Frustrations of finding tracking solutions

It’s really becoming a looming concern that where commerce sites have any kind of marketing campaign - whether PPC, SEO, or other forms of advertising, individually, or in concert - then some form of statistical tracking is required to determine your costs against profits - Return on Investment (ROI).

However, actually selecting a useful tracking solution for my clients is proving a real headache.

Ideally, I’m looking for a piece of software I can upload to my server, have clients login when they want to check figures themselves if they want to, and also my send reports about specific parameters on a monthly basis.

And all for a set fee.

Trouble is finding something that does this.

Clicktracks has been highly recommended in a few places, so I went through an online demo. I have to admit being disappointed with the interface - it looked out of date and was built with frames.

Additionally, for my clients to access it, they’d need to download software, and then access the Clicktracks server anyway. I don’t find that idea particularly user friendly, and it raises concerns about the flexibility of the program.

For a piece of software looking to charge me thousands of dollars for tracking, I sort of expected something more “on the pulse” and up to date, but clicktracks comes across as having the right information, but in an out of date and inflexible interface.

So I checked out NetTracker - and was disappointed with how little they tried to explain and sell the product on the site. It’s all generic corporate speak fluff, with little description on what the software can do, how it can do it, and how the software is priced.

So I contacted them for a sales rep to call me, and it’s the same old fluff - yes, Nettracker can do it all, and if I want more information they expect me to be happy to download the technical manuals for it.

Additionally, even though I can host the software on my own server, they won’t offer me a fixed price, but instead insist on selling me a solution for a few thousand based on pageviews of the sites I’m monitoring.

The overall impression given is that NetTracker is a corporate solution for big companies, and doesn’t feel at all that it has to sell itself in any way or form - being vague will attract a purchase, apparently.

I find it pretty incredible so far that there isn’t a basic PHP-based solution - I know what I want but frankly I find the attitude of tracking software vendors so far to be somewhat arrogant to small business requirements.

Rather than pay thousands each year for this, I think it could possibly make better sense to look to develop an in-house solution that does exactly what I need - heck, if it were that good, even sell the product on - because it looks like there’s a real gap in the market at present.

In the meantime, I’ll keep on looking…