Read on to see the reasons and learn about the best Google Analytics alternatives.

What’s Wrong With Google Analytics?

From a technical standpoint, almost nothing. GA is, overall, a very good service. Also, it is absolutely vital to the success of any online business to have good tracking data. A lack of web-stats means you’re flying blind and can’t make any targeted changes to your sites, to optimize their performance and make them make you more money.

By all means, use GA, it’s infinitely better than not analyzing your traffic at all.

Having said that, since Google Analytics is free, what would be a reason for anyone to switch to a different, paid service? A possible reason could be features: Perhaps you want a less complex system than GA or perhaps you want something that is more directly geared towards improving conversions, or maybe it’s just live tracking that you want.

For affiliate marketers, there’s one other reason not use GA: Google. GA is free and the trade-off is obvious: you get a great, free service in return for data. As an affiliate marketer, you probably do things that Google doesn’t necessarily condone. You might build websites that don’t offer stellar content but rather aim to get clicks and make sales. You might do intensive link-building through various means (virtually all of which Google disapproves of). One way or another, many or all of your sites are probably in some way involved in manipulating search results in your favour. Google no likey.

What if one of your sites gets caught up in a Google cleanup/slap and it just so happens to be sitting in a GA account along with all of your other sites? Could that compromise every single website you own? Possibly. I’d rather not find out the hard way.

How to Spy on Your Website Visitors

Without much further ado, let’s get to the Google Analytics alternatives. Let me just say two things as precursors: 1) there are dozens (maybe hundreds) of services and solutions not mentioned in this artcle 2) this is because I only list services that I’ve actually used myself, at least as a trial. Also as a disclaimer: I do track a handful of sites in GA (the one you’re looking at right now included). More on this towards the end of the post.

Woopra

Woopra kicks ass. It kicks ass and you’ll know it when you’re using it. Woopra easily has the sexiest user interface of all the solutions listed here. To access your (live) web stats, you can either use their online application or you can download a desktop client. Apart from the very stylish looks, Woopre boasts some impressive segmentation features. For example, you can create filters and tags to assign your visitors to, based on traffic source and visitor information. You can then track the performance of different visitor groups, through different parts of your funnels.

Woopra generally displays unique visitors, total visits and visitor actions next to each other, emphasizing that it’s about more than just counting visitors to your site: It’s about what those visitors do.

The user-interface is quite intuitive and there’s a good balance between usability and complexity. All of the basic information is easily accessible and placed where you expect it to be. At the same time, there seems to be no limit to how far you can dig into the data, for closer inspection. Highly complex features aren’t “in the way”, but they’re there if you need them.

Woopra Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Overall awesome solution and dangerously addictive for people who like data analysis and shiny new things (guilty!). For smaller websites, it’s feature-overkill and you probably won’t ever make use of everything Woopra can do.

Link: Get your fix of Woopra here.

Mint

Mint is a very stylish “less is more” kind of analysis software. Where many others pile on feature after feature, Mint strives to show you the most relevant data about your website in a simple “at a glance” kind of way.

The standard view shows you the visitor count (total and unique), the top referring websites, your most popular pages and the most popular search terms people are using to find your site. You can edit each view for a certain date-range or to show you recent terms/referrers rather than popular ones. Interestingly, there’s also a separate view for traffic coming through image searches, which could be a very interesting feature for certain types of websites like portfolio sites, sites about design or any other image-heavy sites.

The basic functionality of Mint can be expanded with so-called “Peppers”. These are plugins for Mint, which are provided by the developers themselves as well as third-party providers. Whether you want to use Mint on your iPhone, find out what screen resolution your visitors are using or just want to change the look and feel of your Mint application, there’s probably a Pepper for that.

Mint is a self-hosted script and it costs a flat rate of $30 per website, making it very affordable. Another advantage of self-hosting is that no external scripts need to be called, potentially improving site loading speeds.

Mint Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Stylish, affordable, expandable. Mint is a very good option for anyone looking for an affordable solution (no recurring fees!). You need to be geeky enough to like the fact that it is self-hosted and probably requires some customization to suit your particular needs, though.

Link: Have a Mint right here.

Clicky

I’ve been using Clicky for one of my sites for quite a long time now. In the beginning, I had mixed feelings about the user interface, but once I got used to it, I recognized it’s merits. The standard dashboard gives a very comprehensive overview over all of the core data: visitors (today vs. yesterday or any other date-range you set), visitor actions and bounce rate, top content, top search terms and traffic sources.

