When you’re running a website or any type of web application that you need to extract data from, you want to get the job done efficiently, with as few programs as possible. The best solutions for analyzing your data are all-in-one solutions, where you can access the aggregation of multiple sets of data in one place.
Here are four wonderful all-in-one tools that can help you do it:
1. Google Analytics for enhanced demographics
Sometimes you need detailed demographic information to help you make marketing decisions. It’s not always enough to know your visitors are mostly women between the ages of 30-50 who live in the US. If you want to better market to your visitors, you need to know what they’re specifically interested in so you can tailor your marketing.
To provide a solution, Google Analytics has been using third party cookies to track detailed user behavior for quite some time. This data was collected from a Google-owned advertising platform called DoubleClick. Now, Google has made that data available to Google Analytics users to find out exactly who their website visitors are, and what they’re interested in.
Knowing what your audience is interested in when you have an active Google AdWords remarketing campaign allows you to segment your audience by interest and send a different ad to each group.
2. Stackify for monitoring ASP.NET applications
If you’re using Azure to host your cloud-based applications, you need an all in one solution for debugging and troubleshooting.
Fetching error logs, metrics, and monitoring your ASP.NET application performance in one place is made possible by Stackify. By recognizing the most common .NET libraries including Azure features like SQL Azure, Azure Storage, and Service Bus, Stackify quickly identifies your application performance problems.
Stackify also makes it easy for you to monitor all performance requests made to your application. With a simple report, you can view failed requests, requests that take a long time to load, and requests that generate errors. You can also identify slow database queries that are affecting the performance of your application.
Unlike most APM solutions, Stackify doesn’t just identify slow requests. It acts as a powerful debugging tool by helping you find out specifically why certain requests take longer to load. You might have slow database queries, or slow web service calls, and Stackify will help you sort it out.
Stackify also makes it easy to collect all of your raw log files, index them, and automatically analyze them.
3. Piwik for website traffic stats
Piwik has been around for many years, providing website developers with a self-hosted, customizable, open-source analytics program.
All of the standard statistics are covered by Piwik, including keywords and search engines used to reach your website, top page URLs, top titles, country of origin, operating systems used, amount of time spent on each page, referrers, and more.
What sets Piwik apart from other self-hosted analytics programs is the ability to manage unlimited users and websites, track goal conversions, and you can even create your own custom variables to track. Piwik also makes it easy to white label when you need a custom interface for your clients.
Piwik aso seamlessly integrates with platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Moodle, and plenty of other content management systems, making it easy for everyone to use.
4. Optimizely for A/B split testing
If you have a marketing strategy in action, you’re probably using split testing to find out which of your sales pages are more effective in converting your visitors. And, if you’re not using split testing, you should be.
Split testing, or A/B testing, is used to measure how effective a webpage is at converting visitors by pitting two versions of your webpage against each other. A conversion is when the visitor takes the action you want them to take. This could be making a purchase, watching a video, or signing up for your email list.
Optimizely makes it easy for you to split test your webpages and extract the relevant information you need in order to optimize your content, with data provided in an easy to use dashboard interface.
With Optimizely, you can customize who sees each page by segmenting your audience, choosing to only show certain pages to people based on the browser they’re using, the country they live in, and even what mobile device they’re using to access your website.
Condense your data
You can save a lot of time by condensing the number of programs you use to analyze specific aspects of your data. Every website is different and there is no single solution that’s perfect for everyone. But if you’re looking for a way to condense the amount of analytics software you use, try these four solutions to see if they meet your needs.
