Many Web professionals will say your e-commerce business is doomed if you don't have access to and/or analyze your site's statistics. Where are your visitors coming from? Where and why are you losing potential sales? What search terms are bringing visitors to your site? One Web analytics company that claims it can help e-commerce entrepreneurs harness this all-important data is ClickTracks Analytics, Inc., which today announced the release of version 6 of its web metrics software.

"We're doing it again with tools like our new Site Archiver — a piece of technology that captures your whole site and saves it for future comparative analysis. In essence, it lets you go back in time and see how the changes that you've made had an impact on your visitors. The Time Splits functionality builds on this, and shows the site — before and after changes were made — side by side," said John Marshall, ClickTracks' founder and CEO.

The company claims ClickTracks 6 offers unique capabilities purportedly not available in competitive products. The company states that all of the program's features are tied to ClickTracks' mission to help customers understand and act on visitor trends in both current and previous versions of their web sites. Four of the new features in ClickTracks 6 include:

Site Archiver: ClickTracks' site archiver lets users capture a Web site as it exists at a given point in time, and store it for future analysis. The site archiver can be manually launched or scheduled, and ClickTracks' compression technology reduces archived files down to 1/10 of the size of the original site.

Time Splits: Users can use ClickTracks' browser overlay technology to see visitor behavior on two different versions of a Web site-on one screen. Users can see their site as it was during two different time periods. This feature can be useful for determining the result of site changes/upgrades, or proving to clients and managers that a suggested change has had the desired outcome.

A/B Splits: Much like Time Splits, ClickTracks' A/B split functionality lets users visually compare different versions of their web site, simultaneously. The wizard interface is designed to make it easy to set up and monitor which page or page element has the desired effect on a site's visitors.

Funnel Reporting: Funnel report lets users understand traditional funnel metrics like exits to pages, but more importantly shows which pages are persuasive to users. ClickTracks also shows visitor segments, such as 'paid vs. organic' search, within the funnel - meaning users can forecast which page groups are more likely to turn browsers into buyers.

Additional new features include browser-based reporting which presents pre-analyzed data in an instant report that can be accessed from anywhere. Smart permission controls allow users access to only the reports they are allowed to have. Scheduled emailing of reports allows users to set up which reports they want mailed, how often, to whom and when.

ClickTracks' Navigation report now lets users to view all the keywords that lead to any given page. "This feature is great for the hardcore search engine marketer who wants to squeeze every last ounce of insight out of their web analytics data," noted Marshall.

Parameter [internal search] and cookie stats help users determine which product is most popular or which affiliate is the highest performing by accessing information they're already collecting. It also shows what people are searching for when using a site's own internal search mechanism.

The Version 6 release will be available to the public on October 12, covers the entire family of ClickTracks products: ClickTracks Analyzer ($495), the company's entry-level analytics offering; ClickTracks Optimizer ($1195), mid-range web analytics with robot reporting and e-mail campaign tracking; and ClickTracks Professional (starting at $3495), robust metrics that include ROI tracking capabilities.

The A/B Splits, Funnel Reporting, Time Splits and Site Archiving are only available in ClickTracks Professional. For more information, visit www.clicktracks.com/6.

Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.