You can then dig into more detailed data on searches/keywords, content, traffic sources and so on. Clicky also offers a simple way to set up campaigns and track earnings. An interesting feature is that it allows you to set up custom twitter searches, so that you can monitor mentions of your site or brand on twitter, from within the Clicky dashboard. Clicky also integrate with a service called SheerSEO as well as Visual Website Optimizer for rank tracking and split testing respectively.

Another notable Clicky feature is that they calculate bounce rates differently from most other analytics tools. Clicky considers every visitor who spends more than 30 seconds looking at a page as an “engaged” visitor and doesn’t count them as a bounce, even if they don’t view a second page on your site. This makes a lot of sense, since you can’t really say that someone who visits your site, reads a whole post and then leaves was “bouncing”. They just found what they were looking for. With this, Clicky has more relevant bounce stats, especially for blog-style sites where the goal is not necessarily to get every visitor deeper into a sales-funnel.

Clicky Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Intuitive and clean user-interface, reasonable pricing and some innovative features make Clicky a Google Analytics alternative worth taking a closer look at.

Link: Click here to get Clicky with it.

StatCounter

StatCounter is one of the better-known free Google Analytics alternatives and it’s been around for a while. There’s no way to be nice about this, so I’ll just say it: Compared to the other solutions listed here, StatCounter is ugly. But, just because you don’t get the “oooh, shiny!” effect when you log into StatCounter, doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. The data is all there and you can get all the info on visits, visitor paths, popular pages, entrance- and exit-pages, incoming keywords etc. To be fair, I also need to mention that they’ve recently updated the dashboard design to make it more appealing (still no Woopra, though).

In terms of segmentation, goals, campaign/funnel tracking and fancy stuff like that, StatCounter does lag behind the competition. Given that most people won’t ever use any of those features anyway, this isn’t a big drawback, though.

StatCounter Features and Highlights

Conclusion: StatCounter isn’t as fancy as many other analytics tools out there, but it’s good enough for most purposes. Plus, it’s very easy to use and free with (almost) no limitations. Probably the easiest way to get away from the prying eyes of Google, without having to pay anything for it.

Link: Check out the newer version of StatCounter here.

reinvigorate

reinvigorate is the new kid on the block, having only recently been released to the public. I had the privilege of being one of the beta testers before the official launch, so I did have a chance to take a closer look at it, despite it’s new-ness.

Much like Woopra, reinvigorate comes with the wow-factor included. Everything looks sleek, stylish and well-designed. In terms of features, reinvigorate places the emphasis on real-time tracking (with segmentation by day-time) and an included heatmap feature. You can always see how many visitors are currently viewing your site, all of their vital stats (browser, OS, location) and thanks to the heatmap, you can get an intuitive overview over which parts of your site are catching people’s attentions and which are leaving them cold.

Other notable features include identifying registered users (e.g. for membership sites) by name and tracking individual user’s behaviour, a WordPress plugin that makes installation a breeze (plus tracks any registered WP users by name) and the fact that the tracking script is cloud-based, to increase page-load speeds.

Also: Have I mentioned that it all looks totally awesome?

reinvigorate Features and Highlights

Conclusion: reinvigorate definitely shows potential. It has many innovative features, it looks and performs great and it’s only just out of the gate. Having said that, the emphasis was never quite on the right data for my personal purposes, but this is a very minor complaint and I have no doubt that the service will only get better over time.

Link: reinvigorate your desire for shiny new apps right here.

Piwik

Piwik is advertised as an open-source alternative to Google Analytics and this seems an accurate description. It’s completely free to use and fairly easy to install. Currently only available as a self-hosted script (which has it’s advantages), there’s also the possibility of a hosted version of the service in discussion.

While the Piwik dashboard is nowhere near as fancy looking as some of the competitors’, I immediately took a liking to it. It’s a bit reminiscent of the WordPress admin interface and it just seems to have all the data and all the buttons in the right places. I found it very easy to navigate the data and set up some basic goals for performance tracking. It’s also a breeze to add as many websites as you like to one and the same Piwik installation. Much like with Mint, the Piwik dashboard is very customizable and additional plugins are available to add to the system.

Piwik Features and Highlights

Conclusion: I love it and it’s quite amazing that something as complete and polished as this is entirely free. Note that if you host your sites with Hostgator, you’ll have to get in touch with support to whitelist Piwik for installation. Click here for details on how to install Piwik on Hostgator servers.

Link: Get a taste of Piwik here.

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics (or OWA) is another free, open source web stats solution, like Piwik. It’s also self-hosted and it also comes in the form of a WordPress plugin, which creates one instance of OWA to track the specific WP site it’s installed on. Installed separately and independently from WordPress, you can use OWA to track multiple websites.

