Cost Effective tracking and analytics?

Start up company looking to get off on the right foot...

[asptony]

I am looking to see if anyone can point me in the right direction for either a free or cost effective tool I can use for tracking and analytics on our site. Anyone have any ideas?

[schwartz]

Try deepmetrix.com. Cheap, easy to implement, powerful, real-time.

[Mardi_Gras]

NetTracker has a large number of followers around here and I am certainly one of them. Uses logs and page tagging, customizable, cross-tabulated reports, reasonably priced for all you get. Highly recommended.

I would have trouble calling DeepMetrix cheap, unless there are lower prices available than the ones on their web site.

[schwartz]

Well, I guess "cheap" is a relative term. I'm used to large marketing budgets and DeepMetrix was quite cheap to me. :o)

[asptony]

I guess I should have specified that I am looking to spend close to nothing because we are trying to keep our start up costs as low as possible.

[schwartz]

Ok, DeepMetrix will run about $49 per month for what you're needing likely. And... I have nothing to do with them. :o)

[Mardi_Gras]

NetTracker offers a free version (not a trial, just free). It doesn't offer the same capabilities as the full version, but hey, it is free. Hard to beat that price.

[moneymancn]

Cost effective!
We use Index Tools.You get what you pay for
MM

[cgrantski]

Slight sidetrack from the main conversation:

Do you know what it is you want to measure, and why (i.e. what're you going to do with the information)? If not, you may end up doing a lot of work and maybe spending money for something that's not all that valuable to you. You may find that whatever tool you get doesn't give you the information that you need, or that you could've gotten the same information a lot easier, for example by massaging your logs in Excel (which is still capable of producing some kinds of information that a lot of the tools still don't). You may even realize that you didn't need any metrics all that much in the first place, period.

I suggest that you get together with someone who's experienced in this area, introduce them to your business/site concept and implementation, and take their suggestions. It may be easier & cheaper to farm out your analytics to somebody like that for a few months, and if you can get a relationship where they can teach you about how to interpret, set up, and use it, then in a few months you'll be in a much better position to commit to a time or money investment that will actually pay off.

I've just seen too many sites go to a lot of trouble to get metrics that never help them.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I was reccomending urchin, but since they have been bought by google, they have no telephone number for support. With big customers this is a serious issue.

[mmmwowmmm]

I was about to post this same question myself. Right now I’m using Traffic Facts, but I can’t seem to get the info I want. One of the main things I want to do is track visitors who are referred from a specific site. In other words, I want to be able to isolate visitors who are sent from Google and just look at that data, then isolate visitors sent from Yahoo (or whatever website), etc.

It would also be great to be able to see how well visitors from a particular site are converting, verses visitors from other sites. Does anyone know of a tool that will do that? Something that’s easy to set up (I’m no genius with scripting or anything, I just do basic html pages) I’d prefer something that I wouldn’t have to have installed on the server. I wouldn’t mind if it was just a program that I would run on my PC, something that could analyze the log files after I download them.