PPC Without Pity

Google Analytics is a fine (and free) web analytics program, but maybe you’re in the market for an alternative. Perhaps you’re uncomfortable with Google having access to your web traffic stats. Or, maybe you’re just looking for a backup for data if Google’s tracking goes awry. There are plenty of web analytics companies that would gladly take your money for one of their paid solutions. But, if you’re like me, you would probably prefer to explore some free alternatives first. Here are three free web analytics alternatives that can help you replace or supplement Google Analytics:

1. Yahoo Web Analytics – Unsurprisingly, Yahoo offers a free analytics package to compete with their rival, Google. Their features are pretty similar to Google Analytics, including custom reports, data filters, and integration of PPC campaign tracking. However, they do have one important feature that tops Google: real-time tracking. Unlike Google Analytics, which has a 24-hour lag in data, you can get near-real time stats with Yahoo Web Analytics. Installation is pretty simple, too – you just cut and paste a code snippet into each one of your pages, just like Google Analytics.
2. Piwik – Piwik is an open-source alternative to Google Analytics. You can get trendlines, charts, and basic reports that are straightforward and easy to use. All of your key stats are there (keywords, top search engines, traffic stats, referring sites, goal conversions, etc.), but customized filters and reports are conspicuously absent. If you just need basic site stats, Piwik should do the job, but if you need enterprise-level analytics solutions, it might not be entirely up to the task. However, since it is a server-side installation you’ll be able to get your stats in real-time. Also, it is an open-source project, so if you (or your developers) are pretty code-savvy you should be able to do some extensive customization. Installation is a bit more difficult than the major web analytics tools, because you need to install the Piwik program on your web server. Once you complete installation, you can either add code tags to all the pages you want to track, or have a Piwik analytics installation plugin do it for you.
3. Open Web Analytics – Another open-source alternative to Google Analytics is the appropriately-named Open Web Analytics. This program is similar to Piwik, in that it is open-source and must be installed on your web server. There are easy installation options for WordPress, so it might be a good option if your site is based on that particular content management system. Open Web Analytics reports provide all of your key information – hits, unique visitors, visitor location, and the like. They also offer some cool information options like visitor click streams, heatmap site overlays, and tagging user locations in Google Maps or Google Earth.

So there you have it: three great alternatives to Google Analytics. Got any more suggestions? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

The new Google Analytics app gallery was announced this week, and boy does it look like a lot of fun. I’m an avowed Google Analytics fanboy, so this feels like Christmas to me. I haven’t had a chance to try out any of the apps yet, but I appreciate what Google is doing by allowing analytics geeks like you and me to monkey around with their system and come up with some creative uses. I’ve always thought that the Google Analytics program was pretty open to start with – you can easily create segmentation, user funnels, and custom tagging if you’re a savvy enough webmaster.

The app gallery takes the open platform to the next logical step. By allowing independent developers to create useful apps that link into existing Google Analytics accounts, big G is making their useful (and free) analytics platform even more useful. Here’s a quick rundown of some apps that caught my eye:

Call Tracking – No specific mentions here, but I think it’s nice that the app gallery has an entire section devoted to call tracking apps. Keeping tabs on offline conversions is always a real pain for the serious online marketer, but you might find that some of the apps here give you relief. Of course, you’ll probably still need to deal with the hassle of setting up multiple 800 numbers to keep track of the calls coming in from different marketing channels. But, being able to get all of your data from offline and online sources in a single dashboard, from PPC to SEO to phone calls, is a real time-saver if you’re dealing with a large volume of conversions.

Analytics Visualizations – You probably already know that I’m a pretty big PPC geek. Well, I’m a data visualization geek, too. Infographics get me excited. I have two signed books by Edward Tufte on my bookshelf. And I think that this data visualization app looks really cool. Google Analytics already has some decent data visualization capabilities, but Analytics Visualizations really takes it to the next level. Right now, there are two options for visualizations: referrer flow and keyword tree. Referrer flow shows a linear visualization of traffic to your site, with individual pages segmented and color coded by page. You can even apply filters to drill down to greater areas of specificity. The keyword tree tool looks pretty nice, too. It takes your search queries and creates a structured word cloud to visualize both the search volume of the keyword, and how it related hierarchically with other user queries. Both tools are free, and a whole lot of fun to play around with.

Pion – Well, now this is interesting. Pion offers an app that lets your forgo the tagging system in Google Analytics for an easier installation with more complete data. The Pion analytics app doesn’t use javascript tagging like a normal Google Analytics installation. Instead, you install Pion on your web server, tell it your GA unique ID, and it communicates directly to your Google Analytics account what’s going on with your web traffic. It’s an interesting concept, and could be really helpful if you tend to make a lot of new pages and don’t want to bother with checking every single one for correctly installed Google Analytics code. I haven’t tried it, though, so I can’t vouch for its accuracy. Anyone out there have any experiences or opinion?

