Item: HitsLink
Rating: 9
Author: Reece W. Freeman

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Hitslink to gauge web traffic statistics such as visitors, affiliate link clicks, and just in general how people are using our sites. With the information Hitslink provides, we are able to follow trends in search keyword popularity (and how that traffic converts to sales) in order to optimize the efficiency of our SEO efforts. The software is great for long-term as well as long-term analysis; allowing you to see minute-by-minute visitor numbers in real-time as well as zoom out to weekly, monthly, annual, and multi-year traffic statistics. We tally these stats at the end of each quarter to view our progress from one quarter to the next and year over year.

Pros and Cons

View website traffic stats and trends in user-friendly charts, graphs, and lists.
Easily parses out website users by search engine, search term, geographic location, referral website, and other specific characteristics.
Shows which websites users are coming from, what pages on your site they've landed on and which ones they leave your site from.
Gives statistics on how long users are viewing specific pages, which allows for the analyzing of the effectiveness of each webpage on a website.
Easily view real-time as well as long-term traffic statistics

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.

Return on Investment

Faster lead conversion
Improvement of the effectiveness of landing pages (and all webpages on our sites for that matter)
Increased employee efficiency by allowing us to make targeted changes to webpages in real time

Likelihood to Renew

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Users and Roles

8 - The people who use Hitslink at my company are SEO/SEM Strategists, Project Managers, Research Analysts, Content Writers, the CEO and COO as well as out interns who are learning the ropes of a web-based marketing firm. Basically everyone on our team (save the back-end website developers themselves) keeps an eye on the statistics generated by Hitslink.

Business Processes Supported

Daily Traffic Updates
Webpage Conversion and Click-through Reports
Website Improvement Meetings
Quarterly Reviews

Innovative Uses

We were able to implement A/B Testing of webpages and entire websites through creating duplicate sites and labeling them with distinct Hitslink codes.

Usability

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.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

The account dashboard has an easily-digestible statistical overview
Drop-down menus labeling each report's function
Auto-generated graphs alongside charts of data supporting the graphs
The ability to export data in a variety of formats (Excel, PDF, Email, Rich Text, CSV, JSON, etc.)

Difficult Tasks

Nothing

An Instrumental Part of a Successful Website

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with HitsLink