ClickTracks and HitsLink cull Web site stats without the stress

This illustrates a small compromise you need to accept with this solution. Pre-configured reports are speedy and can also be accessed from a browser. To perform custom analysis, you need to download data to your PC or a local server for preprocessing. Files are significantly compressed -- about 1,000-to-1 -- so transfer time isn’t a real issue. But, on a slower PC, this does introduce an analysis lag each time a report is changed, which can be several minutes based on my testing. Still, this delay is trivial compared with waiting overnight for results -- common with traditional log analyzers.

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Importantly, custom analysis provides powerful visitor segmentation. Called Labeling, ClickTracks starts you off with nine pre-built ways to see statistics, such as visitors from the top three search engines and their navigation patterns. And, at the advanced level, you can perform almost endless segmentation.

Another interesting report shows statistically significant variations, including referrers, search keywords, entry pages, and countries.

This type of analysis is core to the click-fraud function. The software looks at all the parts of a particular campaign, such as sessions with revenue, number of IP addresses, sessions with no referrer, and average time on the site. ClickTracks then compares this data across campaigns and flags those that are out of bounds. Finally, you review the figures and determine whether there’s a reasonable explanation for discrepancies. If the only explanation is click fraud, the software creates an Excel spreadsheet with all the evidence so your PPC provider has enough data to make a refund decision.

ClickTracks provides an elusive balance of quick reports for inexperienced users along with analytics that knowledgeable marketers require. Plus, the hosted service and in-house JDC version offer real-time reporting. Very experienced users might be hungry for more reporting options and custom dashboards. Still, considering the design objectives for this product -- getting useful results without fuss -- it’s very satisfying.

Net Applications HitsLink

There’s no software to install with HitsLink. After including a small piece of tracking code on my Web pages, the service immediately started generating statistics. That ease and speed of setup extended through analyzing results, which is done through any browser -- without any plug-ins.

HitsLink’s interface is extremely well organized, with menus logically grouped by topics, such as Traffic and Campaigns. In some ways, there’s nothing remarkable about the reports I found within each area. For example, Navigation Reports show entry and exit pages, along with average time visitors spend on each page. Information is typically available in tables, along with various types of charts.

Noteworthy, however, is how fast HitsLink responded when I changed date ranges, sorted links, and performed a range of other report customization -- usually in less than a second. My experience with other products is that this type of investigation takes upwards of minutes, or longer.

When I compared the quality of HitsLink’s results to log analysis, HitsLink was more accurate. It properly counted cached pages, did not show results from search crawlers, and handled redirects.