Search engine optimization and search engine marketing play a very crucial role in the promotion and success of an online portal. However, it takes sincere efforts, right approach and accurate strategies to make a niche for yourself in a hyper competitive world. This is where the role and importance of web analytic tools comes into play. Web analytic basically means the measurement, collection, analysis and reports on internet data. In other words, web analytics can be described as the study of the numbers of all the aspects of a site’s online activities. Search engines takes almost every aspect of a website into account while they rank it. Moreover, with time and change in technology, it is not just a website that is measured, but also things like social media activities that include Facebook activity, LinkedIn insights and a lot more.

A web analytics tool can help in analyzing market trends and to identify website visitors and users. Another advantage is that it can help you determine the behavior of website users, latest website trends and your visitors’ or users’ preferences in terms of site features.

If you have been around in the online world, you must have realized that it is imperative to test everything you do. You need to ensure whether things like squeeze pages, sales letters, blogs etc are working fine. The way to find this out is to track them. Web analytics help to measure site traffic as well as the site behavior.  In fact, a web analytic tool can help immensely in tracking visitors and their search behavior. Read further and you will find out how.

First of all, a web analytic tool helps to monitor your visitors and users. It helps you to find out how long visitors stay on your site, who they are and also their location. It helps you to find out the visitors’ clickstreams, keywords used by them, and how they landed on your website. You also get to know how many times a user or a visitor returned to your site and which pages were given preference. All these are important to improve the performance of a website.

It also gives you information like nationality and language of your visitors. It can also tell you about their city of origin, IP address and host used for access. Another important information it gives is- it helps you discover whether visitors were there to actually check out your site or did they get strayed. It also tells you how many visitors you get daily. Furthermore, it helps you to determine the bounce rate, that is, why visitors left your site without any action.

Another important benefit of a web tool is that it helps you to optimize your website in an effective manner. With a web tool, you get all the above mentioned information about your website. This helps you to optimize your website in a right manner. You get a clear idea as to what needs to be changed and what requires more attention on your site. It helps you determine which pages are viewed most and which ones get ignored. Thus you can work on improving those ignored pages.

With the help of a web analytics tool, you can also formulate a sales and e-marketing plan for your business. This ensures an effective plan as it is based on actual facts and not on probabilities. You get a very clear picture of what exactly does the market demands from you. You can track the most viewed items and can find out which products received excellent response. It also helps you to enhance various other programs that you may have already employed. These include PPC advertisement. It will make sure that you get more clients. You will also know how to monitor and keep your clients hooked to your site.

Some key information provided by a web analytics tool

• Time spent by a visitor on the site
• Keywords used by the visitor to arrive at the site.
• The IP address and country information from where the visits generate.
• The arrival pages and the exit pages.
• Identifying the week areas in web pages.
• Identifying lucrative online partners.

Hence it is clear that a web analytics tool is of much importance for proper functionality of a website. There are many analytics tools available in the market. Discussed below are the five important and useful web analytics tool.

1. Google analytics:

Google analytics is one of the most comprehensive  tracking system . It is also a very sophisticated one. And why not? It has to be so for it is Google. It is quite simple to use. You just need to grab the code, put it into your HTML above the closing body tag. It provides all the vital information like site usage, bounce rate, traffic sources, map overlay, content overview etc. It helps you comprehend how your visitors were able to find or arrive at your website. This can even narrow down into keyword level. You will know what are the keywords that visitors use in order to reach you page. Secondly, you would know whether your optimization efforts are paying or not. Moreover, you can also  find out which other pages need more optimization in order to get more traffic. Above everything else, Google Analytics can be used for free!

2. Yahoo analytics:

This is also a free tool. It is a part of Yahoo search marketing or Yahoo pay per click. It is also easy to set up. It is more than a reporting tool. It is a powerful and highly flexible data analysis tool. It helps you see individual click paths, time spent, actions taken, and other information about particular visits. This is not all. It also helps you to track up to 50 different online actions. Also, any link or page load can be tracked. It provides you individual visit information. Yahoo analytics lets you create new custom reports or edit existing reports with the metrics you need. You can also  organize it the way you like with the help of drag and drop Custom Report Wizard. Most of these reports allow you to quickly compare the time period you are viewing to another time period side-by-side. Another feature called the Paths to Conversion report gives you a list of all the paths that led to any of the 50 actions you can track on your site.

3. Piwik:

Piwik is another open source and downloadable real time web analytics software program. The best thing about this tool is that it gives you detailed reports on your website visitors, the keywords used by them and the language they speak. It also gives information on search engines and your popular pages.

4. Crazy Egg:

It has some really cool features. It not only helps you to track where your visitors are clicking, but it also lets you to see in various colors exactly where they click and how many are clicking.

5. Woopra: 

Woopra is a great web analytic tool that offers some amazing features like visitor tracking, live dashboard, visitor search, live chat, live map, custom events, custom visitor data, notifications, dynamic labels and many more.

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