I think we all know the importance of tracking how visitors interact with our websites and users with our applications. There are a number of tools available depending on your budget, what you’d like to track, and how you’d like to track it. Below I’ve included a number of tools to help you collect valuable data on your users and help make decisions based on this information.
Visual Tracking of User/Visitor Interaction
CrazyEgg is a great complimentary service to your existing analytics application allowing you to “visualize your visitors” with heatmaps and overlays.
- http://crazyegg.com
- Starts at $9/month
ClickTale allows you to record how visitors interact with your website. You can then watch these videos and see mouse movements, where visitors click, and how far they scroll on a given page. It’s also great for testing the usability of forms and seeing where visitors abandon within the process.
- http://clicktale.com
- Free and Paid Plans. Paid plans starting at $99/month
Usability Analysis & Testing
SilverBack allows you to run usability tests on your site and capture screen activity, record the user’s voice, and video the participant’s reactions as they navigate your application and website.
- http://silverbackapp.com
- Free Trial for 30 days and one-time purchase of $49.95
Web Analytics
Not much to say here. I think we’re all pretty familiar with Google Analytics, but I found AnalyticsApp a couple of days which is an iPhone app for Google Analytics. It’s $6, but well worth the price.
- Google Analytics: http://google.com/analytics
- Mobile App Available? Yes via http://analyticsapp.com
- Real-time? No
- Web-based
- Pricing: Free
VisiStat is a web-based analytics service that tracks visitors in real-time. They also provide a slick geo-map that shows visitors who are on your site now and where they are located. They also offer additional services such as heat mapping and site monitoring to ping you if/when your site is not available.
- VisiStat: http://visistat.com
- Mobile App Available? Yes
- Real-time? Yes
- Web-based
- Pricing: Starts at $29.95/month
Mint is a self-hosted option that is brought to us by @shauninman. The interface is clean and simple and functionality is extensible via “Peppers”. An additional advantage over other paid options is that you pay a license fee once instead of a recurring subscription.
- Mint: http://haveamint.com
- Mobile App Available? You can use iPhone Pepper to view your stats in a single-column format.
- Real-time? Yes
- Self-hosted
- Pricing: $30 per site (one-time license fee)
Piwik is an open source option, so it’s free and you host it on your server. If you enjoy diving into the code, Piwik is a great option as it allows you to build custom analytics plug-ins. Overall, if you’re a developer it gives you much more flexibility than many, if not all, of the other analytics services.
- http://piwik.org
- Mobile App Available? Yes (available from independent contributors/developers)
- Real-time? Yes
- Self-hosted
- Pricing: Free (open source)
Clicky is web-based analytics app that displays visitors in real-time. They have a free option available and paid plans depending on the number of websites you’d like to track and number of pageviews. They also provide a tab for Twitter where you can view mentions of your site via Twitter, links, tags, and Tweet types such as questions, Tweets with positive tones, and reTweets.
- http://getclicky.com
- Mobile App Available? Yes
- Real-time? Yes
- Web-based
- Pricing: Free and Paid Plans Starting at $4.99/month
ChartBeat is a web-based analytics app that gives you real-time data on visitors to your website, provides alerts for site availability, and tracks your presence on Twitter. It’s beautifully designed and takes “dashboard” quite literally with gauges for page load time and displaying the number of people who are visiting your website.
- http://chartbeat.com
- Mobile App Available? No
- Real-time? Yes
- Web-based
- Pricing: Free Trial and Starts at $9.95/month
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