I get asked all of the time about what analytics tools I use to do my job every day from folks who know this stuff inside and out, as well as folks just starting out in the business. My answer is usually that it really depends on the project. Sometimes I rely heavily on monitoring solutions, while other times it's mixing and matching from a bunch of different tools. However, there are a set of tools I go back to time and again. Here are some that work for me and I hope, in turn, work for you.
- Radian6 - The people who know me best would probably call me a Radian6 fanboy. I guess there are worse things in the world, right? I've known those guys for a few years now and firmly believe they are producing the best monitoring solution on the market. There is significant debate in "listening" circles about that point, however, so if you'd prefer to use someone like Alterian I won't think less of you. They are both good tools, it's just my feeling that Radian6's is more comprehensive (maybe too comprehensive sometimes, but that's the subject of a different post). The listening tool is the building block for all other tools. It gives me a sense for who's talking about my brand, where they are talking, what are the main themes, etc... Without it, we're flying blind
- Backtype - Backtype provides some baseline metrics on the "reach" of a particular URL. Granted, one of the metrics they provide is impressions (ugh), but the other data on tweets, clicks, Facebook shares, comments and likes more than makes up for that. Depending on how popular the link is, they'll also give you metrics on digg's and number of reddit's
- Compete/Alexa/Quantcast - If you don't have constant access to Omniture or Google Analytics, you'll need at least one Web metrics tool. I'm kind of indifferent on which I'd use amongst these three because they are all giving me (essentially) the same metrics. I'm most interested in total visits, unique visits, time on site, percent change in site traffic, bounce rate, etc...
- Yahoo! Site Explorer - If you are ever wondering who is linking back to your site, this is the place. Not only that, but it gives you the total number of indexed pages for a particular site. Oh, and one other thing... it allows you to download the inbound links for future use. Really cool tool.
- Google Adwords - As I mentioned in my first post here, the intersection between social, brand.com and search is very real. Adwords gives me the most popular search terms relevant to a particular phrase that I've entered. Not only that, but it gives me information on the competition for that word, global volume, local volume and a direct link to Google Insights.
- Google Insights - Most people have been exposed to this tool already, but Insights gives you the ability to break down search trends by category, seasonality, geography, as well as get a handle on what terms are the most popular now
- Wordle - You may not see this as an analytics tool, but I do. We often need visual representation of the data we are collecting, and Wordle gives us a great free tool to do that.
