Five Best Free Web Analytics Tools

Everyone likes free stuff, especially if that free stuff can boost your website conversion rate. Here are five free tools available online to help you get started analyzing your website.

1. Google Analytics – Certainly not the first web analytics tool out there, but easily the most popular, Google Analytics absolutely dominates the field, here. The developers pride themselves on its efficient displays and reporting functions, and frequent updates ensure a cutting edge experience. A big plus here is the ability to graphically separate different user demographics and explore your visitor data visually. The biggest complaint against the tool—that website accounts could never be deleted—has been resolved, leaving Google Analytics a strong option for anyone wanting to improve their website.
3. Piwik – The open-source, community-driven David to Google’s Goliath, Piwik is a powerful little web analytics tool that installs on your computer and provides real-time visitor tracking via its simple and customizable interface and reporting system. This tool is a great choice for developers hoping to store their data on their own computer, instead of keeping everything server-side.
4. Yahoo! Web Analytics – Yahoo had to answer Google, so it developed and released its own web analytics tool that makes its mark by trying to do a lot of the analytical work for you. Its Visitor Insight feature can help you learn about your visitors’ demographics, and behavioral tracking lets you plot the average path a visitor takes through your website. Convenient drag-and-drop graph filters round out this slick system.
5. Snoop – Created by Media Temple Ventures as part of its Reinvigorate suite, Snoop is marketed as a no-frills downloadable web analytics tool that reports back to you when and how you want in real-time. Perfect for the obsessive tracker, this tool lets you define custom reporting events and have notifications pop up on your screen. Want to know every time somebody donates to your organization? No problem. There aren’t a lot of fancy visual displays going on here, but this system certainly keeps you up to date in its own way.
6. GoingUp! – Creation Shop’s GoingUp! web analytics tool is one of the most powerful we’ve featured here, combining many of the features of other systems into one slick package. The interface may seem a little intimidating to new users, but experienced developers will find the array of analytical devices astounding. And don’t let the slick design fool you—there’s some hard core reporting and data manipulation tools under the hood.

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