Web Analytics Tools You Should Know About and the Big Debate: Google Vs. Omniture

Web Analytics tools are important!  Often, the goal of digital marketing is to sell something, or to get people to sign up for something.  If you want to monitor your efforts, you NEED to understand analytics or at least understand how to use a few analytical tools available to you.

Google Analytics: This is a FREE tool!  Sometimes Google Analytics out performs the paid tools, and in other cases the paid tools beat Google Analytics.  If you are a smaller business with a small website and simpler transactions, but you need high-level analytics, Google Analytics is a great option.

Omniture (Adobe Analytics):  Omniture is considered the top "enterprise" tool.  Omniture has lots of power, sophistication, and customization.  If you have a larger website and do hundreds of transactions, then Omniture is a better option.  Again, there are things Omniture can't do that Google can, so often times using more than one tool can be beneficial.  

Five Rivers Interactive Media has done a great job comparing the two here. 

Open Source Analytics:  If you have concerns about Google having your data, then you may opt for Open Source Analytics.  With this option, you will have the opportunity to keep your own data without having to share it with Google.  Both Piwik and Open Source Analytics provide comparisons to Google Analytics as well.  Again, depending on your needs choose as necessary.  

http://piwik.org/ and http://www.openwebanalytics.com/ are two options for Open Source Analytics tools.  

Social Analytics:  Social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, etc. allow you to get information about how many likes, viewers, and other various analytic data for free.  They are built into the applications and are available to you always.  Adobe's analytics tool has tried to become an "all-in-one" place for this type of data collection.