Snooping on everyone’s web analytics vendors

 – posted June 22nd, 2006 by Brian Donohue     No comments

I just came across this nifty little tool that web analytics guru Eric Peterson created: the web analytics vendor discovery tool. It’s simple — you submit a URL, and it returns the web analytics application the site uses.

Screenshot of the application.

No, it doesn’t check for every app, but it does check for the ones that matter:

  • Google Analytics
  • ClickTracks
  • WebSideStory
  • Omniture
  • Coremetrics
  • Fireclick
  • IBM SurfAid
  • WebTrends

Who should you check out?

Well, you’ll want to suss out your competition. See who they’re using. If they’re using WebTrends, you can’t guess much from it; they might not even be looking at their stats (we’ve seen that a lot). If they’re using anyone besides WebTrends, it suggests they’re probably paying attention, that they’re probably clued in to analytics.

Any interesting trends?

Pretty much all the major sites are paying a company for their application, which is what you’d expect.

Much more interesting, though, is what you find when you check out the smaller, smart sites — the sites who should know what they’re doing, and aren’t going to casually drop a lot of cash if it’s not worth it. Sites like Adaptive Path and 37 signals, plus the influential analytics thinkers like Hurol Inan (who wrote the first, if not necessarily the best, book on web analytics) or Robbin Steif. If you do, you’ll find a clear trend — they’re all using Google Analytics. Why? Because for paying nothing you get just about everything you need to figure what’s going on with your site. It’s a powerful argument for the value of Google Analytics.

Categories Technology, Web analytics

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