HitBox More Information Overall Rating: Not Rated Pay Per Click Universe Recommends: AdWatcher - 100% Click Fraud Protection. Concerned about click fraud? Protect your online advertising dollars with the world's most trusted & accurate click fraud solution on the market today. AdWatcher will put a stop to competitors and fraudsters who are looking to drain your hard earned advertising budget. Test-Drive AdWatcher For FREE For 30 Days! HitBox Professional is one of the products offered by WebSideStory.com, a well-known web analytics firm that mostly deals with enterprise-sized companies (as well as being the owner of Atomz), rather than small- to medium-sized businesses. However, HitBox Professional is designed for the small business market and can be a useful way of tracking ad results, with the main selling point being the hundreds of reports that you can access for analysis. HitBox bills itself as “simple, real-time insight to improve your bottom line,” and the number of statistics that are tracked indeed fit the bill. As with any web analytics system, HitBox will track visitors through your website, identify promos that do well and those that don’t, allows you to schedule reports to be sent to you via email, etc. A free download whitepaper entitled “Web Analytics – It’s Surprisingly Simple!” is available on site, as well as a demo of the product, but you do need to register with WebSideStory (free registration) in order to access it. It’s well worth going through the general registration process on the WebSideStory site itself if you are interested in this product or web analytics in general, as registration also provides you with access to the WebSideStory Resource Center, which contains a number of free whitepapers and a lot of diverse and up-to-date information about online advertising The reports are impressive, offered in real-time and using Flash-based reports, you can manipulate the reports to produce graphs and pie charts summarizing the data with simple point-and-click behaviors. The reports truly do make this product and set it aside from some of the other web analytics products currently available. As one might expect, the pricing of HitBox is on the high side. There are two service plan options available – either a year-long contract or on a month-to-month basis, after your initial direct purchase payment. The annual service plan costs $320 (although there is currently $100 savings offered), with a monthly fee of $26.95 for up to 600,000 page views during the year. Otherwise, you can opt for the monthly service plan at $34.95 per month for up to 50,000 page views per month. Additional page views can be purchased for either plan. HitBox had some bad publicity about a year ago when a temporary glitch resulted in a small percentage (less that ½ of 1 percent reportedly) to receive inaccurate data. HitBox responded with a reasonably quick fix and a free month’s service to anyone affected by the problem. Other than this one issue, users appear to like HitBox and give it high marks for responsiveness when they have questions or concerns; in other words, great customer service, which is what a lot of us are looking for when we are deciding between comparable products. The only real concern with HitBox is that WebSideStory is obviously concentrating on selling its higher-end option (HBX, which is a more robust and full-featured web analytics program), which could indicate they are considering switching completely to HBX. HitBox may have had its run as far as the company is concerned (having been available since approximately 1996 beginning as a free download for a functioning, but not full-featured version). For now, however, it’s a very clear and impressive, simple web analytics solution, indeed with hundreds of reports possible for analysis. |
