comparison of web analytics tools

Google analyitcs

Sitecatalyst

Webtrends

Coremetrics

Google analyitcs

Free easy to deploy,easy to use,very flexible.

Sitecatalyst

Discover,insight,Test and target,SearchCenter etc....Market leader as an enterprise tool.incredibly flexible and powerfull...but with great power comes great complexity(implementation and maintenance)

Webtrends

Segments(formerly Marketing),Optimize,Apps,Social etc..."the Original"...but lost its way for few years,good product ,but playing catch-up

Coremetrics

Explore,Monitor,Benchmark etc...Its mainly built for eCommerce-from the tag structure all the way through the reporting interface.

Comparison of Webtrends,Omniture and Google analytics

• Google Analytics does not allow (Terms of Service) capturing data in a way that allows reporting at the user-level. WebTrends and Omniture do not have that ToS limitation, and both of them enable access to that data through add-on production (Warehouse and Discover respectively)
• Omniture requires pretty heavy configuration at the page-level using the page tag and a host of variables. This is good, in that it provides a lot of flexibility...but it means you'd better understand the process end-to-end (from data capture all the way through to the reporting environment), and you'd better have a robust process for managing your tags. Google Analytics has pretty limited page-level configuration options, but it has the ability to easily do "pre-processing" of the data through the creation of profiles and filters; Webtrends is sort of a hybrid, in that it lets you drop meta tags in the page content and include those in the raw data (similar to Omniture), but it also provides pre-processing configuration (also through profiles and profile filters) before the data actually makes it to the final database. Omniture does have a pre-processing capability, but it requires Omniture staff to actually implement them (Vista rules).
• Google Analytics shines at visitor-level segmentation, and, when a segment is created, it can be applied to historical data. Omniture and Webtrends really require their extended services (Discover and Warehouse) to segment the traffic.
• Google Analytics is free. Omniture and Webtrends are not. (Rumors are that Google is coming out with a paid version, too, but the free version will continue to be available).
• Omniture and Google Analytics have pretty lousy user management -- you're either a "user" with access limited to specific areas, or your an admin, with access to everything. Webtrends has much more robust, roles-based user management.
• Omniture and Webtrends both offer page-level clickstreams, while Google Analytics only has a "previous page / next page" capability. Page-level clickstreams are pretty worthless, but that's a setup for the next point.
• Omniture has super-robust "pathing" capabilities. For any "traffic variable" (these are populated by the page tag at the page level -- see the second bullet above), you can have pathing turned on and get aggregated clickstream data. And, because you have multiple traffic variables to work with, you can carve your site up along different dimensions and "path" them that way. Webtrends has aggregated pathing as well (content group paths), but it's limited. Google Analytics has no aggregated pathing.
• Both Omniture and Webtrends enable the uploading of meta data into the system. The most common use of this is with campaign tracking -- you use a simple ID for the campaign tracking parameter, and then use a backend files to map that ID to a specific campaign name, channel, description, etc. Google Analytics does not have a way to push meta data into the sytem and then use it to report natively within the Google Analytics environment.