If you want to conduct analytics on your online property, it’s important to know what types of tools are available and how they can help you. Hands down the most popular choice is Google Analytics, but it’s important to know what else is out there too.

Google Analytics

This is a free service offered by Google. If you use only this tool you can be quite successful by following not only the wonderful guidelines that Google provides to webmasters, but also all the analytics tools that Google provides. It’s super simple to use and offers a variety of different metrics to study.

You’ll find out where your visitors come from, what they do while on your site, and even how often they come back. You’ll clearly see how many new users you have each period and how many repeat users you have. Again, if you use nothing else, that’s okay – Google Analytics is the best.

Yahoo Web Analytics

The main difference between Yahoo and Google is that with Yahoo you can bring in the cost of goods data for your business, and you can easily see the analytics for multiple sites. It’s a highly customizable enterprise level website analytics system.

Yahoo Web Analytics works to help you gain insight on online customer behavior. It’s very flexible and goes a bit deeper than Google Analytics in terms of the different ways you can spin the numbers. But, due to that, it may be a little more complicated. Works great for small businesses that are selling merchandise.

Crazy Egg

This bills itself as a powerful eye-tracking technology at a lower cost. The cost is based on how many visitors you have coming to your site and how many pages. It can be from 9 dollars a month up to 99 dollars a month, and you are always billed once a year.

Crazy Egg can help you figure out why your visitors aren’t converting. If you are getting a lot of visitors without conversions, this is a great tool to use. Their heat map will help you determine why visitors aren’t converting. It will help you create better calls to action and buy now buttons. They offer a free trial, so it’s worth giving it a try.

Optimizely

This analytics tool helps you conduct A/B testing easier. It’s an easy to use tool that provides a simple way to run A/B testing on your web real estate. You can even target your users’ experiences based on factors such as their operating system, location, referrals and more. It doesn’t really play that nice with basic Google Analytics, but it does offer a great deal of information to help you improve your A/B testing. The pricing might be off-putting to some people.

IPerceptions

You can use this analytics tool free for a small blog. You can identify areas of your blog that need development to help improve conversions. You’ll get more understanding of why visitors come to your site and what they do once they are there.

You can set up a survey for visitors to take after they’re done with your site. They will get a little pop up that asks them if they’d like to participate in the survey (they answer yes or no). It works well with Google Analytics and allows you to study advanced segment behavior.

Try one or more of these analytics tools to improve conversions. Studying metrics and then making tweaks based on those metrics is the best way for you to improve results for your online activities.