Web Site Measurement Hacks

Find a Free or Cheap Web Measurement Solution

Free or inexpensive packaged solutions are a great place to get your feet wet with web site measurement.

It’s easy to get the impression that web measurement is a costly and time consuming endeavor, one requiring deep pockets and significant expertise.

While time and effort are absolutely required to truly understand your web site visitors, there are also many inexpensive and even free software is available to support your efforts. In fact, the very first web measurement applications, Webstats and Analog, are freely available and nominally supported by the open source movement to this day.

An important consideration regarding free and inexpensive measurement solutions is the old adage you get what you pay for. While this does not mean that low-cost solutions are necessarily bad, it’s more a reflection that open source and entry-level web measurement solutions are often less well maintained, documented, or supported than their business-class counterparts (at least at the time of this writing). If you go this route, you need to simply be aware of this and be prepared to have to look a little harder or wait a little longer for help when problems arise (and trust me, they always arise!).

Free Web Measurement Solutions

The following table lists several free measurement solutions, where to get them, which data sources they use, how the applications are delivered, and what makes them worth mentioning in this hack (Table 1-3).

Table 1-3. Freely available ...