HitLinks is an inexpensive web analytics tools providing page view and unique visitor data to smaller site. Customers tend to be media sites with fairly simple analytics needs. The tools requires that some code be appended to all pages to be tracked, and does not offer any social media tracking.
$20
per month
Open Web Analytics
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Open Web Analytics is an open source web analytics software product licensed under GPL and provides website owners and developers with ways to add web analytics to their sites using simple Javascript, PHP, or REST based APIs. OWA also comes with support for tracking websites made with content management frameworks such as WordPress and MediaWiki.
If you're looking for a comprehensive, user-friendly web analytics tool, you should definitely consider Hitslink. Before you subscribe to the software, take a test run on their Demo version of the site, as it behaves exactly like the full professional version. The biggest disadvantage is that Google+ registered users' search engine traffic data will be mostly (if not completely) blocked. However, this drawback is rarely a significant hindrance to analyzing your website's traffic, but it is something to be aware of.
Open Web Analytics is an opportunity for those that like to have skeletons for the start of customized solutions. The package offers several best practices set of features and functions. The possibilities add up to higher performance API for example from Google Analytics. The vast of additional features are of higher value because the market does not have other solutions. There are solutions around Open Web Analytics for example in SAP Design Studio that integrate beyond Content Management systems and attached Shops Systems to Warehousing, Logistics, and Deliverment Management. The market situation are covering all that is possible and has demand. The universality is implemented at the user interface and therefore unmatched and even robust for new kinds of visualization interfaces or input device types. A draw is that against payment system remains a security gap and data security and data safety might be a topic for each customer and user.
Specific information such as search term and geographic location is blocked for users coming into your site through Google who are also signed into a Google+ account, making it increasingly more difficult to analyze trends as more and more people acquire Google+ accounts. This is part of Google's strategy to make companies pay them directly through their Google Analytics software, and it is working against services like Hitslink.
Hitslink is as useful as it is user-friendly. I haven't seen another website analytics tool as comprehensive and at the same time straightforward as this service. The only downside of Hitslink is Google's blocking of information from its registered Google+ users to the software. As Google+ continues to reign in more of the population, I can see this being a significant problem for Hitslink to overcome. However, there is still a vast majority of search engine users whose actions are visible through Hitslink, and as long as this stays the case, the service will be an invaluable tool for website administrators.
The service is incredibly intuitive and very easy to learn. The only drawback is not having a mobile-optimized website to easily view website reports on the go. But on a PC or Mac, Hitslink is as user friendly as it gets. I have yet to see a navigation system on any SaaS website that makes a service that is this comprehensive seem so straight-forward.
Google Analytics is the market leader for web analytics. The package offers search engine marketing that can be integrated into Open Web Analytics. The features and functions of Open Web Analytics compare close to Matomo Analytics. In terms of market share Google Analytics has all and the other two have very little and their other competitors have almost nothing. That changes in specialized markets. Google Analytics is everywhere and much more influential than other search engines because of that particular service. There had been a dying period for such web analytics software packages. There are three kinds of web analytics software packages. Free/open source like Open Web Analytics and Matomo, Proprietary like Urchin from Google, and hosted/software-as-a-service-packages like the market leader Google Analytics. I consider all as rather different in performance. Those closer to the busiest server are the best for traffic. Heat maps are well placed on the hosting server.
