posts. Aaron Wall once told me that the quantity of comments on a post is inversely proportional to how good the post was.

Greg I think BLVD is probably the better option.

We’ve recently implemented Click Tale. As you say, it is a very well rounded tool however a few things I would point out to consider ahead of implementing:

1) They advertise a simple integration of one line of JS to start tracking. This is true of basic pages, however if you run an ecommerce site and want to track secure pages the implementation is a little more onerous
2) We run a PHP site on the fairly common Zend framework, however Click Tale didn’t have any experience of implementing their tracking on the ZEND framework and we had to work with them closely to get it working correctly. This was several hours work. Click Tale were very supportive but nonetheless it wasn’t as easy as suggested on their site
3) We found we needed to up our subscription to the $250 a month plan to get sufficient data to draw meaningful conclusions. At the lower price points we just weren’t capturing enough sessions for statistical validity. Go into this with your eyes open, there is a free service but its only really sufficient as a live demo, you’ll need to upgrade to get real value, though you can of course drop your subscription down again when you have the data you need
4) Allow time for someone to sit and watch the visitor movies. Even replayed at double-speed this is a time consuming task. You’d be wise to set up various ‘events’ to allow you to filter your movies (so for example you only watch movies of those customers who hit error pages, or dropped out at a given point).
5) I would still recommend it in spite of the above.

My reservations here with a seo-focused piece of software like BLVD is that it is run by a SEO company.

I have had a look at Analytics 360 before. I am really impressed with Click Tale – despite the fact that I could feel “Big Brother” hanging over my shoulder as I watched their video ;-)

Good list — thanks for sharing!

Greg,

We don’t mine or do anything with the data. The only monitoring we do is data use and server stuff. It is all in our Terms, I would think having an seo behind an anlytics company is more a plus than a minus as it can lead to some very specific solutions in the space.

blvdstatus ROCKS. Very handy, especially as SEO companies can rebrand for their customers and have their own logins, etc.

Going up has a much more friendly user interface but like you say, their comments on pagerank and the way they describe certain things makes it seem like an application for beginners.

I’ve never heard about ClickTale. But it looks very nice. I wont measure my stats and converstions with google analytics so maybe this will be a nice alternate way. So i will try and have to say thank you from Germany for your article.
Tricks

So helmuts (or the original author) what is the best tool to use? and are there many really good free ones out there?