If you want to understand if the things you're doing in the market place are improving your audience reach, then Lead Forensics is a great tool. It's all very well to network, email, win awards and so on, but you will want to address any inconsistency in how effective outreach activities are. Lead Forensics is great for this.
Free services provide a wonderful resource for people on tight budgets. If willing to put forth work in data managing/analysis and If basic high traffic information or drilling down specific users in low traffic situations is needed, then StatCounter may fit your needs. If automation and low overhead are a high priority then some more expensive packages can provide the same and more information with less hassle. Because StatCounter is free, there is low risk to see if StatCounter works in your specific usage scenario.
The menu could be improved, maybe by giving the chance of a "basic" and an "expert" menu.
The instructions are good and exhaustive but they might be improved.
The most difficult part of Lead Forensics is how some colleagues will use it and - should they not understand - they won't. There should be a way to interest even the less technological colleagues that this tool is for their best.
I would like to see our referral traffic ranked in order of most to least. I'm not sure if this function exists already, but if it does, I do not know how to do it.
Maybe put the average time on site on the same chart as the visitors and page views graphs.
I feel as though some tasks can be streamlined, but this is not just unique to statcounter but to other analytics sites I've used. But people like digging really deep into the data, but for people like me who use it for one purpose, a shorter one-stop-shop version would be nice. Like one page where everything can be seen.
I have not had any issues with malfunctions when using statcounter, so that would lead me to continue using the program. I would like to see more social media measuring tools, but again, we don't use the program to dig really deep. We're just looking to figure out who is reading what articles on our website are the most liked. And it helps lead our editorial team in the right direction.
The tool takes a bit to learn and you go through an onboarding to get a better understanding. Once you go through that, the tool is very user friendly and a piece of cake to use - anyone can go through it, no IT skills need to run and manage their platform.
While we have not had a lot of issues, the Lead Forensics team has been helpful in addressing them. The software is fairly intuitive, and issues rarely arise. This could also be from a lack of use on our part, but we have not had a great deal of interaction with the customer support team.
Lead Forensics is the best as far as I can tell, but choices that are a fraction of the cost come pretty close. Some places like ThomasNet even throw this functionality in for free now. I guess it's a question of if you view this type of intelligence as a luxury or essential.
Wish StatCounter had a more comprehensive report feature comparable to Google Analytics. I feel StatCounter is easier to use and to understand when compared to Google. Some people prefer Google Analytics, but it provides so much more information that the average person really needs. It meets basic needs. If you are looking for something more robust and high level of detail, I would recommend Google Analytics instead
So far we are working on generating an ROI. We did not accurately estimate the time and processes needed to manage the software and processes.
It is interesting to see which companies are engaging in our site that we did not know about, so there is a knowledge ROI there. Just need to figure out better execution to turn it into revenue.
StatCounter enabled us to track what works and doesn't work with regards to driving web traffic. On a personal use level, StatCounter enabled me to gauge how much additional effort I needed to make to reach the traffic levels needed on my website.