There are a lot of free analytics solutions out there. From large well known ones like Google Analytics to smaller less well known ones like this one – 103 Bees.
And of course there are many hybrid trackers, depending on your needs, from Bloglines to Feedburner which all offer at the least a rudimentary form of basic tracking to full fledged analytics comparable to what you would have to pay hundreds of dollars for.
And with this influx of new tools on an almost daily basis we thought we would take a look at one of the newer players in this field – 103 Bees.
Why 103 Bees?
According to the site, bees are very hard workers, “relentlessly gathering millions of pollen every day.” So I guess they consider this analytics package much like the works of bees – relentlessly gathering millions of search queries every day.
Because that is what 103 Bees is – a real time analytics package. But unlike other real time packages it has a twist which some will find useful.
That is, its ability to perform Long Tail analysis on your referring terms.
The Long Tail of Search is a term which has been used for some time now – it refers to the notion that while most of your search traffic may actually come from one or two phrases (the “head”), in reality the “good” traffic comes from the tail. That is, terms which may only be used once or twice but ones which can generally produce the greatest conversions.
It is based on a mathematical law called the Power Law in which explains the relationship between 2 quantities. It is a naturally appearing phenomena visible in things like wealth distribution, book sales numbers, and, you guessed it, search volumes.
The following chart from the 103bees blog illustrates the head and corresponding long tail:
The search terms to the left (the “head”) are those high traffic one or two terms while the terms on the right (the “tail”) are those more specific but generally higher converting terms.
Long Tail is OK, But What Else Can It Do?
So now that you understand Long Tail, lets look at what else is handy about this analytics package:
It not only gives you the traditional stats such as a breakdown of organic versus paid traffic (if you are doing a paid campaign that is), but it also gives you search term history, latest search hits (because of its real time nature), top and latest landing pages and search engines.
It also gives you something unique – a simplified ranking report.
The application groups your top referring phrases into rankings by traffic. For example, with my blog 65.4% of my traffic came from rankings I had in the first 10 positions. From here I can click on the “Phrases” links to see what terms were used in those positions in order to determine what work (if any) I need to do to boost my rankings and get more traffic for those terms.
Other Long Tail Terms – Questions Asked
By now you may already know that all search engine users do not just type in “running shoes.” Some prefer to think of the engines as a large database full of answers. And, as such, they form their queries into questions: “Where do I buy running shoes?” “Which are the best hiking shoes?” and so on.
103 bees does an excellent job of parsing out the questions which drove traffic to your site. You can then use these terms to further optimize your site and build more traffic.
But How Accurate Is It?
Of course you want your analytics package to be accurate so I did a side by side comparison with my Google Analytics account.
Overall I found it to be very accurate when compared to the Google Analytics numbers. It was within a few visits overall. The numbers between the two were not 100% identical but close enough that I would say it is a viable alternative.
The only problem I found with it was that it seemed to have a problem combining all my homepage traffic into one count, as compared to Google.
For example, with Google Analytics it seems to be able to understand that index.html, site.com/index.html, site.com/, www.site.com/ and www.site.com/index.html are all the same page and not 5 different pages.
Overall though, I did not find that a big enough issue to warrant not at least trying it out.
One caution, however. I do not think this is an enterprise level analytics program. It seems to be geared more towards bloggers. While you could likely use it successfully on an e-commerce enabled website, I don’t feel that that is it’s primary use.
Therefore, be sure to weigh the pros and cons before switching to this package.
