Are there better & inexpensive third party website analytics software over Google Analytics?
-
I've heard there are some third-party software that provide greater depth of information than Google Analytics, such as mouse tracking, heat mapping, video snapshots ect.
Can anyone recommend a good program to use? I've tried a basic web-search but there seems to be a great variety of different ones.
-
I'll second what Paul said about Crazy Egg...it's amazing! I still use GA as well but I absolutely LOVE the Heatmap and have made many optimization decisions after doing tests with it running.
-
If you are interested in knowing the value of your visitors and why they are not converting then probably you should consider moving towards KISSmetrics as this is one of the best tool that can tell you about the value of visitors and how fixing things can help you increase your conversion rate!
-
Hi Paul,
Thank you for the detailed response. You've made a very good point here.
Specifically, what I'm looking to try find out is more about the 'buying process' of our customers. While Google Analytics can tell me what pages get the most hits, basic vistor demographics, I'd like to investigate more of the 'individual buyers process' on the website.
For example, an individual reaches the home page, then where do they go? What sequence of pages do they go to and then what is the end result. Do they file a web inquiry or do they consistently exit on a particular page?
Also - I think mouse tracking would be beneficial for this purpose. If you have any other recommendation of area's I should look into regarding identifying online buyer behaviour I'd greatly appreciate it.
I am still in the intermediate stage of learning web analytics and SEO and am looking to take it to the next level and identify key data that would result in physical alterations to the website and online marketing strategy to increase both website hits and conversion rates.
Thank you again,
Justin.
-
There are so many analytics options out there that it's pretty difficult to make recommendations without knowing what it is you want to accomplish, Justin. Each will have their own very specific purposes and strengths. And weaknesses. For example most specific tools will do a very poor job of overall analytics. So they need to be run in conjunction with other tools.
What specifically do you want to know about your site that Google Analytics isn't telling you?
If you're looking specifically for heat-mapping, Crazy Egg is pretty much the industry standard. As a Pro member you can use your Pro Perks to get your first two months free.
But it's always better to have a clear plan for what and why you want to measure first. Then find a tool that delivers the data you need. Otherwise, all the new data will look very interesting but the time spent won't be justified by any improvement.
Hope that helps?
Paul
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Setting up Google Analytics
Hello, I will try to explain what I want and I am not sure if that is possible. Firstly I want to set up my Google Analytics that I would know where people come from and how many of them click on Google Ads. For example:
Search Behavior | | FCRMediaLietuva
Facebook > 2% of them click on ads.
Google > 3% of them click on ads.
Direct > 6% of them click on ads.Or whatever the results are. Secondly I would like to take people coming from facebook and divide them into age groups. For example: 100 ad clicks from facebook.
25-34: 9 clicks (9% of total facebook clicks, 2% of total ad clicks)
18-24: 7 clicks (.....
35-44: ... and so on Thirdly I would like to know which group use the adblocker the most.
Any other stuff that would be interesting if working with adsense? I believe that this would help me working with my target audience the best on facebook. Should this be set as goals? Sorry I am not an expert of Google Analytics 🙂 Thanks for the help.0 -
Is it better to find a page without the desired content, or not find the page?
Are there any studies that show which is best? If you find my page but not the specific thing you want on it, you may still find something of value. But, if you don't you may associate my site with poor results, which can be worse than finding what you want at a competitor site. IOW maybe it is best to have pages that ONLY and ALWAYS have the content desired. What do the studies suggest? I'm asking because I have content that maybe 1/3 of the time exists and 2/3 of the time doesn't...think 'out of stock' products. So, I'm wondering if I should look into removing the page from being indexed during the 2/3 or should keep it. If I remove it then my concern is whether I lose the history/age factor that I've read Google finds important for credibility. Your thoughts?
