Web analytics is no longer as cut-and-dry as having a solution installed that can measure all of your digital marketing , or give you a complete view of your customers interaction with your brand online. Sure, you have your Google Analytics, Omniture, or whatever covering you for most of your site traffic. But what about what’s happening beyond your site, or what about your need to analyze visitors in “different ways”? here’s a brief rundown on three specialized applications that aren’t terribly expensive, and can give you some great additional insight into your digital marketing efforts.

Percent Mobile

The technology behind Percent Mobile is nothing special, and the reporting interface is a bunch of fancy Flex or Ajax or anything like that. But, the concept, the simplicity of the reporting interface, and the organization of the necessary metrics, makes Percent Mobile an awesome application. Here’s how it works in a nutshell: you tag your pages with a standard JavaScript tag, and Percent Mobile gathers, analyzes and reports on all the traffic from mobile phones to your site. Simple. There are some really obvious uses for Percent Mobile, one of them just being the ability to give stakeholders a quick look at the profile of mobile visitors to your site.

Kontangent

Kontangent is analytics for your Facebook applications. If you’re building a Facebook app, or you have one already, you should be seriously looking at Kontangent. The Kontangent founders were building applications themselves, and realized the robust analytics reporting they’d developed was probably more valuable then their apps. They worked closely with Facebook to get even more data from the platform, and eventually became a fbFund recipient. Kontangent lets you track metrics you’d want to have for your applications, but integrates it with available demographic data from users. You can filter on this data in the reporting interface, and get a really clear picture of who is using your apps.
Kontangent’s close relationship with Facebook makes them a solid front-runner to dominate this space, so any concerns about the application not getting the attention it deserves, are probably unwarranted. Definitely check it out if you are building Facebook apps.

userfly

If you have never used an application that captures your visitors use of your site as a “video”, you have to try userfly. The downside is that it can slow your site down a bit, as it is essentially videoing your visitors mouse movement and clicks. If you have a high-traffic site, you have to run something like userfly on a small sampling of visitors. The upside of running userfly, is that being able to see sessions in “replay” is way more enlightening than trying to mentally visualize sessions by looking at analytics data. Fancy analytics talk aside, userfly is highly addictive. If you geek out on your analytics reporting for your own sites, you will definitely geek out on userfly. Did I mention it is really cheap? For only $25 you can capture 1,000 visits per month.

I hope you can find some use out of one of these applications. There are dozens of more specialized applications out there that fit unique analytics needs; look beyond your analytics install for other ways to analyze your traffic, profile your visitors, or capture interactions happening beyond your domain.