Four Ways To Track Your Campaigns For Free

Campaign tracking is known as Web Analytics and is a powerful resource tool for any company using any type of ad campaigning on the internet. This is because tracking a campaign can help determine its effectiveness. The effectiveness of a campaign is determined by the quality of the ad's design, where the ad is going (the target market), who's responding and where they come from, and how long they stay at the site. Web Analytics provides this information and more. A company can then increase their profit margin with this information by fine tuning the campaign while it is in progress.

There are companies who sell Web Analytic subscription packages that can cost the user $300 or more a year. In this economic time that's money that many companies aren't willing to spend, especially if that company is small or is a start-up. However, there are several free Web Analytic packages available on the internet to help alleviate the costs associated with campaign tracking. Let's look at four of them.

AWStats

AWStats is one type of free Web Analytic software that can be found on the internet at www.awstats.org. This software is an open source reporting tool that can be applied to the analysis of data gathered from resources like Web and FTP servers, mail, and streaming media. AWStats generates reports from the information gathered and presents those reports in the form of bar graphs and tables. In addition, AWStats has the ability to create fixed, or static, reports using command line interfacing which is supported by the Common Gateway Interface, or CGI program.

AWStats is written in Perl and can be deployed onto practically any operating system. Its popularity has inspired designers to create packages for most Linux systems, as well as MicroSoft Windows, facilitating the downloading of log files from remote locations.

PiWik

PiWik is another free web analytic system and, like AWStats, is also an open source but written in PHP (Personal Home Page). On attribute of this software is that features can be added or removed because they are built into the plug-ins. Moreover, because PiWik is installed locally the data you gather can be easily stored into your own database. You can also use open APIs to publish this data in a variety of formats. Additionally, and recently available, PiWik has a fully customizable user interface that allows to drag and drop widgets and create tailored reports.

W3PPerl

W3Perl is yet another type of free log file analyzer that, as the name implies, is written in Perl and can installed in any operating system that supports Perl. It comes with an administrative interface that allows users to build configuration files from through a web interface and can manage those files, run scripts, update packaging, and presents output statistics.

Webalizer

The word Webalizer is an ominous sounding name and should be because it is one of the most popular web analytical tools used. Webalizer gathers information such as number of visits or hits, a visitor's country, how much data that visitor downloaded, as well as who referred the visitor. This information can then be viewed graphically and presented at different time schedules to fit the needs of the user.