Top free and most innovative website analytics tools

What comes to your mind when you first hear the word analytics? Google Analytics, right? But what many of us do not know are the innumerable other web analytics tools that are equally feature-rich and innovative. These tools measure almost anything you need, from real-time tracking of visitors to tracking user behaviour and search engine traffic. This article looks at 10 such tools that make analytics easier for you.

Snoop

Snoop gives you real-time visitor tracking. This service streams the activity of visitors page-to-page straight to your desktop. Other advanced features of Snoop include name tag integration and audible event triggering.

Reinvigorate

The Reinvigorate tool provides real-time statistics tracking and alerts you when a visitor does a specific action on your website. Reinvigorate also features heat map technology which allows you to see where the visitors are clicking.

Clicky

Much like Snoop, Clicky’s distinctiveness is in providing real-time analytics. The user-interface is extremely intuitive and functional, along with a dedicated iPhone version just in case.

Piwik

This is an open source web analytics tool and has been built on the PHP and MySQL platform. To use Piwik, you need to install it on your server which is a simple process that takes less than 5 minutes.

Yahoo! Web Analytics

This one is a full-featured, free enterprise analytics solution with flexible and powerful dashboards, segmentation tools, and campaign management features.

Measure Map

This tool is aimed at providing easy-to-understand and free web statistics for bloggers and the like. The site is currently closed to new accounts but one can enter his/her e-mail for notice in the future. Measure Map is owned by Google and some parts of its technology were ported to Google Analytics.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg gives you the ability to track, evaluate, and customize your site based on your visitor behaviour. Overlays and Heatmaps provide quick perspective into user behaviour and habits.

FeedBurner

As the name suggests this tool is tailored exclusively for blogging. FeedBurner provides in-depth feed analysis and blog statistics in general in a slick, intuitive interface. It's now owned by Google.

103bees

103bees is a real-time search engine analysis and statistics tool. 103bees is highly focused on natural search engine traffic and analyses important keywords and terms for SEO purposes.