Search Behavior | | friendoffood0 -
Google smacked my site and dropped all rankings, can't find out why
I have checked out everything, I mean everything. We have no dupe content, our content is a little thin, but it is ours and accurate enough to help our customers.We follow all SEO guidelines and make sure we de-index any pages with no / little content (like privacy, or faq) All in all, we haven't done any major updates to the sites, and everything was great (page one on almost all kw) but beginning of the month, all kw wiped to the second page, than third, than back to one and now pretty much gone (rank 100-200) I really don't know what to do. We didn't receive a manual action, and the last algo update was nothing big to cause such a drastic change. Meanwhile our competition (multiple sites) are gaining in ranks and nothing happened to them (most of them have even less content and not even SSL) Negative SEO is out of question, I check all links via ahrefs every other day. Any help is appreciated Thanks
Search Behavior | | s-s0 -
Correct approach to a business website with separate content for personal and business customers
I'm laying the groundwork for a fairly involved website. The website is for a telco that caters to both residential and B2B. I was browsing the websites of the likes of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint & T-Mobile. What I saw is that they compartmentalize almost everything - all their business pages are in a business subdoman, all their investor info is in an investor subdomain and so-on. So I'm going implement this strategy on this website update. I just want to make sure that my idea makes sense and isn't a complete cluster****. I've attached a link to the mind map. Everything with "(sub)" attached to it is a subdomain. Everything else is a page at the root level of the top domain. Most of the visitors we get to the website are residential, so instead of loading a portal at first and asking if they're there for person or business reasons, I'm considering forwarding all visitors to the top-level domain to the personal.example.com site. Is this okay or would it be better to just keep the content in the top-level rather than forwarding all traffic to a subdomain? Thank you! 1JY7DWw
Search Behavior | | CucumberGroup0 -
Homepage & Subdomain Love Story...
Hi, Here's the situation: There's this website URL.com which is a search engine for a certain purpose (android developers). In fact, the homepage and maybe the "about" page are the only pages sitting on URL.com, all of the other inner pages (hundreds of thousands) are generated within one main Sub-Domain - X.URL.com Also, the analytics is tracking only X.URL.com because those inner pages are the only ones to attract organic traffic. So, in Analytics we see URL.com as referral traffic to X.URL.com Also, in WebmasterTools under "Links to your site" we see like half a million links from URL.com to X.URL.com Is this situation normal, do you think it may impact SEO in any way? Last remark, organic traffic is growing in a great way to the inner pages generated by the search engine, which as said sitting under x.URL.com Thanks
Search Behavior | | Yoav_Vilner0 -
Better click through rate in 2nd position?
I'm digging through my Google Webmaster tools and found something really odd. On one particular keyword phrase Google is reporting a higher CTR on the 2nd position over the first. A lot higher. Per Google the 2nd position is getting a 31% CTR. Has anyone else seen this?
Search Behavior | | Thos0030 -
Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
Hi,
Search Behavior | | ChrisHolgate
We’ve recently received a Google notification of unnatural linking along with a confirmation that we're being penalised. There were a few other sites that we owned that perhaps had too many links pointing to our main domain so we trimmed them down and submitted a reconsideration request and got the following back: "Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team" I want to stress that we have never in the past and do not currently buy any backlinks. The problem that we face now is that our site has been online for best part of a decade, there are thousands of people linking to us and I have absolutely no idea where to start. We don’t use an SEO Company but in the past few months have been using SEOmoz to improve our on-page optimisation. I know it’s a massive ask but if could a member of the SEOmoz community or a staff member quickly take a gander and let us know if anything in particular sticks out like a sore thumb it would mean a great deal to me. Of course, if needed we’ll employ the services of an SEO company but I’m hoping one of you guys will see something immediately obvious that could really help us out! Thanks in advance. Kind regards Chris0 -
Have Google changed something in Analytics
Hi Mozzers, I have a client that gets loads of traffic and since the 15th February there has been a decrease in New Visitors and an Increse in Returning. Traffic levels are the same. The returning is up and new are down by a long long shot. Have Google changed the way these visits are calculated? I can't see anything on the blog - anyone experiencing similar issues Bush
Search Behavior | | Bush_JSM0