Are there better & inexpensive third party website analytics software over Google Analytics?

[Justin_hannan27]

I've heard there are some third-party software that provide greater depth of information than Google Analytics, such as mouse tracking, heat mapping, video snapshots ect.

Can anyone recommend a good program to use? I've tried a basic web-search but there seems to be a great variety of different ones.

[ThompsonPaul]

There are so many analytics options out there that it's pretty difficult to make recommendations without knowing what it is you want to accomplish, Justin. Each will have their own very specific purposes and strengths. And weaknesses. For example most specific tools will do a very poor job of overall analytics. So they need to be run in conjunction with other tools.

What specifically do you want to know about your site that Google Analytics isn't telling you?

If you're looking specifically for heat-mapping, Crazy Egg is pretty much the industry standard. As a Pro member you can use your Pro Perks to get your first two months free.

But it's always better to have a clear plan for what and why you want to measure first. Then find a tool that delivers the data you need. Otherwise, all the new data will look very interesting but the time spent won't be justified by any improvement.

Hope that helps?

Paul

[Justin_hannan27]

Hi Paul,

Thank you for the detailed response. You've made a very good point here.

Specifically, what I'm looking to try find out is more about the 'buying process' of our customers. While Google Analytics can tell me what pages get the most hits, basic vistor demographics, I'd like to investigate more of the 'individual buyers process' on the website.

For example, an individual reaches the home page, then where do they go? What sequence of pages do they go to and then what is the end result. Do they file a web inquiry or do they consistently exit on a particular page?

Also - I think mouse tracking would be beneficial for this purpose. If you have any other recommendation of area's I should look into regarding identifying online buyer behaviour I'd greatly appreciate it.

I am still in the intermediate stage of learning web analytics and SEO and am looking to take it to the next level and identify key data that would result in physical alterations to the website and online marketing strategy to increase both website hits and conversion rates.

Thank you again,

Justin.

[MoosaHemani]

If you are interested in knowing the value of your visitors and why they are not converting then probably you should consider moving towards KISSmetrics as this is one of the best tool that can tell you about the value of visitors and how fixing things can help you increase your conversion rate!

[PhilGraham-SlateInboundMarketi]

I'll second what Paul said about Crazy Egg...it's amazing! I still use GA as well but I absolutely LOVE the Heatmap and have made many optimization decisions after doing tests with it running.