Web Analytics and Customer Insight | Data Visualization | Competitive Intelligence and Context | A/B & Multivariate Testing | Search Marketing | User Experience | Blogging and Social Media

Analytics

You can buy tons of expensive tools and any sales rep will be happy to tell you about them. Instead, I’m going to focus on analytics tools that are free or less expensive.

Feed Analysis

• Manage a blog?  This tool supplements the basic charts in FeedBurner with some useful data about subscriber growth and popular days of the week.

Piwik

• This is an open source project hoping to be a viable alternative to Google Analytics. What’s cool is that you can add and subtract plugins as you need functionality.

SongKick

• This unconventional tools gathers buzz from Amazon sales, MySpace mentions, music blog write ups and more sources. It helps you measure a band’s “hotness” factor and find concerts.

Google Analytics

• The premier free analytics tool.

NetMechanic

• A simple tool aimed at small and mid-size business. It can help you find broken links and slow loading pages automatically. No analytics tool aggregates this kind of data yet.

Pythia Analytics

• A basic tool to show you links in from social media sites and some search data. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but it does cut the data in a different way than other tools.

Crazy Egg

• Crazy Egg is a path visualization tool in the vein of site overlay. They’re best known for their heatmap and confetti products, both of which take you a step past basic click maps.

Clicky

• A “web 2.0″ style analytics tool. Most interesting is their spy feature that shows you a real time log of actions on your site.

ClickTale

• It literally records what your users do on your site and lets you watch a movie of it. UXAs rejoice! You might also want to explore tapefailure or RobotReplay.

BrowserShots

• If you’re worried about how your site renders in other browsers and operating systems, get free screenshots from BrowserShots.

103 Bees

• The should read 10 to the 3 bees. This is a search focused analytics product. I can’t see much value in it, because I have yet to see how it distinguishes paid and natural traffic and they love the word hits. That said, I do like their one feature that shows you which words relate to a search term that delivered visits to your site.

MyBlogLog

• This is a niche blog measurement tool that stands out for one reason–you can see the actual people who are viewing your site! It’s much more handy in the blogosphere to know if the “right” people are reading your content.

Institute for Advanced Analytics

• North Carolina State’s new Master of Science in Analytics degree is a unique option to get certified in analytical considerations above and beyond web analytics.

Web Analytics Association

• The WAA is the official organization of the industry and a great source of training and guidance on discipline topics.

Emetrics Summit

• The Emetrics Summit is put on semi-annually by Jim Sterne in locations across the country and globe. It’s a great chance to meet other analytics folk and is especially useful if you’re new to the industry.

Yahoo! Web Analytics Forum

• This is the virtual meeting grounds of experts, newbies, recruiters and everyone in between. It’s the perfect place to research a specific question and connect digitally to your peers.

Introduction To Statistical Thought

• This is a free book all about statistics, which is a great reference when you have a burning math question. It’s from Textbook Revolution, a source for free educational materials. Props to Toby for discovering this.

Excel Tutorials from DataPig Technologies

• Here are some basic video tutorials to cover some Excel functionality. If you’re still stuck, check out the MS Office forums to ask a question.

Free Excel Stuff

• If you can wade through the circular links and promotions, OzGrid has some good free information about formulas and functions within Excel.

Perceptual Edge

• Stephen Few is a noted writer on the topic of data visualization and his site and blog have a more in-depth discussion of the nuances of the field.

Contextures

• Contextures has a nice list of FAQs to answer that burning question you have about a specific Excel function.

Peltier Technical Services

• Peltier has a really huge list of topics for all levels of Excel users.

Web Page Analyzer

• Worried your pages might be loading too slowly? This free tool will help you determine how fast your pages are showing up.

Web Analytics and Customer Insight | Data Visualization | Competitive Intelligence and Context | A/B & Multivariate Testing | Search Marketing | User Experience | Blogging and Social Media

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