Posted by Herman MallhiDigital Marketer

Web analytics are the tools used for gathering and analyzing the behavior of visitors to a website. As a dentist and more so as a business owner, you have goals for your website. Web analytics help you track your website’s performance against those goals, maximize ROI, and better target your advertising efforts.

The first step in putting web analytics to work involves choosing a provider. A variety of web analytics tools are available from a number of quality companies. Below you’ll find a list of some of the most used web analytics providers along with a little information to better help you decide which provider is right for your dental practice.

Web Analytics Providers:

• Google Analytics
• Yahoo! Web Analytics
• CrazyEgg
• Omniture

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/)
Google Analytics is a free tool provided by, you guessed it, Google. It’s pretty easy to set up and use, with minimal technical knowledge needed. It offers basic analysis and reporting functions, which are capable of collecting standard metrics such as page views, unique visitors, time spent on the website etc. And all you need to do to use this software is to add some code to your web pages – a process that Google walks you through with step-by-step instructions.

More about the product here: http://www.google.com/analytics/tour.html

Yahoo! Web Analytics (web.analytics.yahoo.com)
Like GA, Yahoo! Web Analytics can give you valuable insights including the demographics and interest level of your website visitors. It also gives you powerful and flexible dashboards, market-segmentation tools, and campaign management features. And, like GA, it’s easy to implement.

Learn about product features here: http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/features

CrazyEgg (http://www.crazyegg.com)
CrazyEgg offers a more advanced overlay tool that gives you an ability to literally see where people are clicking on a web page, and the results can be depicted on a Heat Map. This can tell you volumes about what’s working on a page and what isn’t.



The basic version of their tool starts at $9/month and goes up to $99/month for the Pro version.

Omniture (http://www.omniture.com)
Among the available web analytics options, Omniture is one of the most advanced and priciest option. It’s usually used by enterprise level companies that need custom tracking.
The biggest advantage to Omniture’s offering is the extremely customizable implementation of your tracking. Custom success events and variables allow for a virtually unlimited set of options when planning your analytics strategy. The caveat to this feature of course is the increased complexity of implementing this solution.

The Bottom Line:
To begin with, we highly recommend using some sort of web analytics for anyone with a business website. Choose the solution that fits your needs best, make a plan, and be prepared to really get some good use out of it.

To set up and manage, any of these web analytics software’s; a basic level of technical knowledge is required. To overcome this issue, one option you have is to work with a company like Yodle (or a similar company), you will not only be given analytics automatically but you won't have to go through the potential hassle and confusion of installing the analytics (which to a layperson might be difficult).
Also because many of these resources are free, there’s no reason why you can’t use more than one of them in combination. Let your specific needs be your guide in building your own personal Web analytics arsenal.

Happy analyzing!