9 Free Tracking Software Tools That Every Business Should Know About

Have you ever heard it said that the “Holy Grail” of marketing is testing & tracking?  Whether yo believe this to be true or not I think we’d all agree that the blood of any website owner is the traffic that flows to and from the site.  Nowadays there are extremenly powerful tools that will allow you to extract loads of data from your online visitors.  Given this information you’ll literally be holding your businesses success in the palm of your hands.  The following are 10 Free tracking software tools that can help you get a handle your site’s traffic.

Google Analytics – This analytics package is probably the most widely used because it’s, well, Google.  The tracking package has been designed for the small business owner and the large enterprise.  The tool will tell you how visitors find your site, how they navigate through your site, and any actions that are performed on your site such as conversion tracking.  There are various reports and graphs that can be run.  Implementation of the tracking software is as simple as copying a piece of HTML code and pasting this in your webpage before the body.  Have a WordPress blog?  Use the Google Analytics plugin to make implementation even quicker. 

ShinyStat – This free service provides realtime tracking of visitors to your site. The company has been around since 1994.  Among the various options available using the free version are web counter stats, password protected reports, search engine & keyword analysis, country of origin analysis, and realtime stats for the last 15 visitors to your site.   For the small business the free version will do just fine but if more is needed they do offer updgraded Pro and Business versions.

Yahoo! Web Analytics - If you are a yahoo business merchant or advertiser are eligible to open a free analytics account with Yahoo.  This analytics package is completely free for users and was designed to help you monitor the actions and experience of your visitors online.  The tool helps you do this by allowing you to track ads, referrals to your site, keywords tracking, conversion tracking and much more.  The tool allows for realtime tracking and exporting of raw analystics data.   

GoStats – In exchange for placing a free web stats counter on your website linking back to the GoStats site, you’ll be able to take advantage of their free tracking software.  The service has an easy to use report section for viewing your returned data.  Dinstinguish between unique and returned visitors.  Monitor your visitors pathway taken through your site.  The company was been around since 1999 is recommended by many as a another reliable free online stats analyzer. 

Piwik - This free web analytics software is downloaded to your own computer and run on your own local webserver.  The tool is built with plugins that you can add or delete depending on your preference.  This tool is great for high traffic websites as there are no page view limits.  You control the software.  Keep in mind that Piwik is an open source community driven analystics tool and much of the software is consistently being updated.

StatCounter – This is a free version and a paid version of the software.  StatCounter does not require any links to be placed in order create a free account.  Like other tracking tools you simply past in the HTML code provided by the service and monitor your free analytics stats from their user interface.  The tool monitors visitor paths, entry and exit statistics, keyword analysis and referring information.  They have a high pageloads/month of 250,000 for small to medium size sites.  Anything above this and you’ll be directed to upgrade your account. 

Tracking202 – If you are involved with pay per click advertising using Google Adwords, Yahoo Paid Search, CPV advertising and any othe paid search networks you’ll benefit from this 100% free tracking tool.  Tracking202 is an open source tracking tool that is designed exclusively for the paid search marketer.  The software will give you realtime tracking of your ppc campaigns.  With its Spy View you’ll be able to see data come in the second someone click or views your ad.  The software allows for A/B split testing of landing pages to see which test page is converting better.  I’ve been hard pressed to find another free ppc tracking tool that does as much as this software.  If anyone knows of anything better please let me know.     They do offer a paid version that will do the work of automatically pulling data from the search engines and your affiliate networks. 

Prosper202 – This is the free self-hosted version of the Tracking202 software.  Some marketers and advertisers are reluctant to have their precious data hosted on a third-party systems and prefer to have complete control of the data themselves.  This tool will allow you to download the entire tool to your own dedicated webserver.  With the use of your dedicated server the tool should perform a bit faster when pulling data and generating reports.  Need a url rotator?  The tool will also allow you to rotate between specified landing pages to track better converting copy.

AdAlyzer – AdAlyzer is a link and ad tracking software tool that is offered for free through ISO Register.  This tools will track your marketing efforts whether your doing newsletters, email autoresponders, press releases, e-books, free ads and paid ads.  Basically anywhere that you’re placing a link that is pointing to your site, AdAlyzer was designed to track it.  Through the ISO Register your given a free lifetime membership to use the software.  You’ll be able to create and track an unlimited number of links.  Once into your ISO Register account you’ll be able to view a video tutorial and site tour of how to use the product.

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