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What are the differences between free Web Analytics and paid Web Analytics?

Web Analytics in recent years has become one of the main talking points of the online marketing community, especially with the release of the free Google Analytics tool, helping to raise awareness in the industry. As such the free vs. paid tool is always a popular talking point and as a result, we have decided to present some facts.

The benefits of web analytics from a marketer's point of view are numerous, include being able to track ROI of marketing campaigns and targeting flaws in your website processes. As with most areas in marketing there are a number of tools to help you, these vary from free applications to paid installations. The same is true of Web Analytics, but why should you choose a paid installation when free alternatives exist?

One of the big advantages of paid Web Analytics solutions is the commercial support available to help marketers through understanding their data as well as the complimentary professional services such as training and consultancy.

Other differences between free and paid tools are that free tools normally just show trends and a summary-based view of the data. Recently we heard from Google Analytics at SES London 2007 where they stated the reason for this aggregated, top level view of the data was due to their privacy policy. With paid solutions the norm is to have summary data presented in dashboards but then give you the capability to drill into the data, sometimes down to the clickstream of an individual user's visit. This allows you to gain a real in-depth insight into the activity on your website.

Another capability of paid tools over free tools is the opportunity to slice and dice the data in order to get real and tangible answers from your web data to business critical questions. For example 'What is my best converting online marketing campaign and what areas of my website are visitors most interested in?' or 'Which keywords and referrer are resulting in higher conversion rates?'

Below is a quick table to show the main differences between free Web Analytics and paid solutions.

	Advantages	Disadvantages
Free Web Analytics	Its FREE Quick implementation Summary data showing trends Goal tracking	No formal support or professional services Vendor lock-in if using page tags as you don't have access to raw data Aggregated data so no drill down capability available As soon as you leave your provider you have no access to your data How long will your provider keep your data and for what purposes? Requires your time and your effort which may be very expensive to your business A distinct lack of customisable reporting can make it difficult to provide you with the information you require

Paid Web Analytics	Data drill down abilities to clickstream data Slice and dice data to find real answers to business questions A handful of advanced solutions can Integrate other business systems for an overall view of web presence and performance Visitor segmentation allowing you to identify sets of interesting/important visitors Online and offline marketing campaign management and tracking A/B split testing Goal/website process tracking Some advanced solutions allow a combination of page tags and log files, giving you a more acurate picture of your web data	Cost of software, implementation and training Vendor lock-in if using a hosted solution

With all the advantages of paid Web Analytics solutions there is still a place for free Web Analytics tools. Firstly free Web Analytics has raised the profile of Web Analytics and brought the concepts of Web Analytics to the marketing masses, which previously were thought of as a niche market.

Secondly a large organisation may have a main paid Web Analytics solution, but departments rapidly deploying short lived websites may require some quick summary information about traffic levels before their main solution can be adjusted for in-depth analysis. This is where free Web Analytics tools can be used effectively as a quick short-term solution.

If you feel that a paid Web Analytics solution would be right for your growing organisation then please take a look at our Affinium NetInsight Web Analytics Solution or call our Web Analytics team on +44 (0)1293 403636.

We hope you have found this article informative and has helped to answer some of the questions we are often asked. We welcome your feedback or questions (please email info@scl.com with your comments).

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