You’ve gotta respect analytics. You may love it, you may hate it, but you have to respect it.

Analytics is the place where you find out how your website works. You can find out where traffic came from and how it behaves once it gets to your website. It’s THE primary source of data to mine for insight about your website.

What you may not know is that there’s more than one way to look at analytics.

In today’s post, we look at 3 analytics programs that you should already be using, and why.

Let’s dig in.

1. Google Analytics

This is the no-brainer of the bunch. If you’re not using Google Analytics, you’re either just not trying or you’re the kind of person who sneers at it (and look at you with your corporate budget).

Google Analytics is an outgrowth of Urchin, a company that Google bought once upon a time. It’s excellent at giving you a look at traffic trends. When you want to know where your traffic came from in a day or how your customers behaved in aggregate, this is the program for you.

It also supports revenue tracking allowing for really robust marketing analysis.

I personally have my doubts about how Webmaster Tools and AdWords are integrated but really, you HAVE to use Google Analytics (or an equivalent) to know what’s going on with your website.

If you’re lead or sales based, you absolutely MUST take advantage of their revenue tracking tools. That’s what makes all the other data meaningful.

Seriously, a website without Google Analytics is like a body without a nervous system.

And best of all, it’s free. So if you haven’t done so, run, don’t walk, to the nearest web browser and sign up.

2. Woopra

WOO! That’s the first thing you want to say when you get your desktop app fired up.

There’s something distinctly different about Woopra from Google Analytics. It does a crazy good job of getting you to think about your users as individuals.

It does this by letting you watch in real time what your users are doing on your site. (To be fair, Google Analytics has this too, but it’s not as awesome and isn’t as much a core part of their product.)

The difference is a paradigm shift. Google Analytics, even though they track in real time, is basically used as a historical document. Woopra on the other hand is more like keeping tabs on your site though out the day. For starters, there are desktop and mobile apps so you can see at all times how many people are on your website and what they’re doing.

Then you get other kickass views. One of my favorite is the calendar month view where you can see traffic by hour across a month.

Their plans range from Free to to $39.95 for average businesses (or more for crazy huge businesses). We have a lot of success with and believe in the $11.95 plan. Try them out today!

3. ClickTale

Holy crap. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love this tool.

I had the opportunity a few months back to go through ClickTale with their senior product evangelist, Shmuli Goldberg. He showed me something that isn’t in the general marketing material and this one thing is worth the price of admission.

But first, WTF is ClickTale?

ClickTale is analytics combined with videos of your users using your website. WHAT!?

I know. It’s crazy powerful. And if you go to their website they’ll show you a ton of stuff that’s awesome that I’m not going to cover here.

I’m going to focus on something they seem not to tell very many people. But this is the HOTNESS. As I said above, it’s worth the price of admission.

They break down the bounce rate into short, medium, and long based on time and then let you see videos of each.

WHAT!?

That right there will answer some of the hardest questions you have about how traffic behaves on your website.

This information is transformative.

It’s also expensive. To get the right plan, you really need to spend $99 a month. There’s a free plan, but don’t be fooled. This is one of those expensive-ish tools that’s absolutely worth the money. Check out more about ClickTale here.