Google’s Analytics is an incredibly useful tool to monitor and measure your business website’s presence or to develop custom metrics and reports around your online marketing campaigns. It does however, have some limitations to the number of profiles, accounts, sessions, alerts and reports you can create as a free service. It is also missing some features that businesses might find useful that are available in other fee-based online analytic products.
While there are many commercial analytic services available (such as Kissmetrics, Clicky, Chartbeat etc.) there are also some opensource alternatives that offers most of the features of Google Analytics along with some commercial capabilities for free.
What does OpenSource mean? OpenSource software are software code that are created by communities of people around the world who are dedicated to working together in a highly collaborative and evolutionary way on a software project. The software code, depending on the licencing, are generally available for the public to use without cost. WordPress is one example of such an opensource software. Another is OpenWebAnalytics. As an alternative to some of the other commercial Analytic applications, it offers some features that may be of interest to business websites owners:
- ecommerce/webstore tracking
- unlimited website profiles, tracking and reporting
- heatmaps that shows where visitors have clicked on your webpage
- recording and playback of visitor mouse movements on your website
- better bounce-rate reporting
Best of all, it is completely free. WordPress based websites can download the plugin version here, Drupal websites here and the applications software is available right here.
