Until, because of a new found interest in web analytics, I did a little reading up and was amazed at the sheer number of choices available out there right now.
ConversionRater's guide makes good reading on the subject, but unfortunately is a little too brief for my liking. But take a look at the article anyway, it'll give you an overview of what's available out there.
One analytics solution that completely fascinated me was the one from VisitorVille. I mean really, its a visual treat to watch your site traffic in 3D, with little buses and people traveling to various sections on your site.
Take a look at some of the screenshots here:
Amazing, isn't it? A tad useless, maybe, but quite the thing to show off to your manager while trying to convince him/her to purchase their services. :)
There's a wealth of information on the new guys on the block, and while they all have their own quirks and issues, its good to see the competition hotting up with Google in the fray as well. I've signed up for Google Analytics, but they don't seem to regard puny blogs as worthy for the beta program :-P
While there are a lot of cool free analytics tools out there, a note of caution: Most web analytics tools give you the statistics you'd usually want to see, but only highly customized (and costly) analytics tools will give you detailed stats, IP address-to-company matching and a whole lot of statistic views created specifically for your organization. Also, if you have a really popular website, then going for a log-file based solution takes some serious computing power - someone in the business recently told me that WebTrends can take upto 8 hours to spew out results of a single query on a large database!
Another interesting read I came across recently is this one, by John Marshall. Titled "Seven Deadly Web Analytics Sins", he points out the most common mistakes people and some analytics engines make while looking at statistics. A must read for your clients in you're in the analytics business :)
Lastly, here are a few more Web 2.0 company logos:
(No, I haven't made this, someone else did)
In case you've gone to some of these sites and said "Hey this is cool, but I'm probably never going to come back here again", I completely agree with you. Here's hoping these companies have rational business plans this time around :)
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