Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Tool For Measuring Web Site Traffic

Posted by Anonymous on 1/27/2009 at 12:54 PM ET 200 Points

I am interested in knowing if purchasing a subscription to Web Trends for measuring our site traffic is a good investment. My company used this program in the past but due to staffing changes we have not utilized it (or any measurement of our site) for the past 5 months.

I am now tasked with starting from scratch with measuring site traffic for www.aaii.com.
I have limited experience in this arena and dollars are a bit tight so I am also interested in knowing about any free and/or inexpensive products for site traffic analysis that this forum can recommend.

About our site - www.aaii.com

we get about 300,000 visits per month
1,100,000 page views
Our site holds over 5,000 articles
We have a store
The site runs on a windows server using IIS and Cold Fusion is our programming language

I hope to use the measurement tool to determine what areas of our site are most popular, where people enter and exit the site and in the future I want to be able to measure the effectiveness of marketing tests as they pertain to landing pages and online advertising spends.

Thanks in advance for your guidance.

Adam





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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Christian on 1/27/2009 at 1:01 PM Member
    Hi Adam,

    We use Google Analytics at SurveyGizmo -- which is surprisingly robust. It's also free.

    I would suggest using this first before paying for another service -- especially if dollars are tight.

    Cheers,

    -Christian Vanek
    CTO & Co-Founder
    SurveyGizmo
  • Posted by excellira on 1/27/2009 at 1:16 PM Member
    I agree. Free can be a negative term when associated with products of this nature but I would not let the "free" word deter you. GA is surprisingly robust.

    If cost is not a concern you may also want to take a look at Omniture.

    There are many others but there are so many variables to consider that it can be challenging to offer a solution with so little data.
  • Posted by SethDotterer on 1/27/2009 at 1:59 PM Member
    Ditto to the above.

    Start with Google Analytics ( the implementation time is 'by the end of the afternoon ) and see what information you're not getting.

    Because GA is so ubiquitous, there's also a lot of good info on the web on how get the most from it.

    https://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-huge-collection-of-google-analytics...

    https://www.wilsonweb.com/analytics/steif-google-analytics.htm

    And most importantly:

    https://www.google.com/support/analytics/

    Seth Dotterer
  • Posted by dmoak on 1/27/2009 at 2:23 PM Member
    Have to agree with everyone above about Google Analytics. There's some good books that go through some hacks that make Google Analytics even more robust (Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton comes to mind).
  • Posted by Christian on 1/28/2009 at 8:17 AM Accepted
    Adam,

    I used web trends many many years ago and it was a solid enough program then. I can't speak to it now, or any online version they may have.

    This was back when web metric analysis involved scraping information from log files. Ah, the good old days...

    WT might have an advantage over Google in one respect -- you may still be able to upload historic data from you server logs into the system. You can't do that with Google, nor can you fix data if you implement it wrong. GA is a forward-only solution as far as data is concerned (and a bit of a black box).

    This caused us a few problems initially, but the benefits (and the fact that it's free) still won out.

    Just remember that log based analysis is going to yield slightly different numbers than a javascript powered solution like WT's subscription service, omniture or GA. If you are doing comparisons while evaluating just keep that in mind.

    I suggest that you pickup Google Analytics for Dummies (ISBN: 978-0470098240). It's a good intro to the system. The other one we use is Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics (ISBN: 978-0470253120).

    The trick to Google is to implement it correctly upfront.

    Good Luck!

    -Christian Vanek
    CTO & Co-Founder
    SurveyGizmo
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