Free Website Analytics Toos

You belive or not you don't actually have to have a big budget to do great web analytics work. That is certainly a myth. And sure, most people know about the wonders of free Google Analytics, I would like to share a few of the other great free tools out there in the web analytics world.

Woopra
This is a great alternative to Google Analytics! Woopra is a very new tool, and is fresh out of the beta oven. This tracking tool is ideal for less trafficked websites, especially for blogs. It offers all the standard metrics that Google Analytics offers, plus two cool features that Google Analytics doesn't offer. Firstly, it has real time visitor analysis (creepy but great - you can see exactly which source your visitor comes from, the page they are on, and their path around your site etc), and secondly, they offer a great built in chat tool, that allows you to popup messages to your website visitors and actually talk to them - this is great for generating real time feedback or to offer help. Might be worth checking out, especially for those of you looking to try something different than the leading free Google Analytics tool.

Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is basically a very advanced version of Google Analytics’ site overlay tool. It allows you to visually see EXACTLY where people are clicking on your website, and even shows you this in the form of a heatmap. It even allows you to segment this visual analysis based on things like visitor referrer. In particular, this is a great tool for helping you find poorly clicked areas on your website for testing (and yes, no-ones website is perfect!) They have a free basic version of this, plus some more advanced paid versions, but the free version should be more than enough to get some great insight into where your visitors are going (or not going!)

Enquisite
If you took out the Search Engine reports part of Google Analytics, and added in a lot more detailed reports regarding your regular search engine traffic (resulting from your SEO efforts) and your PPC efforts (paid search engine clicks), then you have ‘Enquisite‘. It is a very useful free tool for those of you who spend considerable time and resources attracting website visitors from search engines, and allows you to do some great analysis to help improve the ROI of your marketing efforts. An even more advanced, but expensive version of this is Omniture's Search Center - which also allows you to manage your campaigns.

4Q
I am a firm believer that one of the best ways to gain insight and understanding about what is happening at your website is to survey your visitors. You should never just rely on click stream data. Survey answers tell you ‘why’ your visitors are doing the ‘what’ that you see in your clickstream data, and enable you to get ideas for improving your website, thus improving the visitor experience, increasing the chance of them coming back (which should be the ultimate goal of any website). This new survey tool called 4Q is free and easy to set up and start generating good feedback and visitor insight. Oh, and Avinash Kaushik, genius web analyst is behind this great tool.

ClickTale
ClickTale takes visual analysis tools like CrazyEgg to an even higher level, and enables you to record and watch what your website visitors do without the need of expensive usability labs! Its great for gaining insight through the perspective of your visitors eyes, and reveals exactly where they go, how far they scroll, and what troubles they are having (and believe me, you will be surprised where people actually go on your website!) And it only requires a few simple lines of code to be added to your pages, which is great for non-techy people. The free version allows up to 100 recordings a week - more than enough to get started with. Intriguing stuff!