It’s difficult to find a business that doesn’t believe in the importance of customer experience. What’s not so tough is to find one that hasn’t prioritized the tracking of digital key performance indicators (KPI’s) which give us insight into how to improve that experience. The gap however isn’t as much in the absence of digital KPI’s but rather in the level of granularity which those KPI’s are being reported. In other words, to truly impact customer experience, we need to shift towards individual user tracking so that we could personalize the content at the user level.
The good news is that digital analytic tools make this possible by enabling us to see activity such as where visitors come from; the pages they visit; conversion rates; and much much much more 🙂 Google Analytics, for example is one of the more commonly used tools, with no cost and a plethora of granular data to offer. There are, however, a number of alternatives that might be preferable for Small to Medium sized businesses (SMBs) given differing use cases and consequent priorities. Here are a few Google Analytics alternatives for your consideration:
Clicky
Clicky is one of the most popular digital analytics tools, offering detailed statistics in real time. You can drill down into the data, analyzing the actions that each visitor took. You can also take a broader view of your visitors, with factors like bounce rate, average time on site, and country of origin being provided. Bots and referrer spam can alter your data considerably, but Clicky is able to detect a large amount of this to ensure the stats are accurate.
AWStats
AWStats is used by many as it’s both open source and included in cPanel with many hosting companies. While it doesn’t offer the same level of analysis as more advanced tools, AWStats is a user-friendly way of checking visitor numbers, search terms, and referral sources. Bot traffic is also filtered out, helping to avoid inaccurate visitor numbers.
Tableau
Tableau integrates seamlessly with the entire Google Cloud Platform to ensure maximum efficiency for all of your analytics needs. With Tableau, any user can visually explore that data in real-time by connecting natively to Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Google BigQuery, and Cloud SQL to analyze billions of rows in seconds without writing a single line of code. With no need to move data to in-memory storage, you can analyze data in-place to take full advantage of Google’s cloud computing capacity, providing an end to end analytics solution.
Kissmetrics
If you are looking for a product that goes beyond simple visitor data, Kissmetrics might be the tool for you. The price is higher than simple analytics tools, but you also get features like email and Facebook management, A/B testing facilities, and funnel creation. Businesses running ecommerce stores can benefit from Kissmetrics, with the ability to find out what drives sales being particularly helpful. You can also create separate populations, allowing you to track audience behavior over time.
Gauges
Last but not least, Gauges is a simple and user-friendly tool, focusing on the basics of website analytics. The tool will tell you where traffic is coming from, helping to analyze the effectiveness of your search engine rankings and backlinks. There are plans to add additional features to assist with increasing ROI, but the main focus is currently on showing real-time visitor data.
Final thoughts…it’s unlikely you’ll want to regularly change your digital analytics tool, so it is worth making a considerate choice from the beginning. Most site owners pick a tool and stick with it for many years, with Google Analytics being the frequent choice. While Google has created an effective product, there may be occasions where you would prefer an alternative. New products are released regularly and can be worth looking into, but the choices mentioned above should be enough to suit the vast majority of site owners and SMBs.
Visit us at datameaning.com to learn more about us and also email us at sales@datameaning.com to begin a conversation about your digital analytics strategy!