Web Analytics Applications Reviews

Google Analytics Logo

When it comes to running a business online, there's nothing quite as good as having the largest search engine in your corner. Google Analytics is a service and series of tools that let you get an up-close look at the people who visit your website, where they're coming from, where they go through your site, and lets you have hard data to make marketing decisions on. It's based on a platform from the company Urchin, which Google bought.

AWStats Logo

AWStats is an open source web statistics tool written in Perl that converts your log files into organized, and graphically represented data. It combines the data it collects into time-based chunks that are then converted into graphs. It collects normal data, such as: page hits, new visitors, bandwidth used, geographic location, and so on. It's most important piece of data in terms of web marketing is the collection of the most popular in-bound links.

W3Perl Logo

W3Perl is an open source log file analyzer written in Perl. It can deliver output in an HTML file with graphs and a sortable text-data table. This program comes with a graphical web interface, and you can retrieve anywhere from a single-page report of statistics to a multi-page collection of hundreds of reports. These reports can be scheduled for hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly processing.