8 Free Web Site Tracking Tools
by Randall McCarley
October 17th, 2006
How do you know if your site is performing the way you want?
To see how well your site is (or isn’t) performing there are a ton of tracking tools out there. Here are some of my favorites (that are also FREE or offer free versions):
HitTail - Hittail provides updates every 10 minutes or so and gives you insight into what keywords are being used to find your site. This is a pretty new program but I love it and check daily. On high-traffic days (like today!) I check every couple hours. Hittail lets you know what keywords are being used in the search engines and gives you a rough quality score to determine how you stack up.
Secret Uses: HitTail is designed to show you the actual search engine query URLs that were used to find your site but it also picks up non-search-engine traffic. This is especially useful if your stats program only updates daily. It also picks up search queries from sites outside of the “big 3″ your referrer logging might miss like reddit.
Limitations: HitTail is still new and it seems they have some server/bandwidth issues because the site takes a while to load sometimes. Also the results don’t state which page was landed on and you have to follow the links yourself to figure it out. Sites with broad topics may get frustrated with this.
Feedburner - Excellent way to track the progress of your RSS feeds. So far, this feed has over 400 subscribers. How do I know? Feedburner told me so! Feedburner also lets you know what program was used to subscribe (FireFox, Forex, Java-Based, BDFetch, Bloglines, FeedDemon, Flock, Google, My Yahoo, Netvibes…)
Secret Uses: Feedburner offers grate tool for formatting and promoting your feed. I plug my feed into my email and it rotates the latest headlines. Very cool and catchy - I’m asked about it all the time.
Limitations: Some features require payment. What are these features? I don’t know. The free stuff has been good enough for me!
Technorati - Technorati tracks blogs. Right now Scout is ranked 323,286 (and climbing!). In a crowd of more than 55 million blogs that’s not too shabby! You can see which blogs link to you and what words people are using to “tag” your blog. Other neat features include the Watchlist where you can track individual pages or posts and even friends or competitors!
Secret Uses: Any RSS feed works for Technorati. My original feed for 14thC (now discontinued) ranks 93,592 (82 links from 32 sites). The feed was originally used to get pages indexed faster but I also saw some other uses for it including tracking at Technorati.
Limitations: Secrecy is non-existent. You do have to upload a bit of code to “claim” your blog but I don’t see any difference between what I can see about my sites and the stats for my competitors. Also, Technorati runs pretty slow sometimes.
Alexa: OK, before I explain what’s good about Alexa I will admit the data is not very good. I use Alexa for two specific purposes: emergency tracking and trend comparison. Emergency tracking occurs when I suspect a big jump in traffic and can’t access my logs. This was common when I had a “day job”. Trend comparison comes in handy when looking at how two sites stack up against each other.
Secret Uses: Ever wonder where your site fits against your friends or competitors? Alexa makes it easy to compare two sites at the same time. You may be surprised at the results (I was).
Limitations: Alexa “data” is complete garbage. To understand this you have to know how Alexa works. Alexa offers a free toolbar people can install on their browser (like Internet Explorer). Then Alexa tracks the sites those people visit and how often Alexa users visit the same site, how many pages they look at, etc. then Alexa makes a projection of overall Internet use based on this “sample”. Ok, the sample sucks and I have found a few sites where almost everyone has the Alexa toolbar installed so I can entice these people to any site and inflate it’s rankings. Most Alexa users are either webmasters or home users that don’t know any better than to install 20 different toolbars. The actual numbers from my logs are not anywhere close to what Alexa projects. However, the trends are good. Days when my logs show an increase or depression in traffic Alexa does too (though somewhat exaggerated).
DigitalPoint - DP’s keywords tracking tool is a great way to watch your placement in the SERPs for Google, Yahoo and MSN rise and fall.
Secret Uses: You can also track your competitors.
Limitations: Requires an API and if you are like me you will probably burn through your limit pretty quick (Google makes the limit, not DP). Also, generating reports can take a while if you have a big list.
Google Alerts - Want to know when your web site or favorite keyword phrase is added to a page? Enter Google Alerts. I use this to track company names and press releases for a “spot check” on distribution.
Secret Uses: Most people don’t use this at all or if they do they are pretty quiet about it! Of course you can track any key-phrase you want, even competitors.
Limitations: Gets damn annoying sometimes when your keyword gets popular and your inbox fills up. You can change the frequency of the alerts to counter this.
Google Sitemaps - Many tools in one this site gives you information about stuff that may be broken about your web site! Included errors received when attempting to access your site and a robots.txt validator. Also shows a rough PR score that is supposed to be more current than the toolbar score that is public. It even tells you what the most popular search terms were when your site appeared in the SERPs which could be very useful.
Secret Uses: You can add multiple sitemaps including your competition though the information given is limited until you verify site ownership with a file upload.
Limitations: There is speculation that Google uses the data for other things the web masters might not be aware of. I think the value in a search engine telling you where problems may be is an important enough trade-off for whatever data they should be able to collect anyway. However, if you work the dark side of SEO using Google Sitemaps may draw the wrong attention to your projects.
ClickTracks - ClickTracks offers a download that will analyze your data including user tracking, which links are most popular per page, etc.
Secret Uses: Heck, I just found out about the free “appetizer” recently so I’m not sure yet!
Limitations: All the best stuff requires a payment including some very awesome reports. Also, you have to download and install this application so you can’t use it on the fly like everything else listed here.
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