Some apps are paid, but many are either free or have a free “lite” version of the paid app. I encourage you to check around and see if there’s something you can use. The app selection is a bit sparse right now, but that’s to be expected for a brand new marketplace. In time, I’m sure we’ll see dozens of really cool apps show up. So keep an eye out – you may find a Google Analytics app that serves the purpose you’ve been looking for.

On Thursday, the Google Analytics blog announced an upcoming browser-based opt out for Google Analytics tracking. This is huge news for not only webmasters who use Google Analytics tracking, but also on us PPC marketers who rely on this data to make marketing decisions. Details are scarce at this point, but it looks like Google will allow users to opt out of Google Analytics tracking by installing a plug-in in their browser. Granted, not every user will be savvy enough to install this on their web browser, or even know what this means. But I’m willing to bet that there are enough web users concerned about their privacy that we’ll start to miss a significant percentage of Google Analytics data once this thing goes live.

This is clearly a reaction to recent uproars about internet privacy, such as last year’s threat to ban Google Analytics in Germany. Google really needed to throw a bone to its critics, and I guess this is it. They are definitely running the risk of incurring the wrath of their PPC advertisers, though.

I must admit I’m a little ambivalent about this development. The internet user in me applauds Google’s advocacy for the privacy of their users. However, the internet marketer in me laments the loss of precious web analytics data that will help me make decisions about my PPC campaigns. But take my opinions with a grain of salt. After all, I am one of those hypocritical marketing types who spends all day managing web ads, then installs ad blockers in his home computer’s web browser.

So will this mean the end of Google Analytics? It’s too early to tell. But once this plug-in situation is finalized, I’ll be interested to see how it affects my Google Analytics data. Keep an eye out for this implementation to make sure you don’t get blindsided by a loss of stats in your own Google Analytics account. If you see the plug-in implementation take a wrecking ball to your site usage data, it might be time to consider a move from Google Analytics to a more complete analytics package like Omiture, Woopra, Yahoo Web Analytics, or any number of other analytics providers. I really like Google Analytics as a tool, but a web analytics package is only as good as the completeness of its data. If Google wants to stand up for privacy at the expense of its advertisers, then I may have to make the painful choice of going with another analytics provider.

Earlier this month, Google released a beta version of new code snippet that enables asynchronous tracking in Google Analytics. So what exactly is this, you ask? Well, under the current setup of Google Analytics, code is read sequentially by the user’s browser. When a page loads, first the header is rendered, then the body, then all of the elements in the body, etc. Most people put their Google Analytics snippets just before the close body tag, so the analytics script is one of the last things executed by the browser. If a user is having issues with Javascript or slow load times, sometimes the code snippet won’t be executed and you won’t get accurate data. You could move the snippet higher in the code to solve the loss of tracking fidelity, but due to the sequential nature of browser rendering, there may be a page load delay as the browser tries to execute the Google Analytics Javascript before it executes the rest of the HTML code.

With this new asynchronous tracking snippet, the Javascript code is executed separately from the rest of your scripts and HTML content. This means that you can put your tracking snippet higher up in the page code and not experience a page load delay as the browser executes the code. Think of it this way: the old Google Analytics code was a one-lane road, where cars (or in this case, scripts) couldn’t pass each other. Asynchronous tracking opens up another lane, where your Google Analytics code can zip by the rest of your sluggish code without impacting site load times.

So what does this all mean for PPC? Well, the main benefit of this asynchronous tracking is an improvement in site load times. And site load time is a commonly overlooked factor in landing page optimization. Consider this paper by Ron Kohavi and Roger Longbotham. In a web experiment, they tested the effect of site load times on Amazon.com. They found that for every 100 millisecond increase in site load time, sales decreased by 1 percent. One hundred milliseconds! That’s only a tenth of a second. It’s barely perceptible, yet somehow has a drastic effect on the psychology of e-commerce. A poorly implemented analytics tracking snippet could probably hold up your site loading time by this amount.

Sure, the new asynchronous tracking snippet promises greater accuracy in Google Analytics (always a good thing), but I think it’s the improved site load time that’s going to make the real impact. Good PPC marketers should always pay attention to what their analytics programs are telling them. But maybe we should be paying attention to what our analytics snippets are doing to our pages, as well. Having a web page that loads slowly and awkwardly could be costing you sales and conversions, and you wouldn’t even know it.