The user interface is reminiscent of Google Analytics in the choice of colors as well as the general navigation. It’s not a carbon copy of GA by any means, but it offers the same general navigation options and if you’ve used GA for a while, it won’t take long until you feel right at home with this new interface.

Open Web Analytics is very feature-rich, especially considering that it’s free to use. It can track goals along several steps of a conversion funnel, it offers separate stats filtered by pretty much any factor you can think of and it even offers heatmaps and mouse-tracking.

Open Web Analytics Features and Highlights

Conclusion: OWA is amazing. It offers very deep analytics with an intuitive interface and just like with Piwik, it’s quite astonishing that it’s available for free. I can’t quite decide yet, but I might like it even better than Piwik. Definitely worth checking out.

Link: Grab your copy of Open Web Analytics here.

mixpanel

I hinted at performance-driven analytics solutions briefly in the introduction and I mentioned them again in the comments below, so as a quick update to this post, let me introduce mixpanel. This is what I would call a performance-driven solution, because it’s all about measuring user-engagement and conversion rates and then taking steps to improve them.

With mixpanel, you define different actions that you want to monitor (e.g. signing up for an account, trying a free demo, signing up to a newsletter, visiting a particular target page etc.) and then see how they affect each other. For example, you’ll be able to see if users who get a free trial are more or less likely to sign up for a paid service. Or you could test whether users that register to your site via registration form are more or less engaged than visitors that connect with facebook or twitter accounts.

There’s also a module for monitoring funnel conversions. A funnel typically consists of several steps like clicking through to a sign-up page, then filling out a form, then confirming the payment. With mixpanel, you can track conversions along each step of a funnel like that and see if there are any weak spots.

To be clear: many of these things you can also do in Google Analytics or with the other tools listed on this page. But there’s a difference between using an analytics service where you have to customize multiple goals and campaigns and all sorts of stuff to get this result and a tool like mixpanel, that is built from the ground up to get this result.

mixpanel Features and Highlights

Conclusion: for a gadgets-geek like myself, mixpanel is pure candy. It’s a very high-tech tool for making online businesses (particularly services and online apps) more profitable, because it shows you all of the truly relevant data and also shows you how each element affects all other elements. For most webmasters and affiliate marketers, it is completely over-kill though.

Link: marvel at mixpanel here.

My Personal Preferences

Leading up to this review I was using a huge range of different analytics apps for my various websites and I had fun experimenting with all the different features and options. However, at some point I wanted to consolidate my data and not have to log into a dozen different panels to see the traffic stats for all my sites. Currently, I track all of my sites using Google Analytics and Clicky.

Some sites are on GA, because they’ve been there for a long time and I don’t want to move them and lose all the data. When I build a new site, I only use GA if it’s a site monetized with AdSense. With AdSense, Google is already spying on your site anyway and linking AdSense and GA can give you great insights. Any other site goes on Clicky.

I originally wanted to use either Piwik or OWA, but I didn’t like how resource-intensive they were, sitting on my hosting account. So just be warned: if you have sites with a fair amount of traffic, the self-hosted analytics solutions can become quite the resource gluttons.

Conclusion

As you can see, for anyone wanting to keep Google’s googly-eyes away from their visitor data, there’s no shortage of excellent Google Analytics alternatives. Most of these services come with either a free version or a free trial, so there’s nothing stopping you from giving them a test-drive. If you don’t want to spend anything extra for your analytics, then you should give either Piwik or Open Web Analytics a try.

What do you use for analysing your website visitors? And how do you make use of the data you get? Let me know in the comments below!

Cheers,

Split-testing, sometimes also called A/B testing, is the process of testing two or more variations of a webpage against each other in order to determine which one performs better. The goal of split testing is simply to find out how to structure your page so that you can get more clicks, more conversions, more sign-ups or whatever else may be the purpose of the site.

Read on for to learn how and what to test.

How Split Testing Works

Lets begin with a very simple example: We take a hypothetical campaign where we try to get people to sign up to a mailing-list. To run an A/B test, we create two different versions of our squeeze page, one with a blue colour-scheme and the other with a pink colour-scheme.

We will now send our traffic either to a page that serves up one version of the page or the other via some type of script or we will send the to a script that will redirect to one variation of the page or the other. There are different ways to accomplish this on a technical level, but whatever the solution, the result is that 50% of our visitors get to see the pink-themed page and 50% get to see the blue-themed page.

Now, we want to find out which version of our squeeze page gets more sign-ups. To do this, there are again several possibilities, but it always comes down to tracking the source of all our sign-ups or conversions.

