ClickTracks and HitsLink cull Web site stats without the stress

Web sites are an important conduit between customers, potential clients, and employees, so it’s not surprising that organizations invest heavily in watching how their sites are used. For this job, enterprises often turn to the big guns in Web analytics -- Coremetrics, NetIQ, Omniture, or WebSideStory -- because they present visitor behavior from practically any perspective. But this complexity can mean hours of trying to set up and then harvest useful data from reports. Even more difficult is using reports to spot potential click fraud.

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Such frustration opens the door for two capable, easier-to-use, and more economical analysis tools, ClickTracks 6.1 and Net Applications HitsLink.

ClickTracks 6.1, available as in-house software or as a hosted service, has fewer reports than both large-scale rivals and HitsLink, but they all cut right to useful information, such as tables that map search engine keywords to revenue. The data is overlaid on your Web page, so you can easily see how visitors navigate the site.

HitsLink, a hosted service, provides comprehensive reports on site traffic. While statistics appear in traditional tabular or chart format, HitsLink delivers results in real time, even on high-traffic sites.

Most significant, both products have specific features to help you identify possible click fraud. HitsLink’s map view shows essential data, such as clicks by country, making it easier to spot unusual patterns. ClickTracks’ detection employs elaborate statistical analysis and prepares reports that you can submit to your PPC (pay-per-click) provider.

ClickTracks 6.1

ClickTracks offers several options, including the midrange Optimizer for search engine marketing and the Pro version I tested, which adds revenue, conversion, and campaign performance reporting. These are available as a hosted service or as licensed software. For the hosted software, site data is collected using JavaScript tags placed on each Web page; the in-house software analyzes server log files. A third software option, ClickTracks JDC, uses JavaScript data collection. All versions employ a client application for interacting with reports.

ClickTracks is intentionally simple. Beginning with the Start page, you’ll find large icons for selecting reports and tips that explain how to use the app. This visual approach extends to the way many reports are presented, which assists in interpreting results.

As do many high-end products, ClickTracks’ Navigation report displays an exact rendering of your site overlaid with statistics. For instance, this view showed how many visitors from Google clicked a particular link on my home page. In another pane, I saw a path display of how people navigated to other parts of the site.

Time Splits is a really helpful feature for seeing the effect of site changes. Using Site Archiver, which compresses files 10-to-1, I captured a copy of my site at a particular time and then revised the live home-page design. After the change, ClickTracks showed performance statistics of the old and new design side by side. This is a creative approach to comparative testing because it doesn’t require having two production versions of the site.

The new Robot View simulation is perhaps the most understated, yet helpful Version 6.1 addition: It shows how search engines perceive your site and therefore helps you spot problems that would otherwise go undetected. In my tests, I found things such as missing title tags and erroneous meta information. I also liked a companion display that presented keywords per page; after seeing that I had the wrong mix of keywords and correcting the text, my search engine ranking increased. I verified this with a new report that showed the ranking of keywords -- from Google, Yahoo, and MSN -- that drove visitors to my site.

In addition, ClickTracks has pre-configured tabular reports for common statistics, such as average time on site, page views per visitor, and popular pages. The disadvantage to this approach is you can’t change sort order or other report formatting, except for date range.