• by Shankar Gupta , October 5, 2005

Web analytics firm ClickTracks announced today the release of the sixth version of its analytics product, ClickTracks 6. New features including a site archiver, which allows users to save snapshots of the site's layout and traffic for comparison at future dates, and a function that allows Web designers to do side-by-side comparisons of multiple site layouts.

ClickTracks CEO John Marshall said the product is aimed especially at e-commerce site managers who find other analytics products overly technical or overwhelming. "Web analytics have kind of grown up through the IT department providing technical stats from the Web server," he said. "We decided what you wanted was marketing data."

Among the technical data that ClickTracks does not include is reverse-DNS lookups, server error reporting, and visits broken down by time of day, which Marshall said are largely used by IT departments to plan for periods of high server loads. The product emphasizes reporting of return on investment of online ads, income generated through sales, and average time-on-site.

One of the key draws of ClickTracks is the visual manner in which the data is reported, said Dan Noyes, CEO of Zephoria, a search engine marketing firm that uses ClickTracks, among other analytic tools.

According to Noyes, data that is useful for marketers "usually gets lost in the reams of information, and it's really not presented in a way that's going to be actionable for marketing people," he said. "That's really what's driven us to ClickTracks." Zephoria has been using the ClickTracks product for four years, Noyes said, and also uses Urchin, WebTrends, and HBX for site analytics.