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
Siteimprove
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
The Siteimprove platform offers tools used to create digital experiences optimized for quality, accessibility, analytics, and SEO. Sitemprove offers content insights and recommendations in a prioritized list to improve the impact of changes. It is available through three solution packages (Inclusivity, Content Experience, and Marketing Performance).
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.
Siteimprove works well for managing the health and performance of your customer-facing sites in terms of performance, digital experience, and accessibility. It also helps to define policies to proactively avoid experience breaks or issues for customers before they occur. It can improve by providing more options to configure policies for large sites with thousands of pages.
User-friendly customisable dashboards, easy to make a dashboard from a template, or create your own, and add in whichever 'widgets' are relevant for what you are looking at
Flagging words to review, allowing users to check and confirm if the word is 'accepted' or is a misspelling
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.
I don't like that there are different navigation paths to go from point A to point B. When I want to navigate to a specific place, I have more than one way to get there, which means I have to make a decision about how I want to there and I'd rather the designer make that design based on what would be most efficient for me.
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.
I've used support often and it has been responsive, thorough and considerate of our needs. I can get a tech right away, they understand the issue, and work with us to resolve it. Often the problem is with the site we are trying to scan, sometimes it is with their product. I appreciate that they go beyond support into continually helping us implement SiteImprove in more places with 3rd party integration.
We have used or tested other tools that get installed on a computer or that are hosted online, but none of them offer the features that come with Siteimprove. TotalValidator Pro will check your site for accessibility issues, but it is a manual check and there is no historical reporting. I can;t remember the names of the other online solutions, but even if they offered similar features as Siteimprove, they were all very expensive .
