Monitoring and measuring the performance of a website is very important due to many reasons. However, this is not an easy task and most people have no idea where to start. The good news is that there are many products available today that can make this task a lot easier. The dilemma lies on choosing the right product.

Why is Analytics Important?
Before moving on further, let’s first take a look at the importance of analytics. It all boils down to performance. In other words it allows you to determine if you’re SEO efforts are giving you results. This will help you determine whether to continue implementing your strategy or find another strategy that will possibly bring in better results. Every SEO tactic costs time and money and if something isn’t working then a change of tactic might be in order. The intelligence you gain from web analytics will also enable you to make better decisions about your SEO campaign.

Choosing the Right Analytic
According to experts, there isn’t one particular product that works best for all organizations. This means that you have the right one for your company. In fact, most SEO experts suggest finding two analytics products. The first one is the primary tool while the second is for backup. When looking for analytics tools, you need to consider 4 factors namely cost, performance, lightweight and flexibility. The first two are self-explanatory so let me elaborate on the last two. Lightweight means that the product shouldn’t slow down the speed of your website. Flexibility means that the tool can give a solution to a variety of problems particularly those of your website.

Suggestions
For primary web analytics, Google Analytics is unbeatable. First of all, it’s free. Secondly, it offers an extensive scope of reports that paid products usually offer. However, this tool also has disadvantages like sampled statistics and limited support. This is where the secondary web analytics should come in. The secondary web analytics tool should be able to cover the weaknesses of the primary web analytics tool. There are better primary web analytics tools available but you need to make an investment as some of these can be costly.

For back up analytics, there are also many tools to choose from such as Piwick, Open Web Analytics, Mint and many more. As said before, it really depends on your particular needs. The main idea is to have a good analytics strategy that enables you to accurately measure and monitor your website’s performance.