Your auto-responder system will almost certainly feature some kind of tracking for this purpose. If you’re measuring click-throughs (to a sales-page or offer), you can track the conversion rates with a tracking system like Tracking202 or similar. You can also set up two separate redirects, one for each of the page-variations, but both pointing to the same sales/offer-page, to see which one of the redirects is used more often.

Again, there’s no shortage of tracking options, but it all comes down to this: Split your traffic evenly between two variations of a page and keep track of which one gets more clicks, sign-ups, sales or whatever it is you’re after.

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What to Test

There are three basic rules to follow when doing split-testing:

1. Test only one variable at a time
   If you change several things on a page and get better conversions as a result, you won’t know what exactly caused the increase in conversions. Was it the new font? The different headline? The new pictures? The only way to know for sure is to only change one thing at a time.
   –
2. Test big differences first
   Don’t test tiny details as they will rarely make a difference (e.g. exclamation mark vs. period in the headline). Test large, significant variations first.
   –
3. Keep testing
   Test two variations of a page against each other. When you’ve found the winner, make another variation of that page and test it again. Repeat this process until no change you can think of still produces better conversions. The worst thing you can do in online marketing is not to test. The second worst is to stop testing to early.

Here are some examples of what you can test:

• Text vs. Video
  Have a text-based squeeze-page and test that against one where you read the text and record a slide-show or some other type of video. You could also test video vs. video and text.
  –
• Long vs. Short
  This goes for text as well as video: Test a long, extensive sales-page against a short one. Test a two-minute video against a 30-minute video.
  –
• Bullet-Points vs. Paragraphs
  Write out a few paragraphs highlighting the main benefits that come with your product or offer. Then test that against a brief description and bullet-points listing the main benefits.
  –
• Different Incentives
  Most squeeze-pages offer some type of incentive for signing up, like a free report or something along those lines. If you have more than one incentive at your disposal, test them against each other as well as one against several (remember that too many incentives can make you seem desperate). Also try giving your incentive a more compelling name and/or description.
  –
• Colour-Themes and Design
  Test a “naked” squeeze-page against one with more graphical elements. Test different colour-schemes against each other. Even fonts and background-colours can make a difference. At the end of the day, you have to make sure that your page is visually appealing to your target demographic otherwise they’ll leave before taking a closer look at it.

Whatever you do, you should be testing your sales-pages and squeeze-pages. For a free solution to create split-tests, check out Google Website Optimizer. If you’re a WordPress user, I’ve got a very interesting for split-testing, a review of which will be published here shortly. :)

Now go forth, test and prosper.

Cheers,

Market research is usually concerned with the demographics of a market, the amount and kind of competition you can expect, evaluation of what type of content and delivery the target demographic responds to etc.

For this article, I want to take the market research down a notch and present you a very simple, very basic research “method” that you should be applying on a regular basis as an online marketer. Especially if you are new to this game.

Competition “Spying”

To get a feeling for a market (or even Internet marketing in general), go and take a look at websites and sales-pages created by other Internet marketers.

How do you find those pages? If you are already selling products or affiliate offers yourself, simply find some more offers in your niche and run a search on the product names as well as some closely related keywords. Especially for the product names, most of the resulting pages will be pure marketing sites. For your “typical” money-makers like “weight loss”/”how to lose weight”, “dog training”, “make money online” etc. you’ll also find lots of pure money-sites.

If you haven’t decided on a niche yourself yet, just go to ClickBank or CBtrends and search through the product catalogue there. Not that ClickBank is the only or even the most important online marketplace, but it’s the most easily accessible and you can find lots of product names and keywords to search for within minutes.

If you’re a member of some CPA networks, apply the exact same method. Search for the product/offer names as well as closely related keywords and browse some of the results.

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What to Look Out For

As you are browsing these sites and pages, here are some things to take note of:

• Types of Sites
  Are you encountering many squeeze pages or sales pages? How are they set up? Is there an order-button right on the page or do they squeeze your e-mail address first? Or are you encountering blogs and blog-style pages?
  –
• Use of Media
  What are you finding on the resulting pages? Is it mostly text, test with images, audio or video? What’s the writing style like? How is the information in the video delivered?
  –
• Visuals
  Are the sites visually appealing? How are they making use of colours and fonts? Are they simple or graphically elaborate?
  –
• Incentives/Promises
  What is being offered on the pages? Are there free giveaways or other incentives? What’s being promised?

Once you’ve taken note of these things, simply ask yourself: Could you do the same? Or could you even do better?

