Free Web Analytics

For those of you involved in Internet Marketing, you know that you just can’t get enough data. Most of you, I’m sure, are already using a web analytics package today. Certainly anyone with an ecommerce site is a very heavy user of web analytics data. There are many popular commercial packages out there, including websidestory, websense, urchin and omniture to name a few.

But even if aren’t selling directly from your site, say you have a B2B site, in a niche market with high-priced products, you should still be tracking your sites traffic with a web analytics package. It is still very important to measure your traffic, and see the effect that various online and offline marketing campaigns are having on visitors to your site. Or it may be very helpful to see what content on your site is getting the most attention. If you don’t measure what’s going on with your site, you might as well just have a paper brochure–you aren’t taking advantage of having an intelligent, electronic home for your company.

There are a number of free (advertising supported) services out there, which do a good job of tracking basic data on the visitors to your site.

I use a service called statcounter (www.statcounter.com)

It is one of the free sites I referred to earlier. I’ve been using it for a couple of years. It works great, and is very easy to use. I set it up on my entire site in a couple of hours, and was off collecting data about my website guests. If you have a modest budget or just don’t have a need for extremely detailed analytics, I suggest that you check out StatCounter.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com