• by Shankar Gupta , February 21, 2006

Reverse domain name services lookups? Server error reporting? Server load metrics? Although these aren't of particular interest to most marketers unless they spend the majority of their time in the server room, many analytics programs offer them just the same.

ClickTracks 6, however, is designed specifically to exclude this data, offering only the metrics that marketers are interested in, such as which ads bring the most visitors, where visitors go on the site, and how long they spend there. ClickTracks CEO John Marshall says the product is aimed especially at e-commerce site managers who find other analytics products overly technical. "Web analytics have kind of grown up through the information technology department providing technical stats from the Web server," he says. "We decided what you wanted was marketing data."

One of the key draws of ClickTracks is the visual manner in which the data is reported, says Dan Noyes, CEO of Zephoria, a search engine marketing firm that uses ClickTracks, among other analytic tools. 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," Noyes says. "That's really what's driven us to ClickTracks." Zephoria, which has used ClickTracks for four years, also uses Urchin, WebTrends, and HBX for site analytics.