Remember that many of the people behind those pages you’re looking at are making money from them. Of course, not every offer and every sales-page is profitable, but particularly the top listed pages in organic search results are almost guaranteed to turn some kind of a profit for the site owner.

The reason I mention this is because especially those new to online marketing can easily feel overwhelmed by it all and not know where to start. If you just take a close look at what other marketers are doing, you’ll soon realize that there’s no real magic to it. Many a successful sales-page is not particularly pretty and you don’t have to be a genius to create something similar, or superior, yourself.

Allright, now go forth and research! And once you’ve researched, build!

Cheers,

Here’s another video I made after a reader made a suggestion to me. Someone recommended the SEO Quake Firefox plugin and asked me if I could make a video about it. I took some time to play around with the tool and liked it quite a bit. Here’s the video I ended up making:

The plugin is mainly a website analysis tool, although it comes with a few features that go beyond that. While I always try to show both sides of a story, I can’t really find anything to complain about with SEO Quake. It’s fast and functional, you can easily deactivate it an re-activate it (so it’s data and toolbar doesn’t annoy you during regular surfing) and it’s completely free.

If you don’t have a program for analyzing websites yet, I recommend you hop over to the SEO Quake homepage and give this one a try.

Cheers,

Someone made the suggestion to me to make some tutorials about Squidoo, an interesting article/webpage publishing service that many online marketers use for a bit of article marketing and backlink building. I will be publishing a series of Squidoo tutorials here, shortly. Before that, let’s take a look at some of the top-ranked lenses out there to see what we can learn about making great Squidoo lenses.

Method

To learn about the best lenses on Squidoo, I simply took a look at all of the top ranking ones within Squidoo itself. The site has it’s own ranking system that evaluates the lenses according to how many visitors they’ve had, how frequently they are updated, how many ratings they get and probably many more factors.

I spent some time browsing the top entries in every category as well as some random, not highly ranked lenses to get a feel for what contributing factors to a high rank might be.

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Content

While I will be talking about some objectively measurable metrics in just a minute, you always have to keep one thing in mind: There are many factors that play a part in getting your lens noticed, liked and ranked highly, but above them all is the quality of your content. If your content is not compelling, interesting and generally worth reading, it doesn’t matter how much you tweak other aspects of your lens, it will simply never fly.

Having said that, let’s go ahead and take a look at some of the other factors that I found the most popular Squidoo lenses have in common.

Length
This one is quite surprising, actually. It turns out that the majority of Squidoo pages that are getting a lot of visitors, are very long. Since Squidoo is very multimedia rich, I didn’t do a word-count. Instead, I just counted how many pages I had to scroll down on my screen in order to get to the end of the page.

The shortest lens among the top ranked ones I analyzed was 5 pages long.
The longest one was a whopping 32 pages long!
The 20 top pages I analyzed had an average length of 17.5 pages.

Image Density
With only very few exceptions, the most successful lenses all feature a lot of images and the occasional video. I didn’t count the images in the Amazon ads modules or the user-pics in comment-modules, only the images and videos the author inserted themselves, by hand.

On average, the lenses I analyzed have exactly one image or video per page. So when you go through them, you’re never just staring at text.

Here is how the image density (imaged per page) was distributed for the lenses I analyzed:

What this shows is is that there are some exceptions with lots of pictures and some with very few (steep bits at the beginning and end of the curve), but the majority of the lenses have around 0.8 to 1.2 images per page. So, having at least one image per page seems to be a good rule of thumb.

Interactive Modules
On Squidoo, you can include different interactive modules in your articles. From simple comment boxes to polls there are lots of possibilities to get the readers involved. I noticed that practically every successful lens contains at least one interactive element. Practically every lens I looked at had a comment section. Most of them also included a poll or some similar type of interactive module. I can imagine that these modules motivate readers to return to the lens several times, to see whether someone has replied to their comment, for example.

On average, the analyzed lenses had 1.7 interactive modules. Most of them had two.

Trending Topic
Finally, I noticed that around one third of all the top ranked lenses are about a topic that is something of a trend. For example, you can find quite a few highly ranked lenses about twitter, the new Twilight movie, celebrities and, currently a real winner, Christmas.

This is no big surprise. Content about current and trending topics tends to do well and Squidoo is no exception.

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Build That Lens!

So, there you have it. Head on over to Squidoo and build a lens. Add lots of images, make sure your readers get to have their say once or twice on the page and write about a current issue and you could potentially have a traffic-driving winner on your hands. Give it a shot!

For more instructions on how to go about building a lens, check out my upcoming video series.

Cheers,