Web Analytics (WA) – Best tool evaluation

I hate to admit but I have only really been exposed to 2 Web Analytics products to date-  Google’s free Analytics and Site Catalyst by Adobe (through school).  However, given how much competitive advantage can be gained by successful use of analytics and the growing consumer ‘need’ there are bound to be a number of other products that fall into the same web-based Web Analytics (WA) category.  In this blog I will share my results on what others feel is the ‘Best web analytics’ products.

Question:

I took my search to the web by Google searching for “what is the best web analytics product?” and found sites that evaluated a number of “web analytics” products. I however don’t have any way to truly validate their individual evaluations so I thought it might be useful to compile a more aggregate approach to their reviews. The hope is that by doing such an aggregation we would mitigate any individual reviewer’s bias and truly find the tool that evaluators find as the ‘best’.

Research:

For this comparison I looked at 10 different sites that provided their view of the top WA tools. From those 10 sites I found 55 different WA tools – who knew there were so many!? To find what I feel is the collective wisdom the best WA tool I took the average ranking for each of the WA tool that had more than 3 rankings (of the 10 different sites).  With that filtering I was left with 17 WA tools. Of those 17 the top 10 (based on average rankings, where 1 was the best) are as follows:

Company	URL	Average	Std.Dev.	Count
Google Analytics	http://google.com/analytics	1.0	0.0	8
Coremetrics	http://www.coremetrics.com/	2.5	1.5	4
Omniture/Adobe Sitecatalyst	http://www.adobe.com/products/sitecatalyst.html	3.3	1.6	4
Site Meter	http://www.sitemeter.com/	4.0	1.6	3
Stat Counter	http://beta.statcounter.com/	4.3	0.5	3
Crazy Egg	http://www.crazyegg.com/	4.8	2.0	4
WebTrends	http://www.webtrends.com/	5.3	2.3	4
Piwik	http://piwik.org/	5.7	3.4	6
Clicky (getclicky)	http://getclicky.com/	6.5	6.8	6
Mint	http://haveamint.com/	7.0	6.4	3

To save room on the blog I have a copy of the Excel list I generated with the ranking per tool by source and the citations for each source. You can find that here (best viewed as a downloaded doc):

Results –Take-home:

There are no shortages of WA tool in the market place. I am sure with a little more exploration that we’d be able to find another 30-50 WA tools. The overwhelming majority of evaluators’ reviews indicate that Google Analytics, Coremetrics and Sitecatalyst are hands-down favorites for “Best WA tool”. I guess there should be no surprise that I have been exposed to 2 of them already. It looks like I should get to know Coremetrics a bit more.

Other useful sites:

Site	Notes:
http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2010/08/40-advanced-web-analytics-tools-for-business-small-and-big.html	This site lists a lot of different tools and provides hyperlinks to each.  Although it is a bit outdated.
http://www.slideshare.net/tgwilson/web-analytics-tools-comparison	Provides a slide share view of GA, Adobe's, Webtrends, and CoreMetrics.