Innovative and Free Web Analytic Tools

Read/Write Web does a nice roundup of 10 free and innovative web analytics tools. I’ve used most of them but I’m excited that they brought up a few new ones to try. My thoughts on the tools that I have used they mention:

Clicky
My favorite simple web analytics application of the moment. Some really nice features, it’s easy to use, and great for the blogs. The Spy feature and RSS feed control are highlights for me.

CrazyEgg
A really cool way to generate heatmaps of your site. Heat maps can be used for general information about where people are clicking, but can really be helpful for navigation changes and ad placement.

103Bees
103Bees is a cool way to see more about your natural search results and identify long tail phrases you may be able to expand more on to get more traffic, but it kind of feels like it’s just a subset of a web analytics application. There’s just not enough there that I want to use that much to keep me coming back to it.

MeasureMap
Like Clicky one of my favorite of the simpler analytics applications, but it never came out of alpha as Google bought it and ported a lot of the functonality and the team over to Google Analytics. I’m not sure if it should really be included on lists like this anymore since I don’t think they’re really giving out new accounts or continuing to develop it.

FeedBurner
The most comprehensive RSS analytics application that also provides numerous other features relating to feed management and monetization. It’s nice they also bought BlogBeat a while back and added in some nice basic web analytics to make it a “full” basic solution.

ClickTale
Like CrazyEgg a provider of heat maps, but different ones and with the recording of user sessions using your site. ClickTale has heat maps that show you how people scroll, and how they hover on links and for how long. They also allow you to record user sessions so you can actually watch users scroll and click around your site. Very interesting data.

MyBlogLog
There is a lot of functionality here beyond analytics, but MyBlogLog is also a good example of it being handy to use one piece of code to get good widget functionality, community, and analytics in one package.