Hey Marc,

I use Mint for my analytics. Why? First of all, it’s an easy install because it’s a self-contained PHP application. I can drop it in place, create the database I need and away I go. I don’t have to rely on a third party’s service being up for me to look at reports, like has happened to me in the past with Google analytics.

Second, the author is very responsive when you email him with questions.

Third, the layout for the stats seems very logical to me.

Finally, there is a great community around it that is creating new plugins for it and themes and doing their best to extend it.

If you like my answer, feel free to donate the $5 to the charity of your choice.

Based on your past experiences, I’d recommend either customizing data collection with Google Analytics to get a little more out of it or considering a service like ClickTracks (disclaimer: I used to work for ClickTracks). Starting to use custom variables in google analytics should give you a pretty useful set of data to work with and probably give you a little more information than what you’re getting now. ClickTracks has a low price point and will give you really strong segmentation, which is something that none of your previous packages had and ultimately is what’s going to make analytics data useful.

Hi Marc,

I’ve been on the quest for the perfect analytics software myself, and I’ve settled for two solutions:

1. ClickTracks Optimizer: a log file analyzer, easily customizable to display visitor segment behavior based on parameters like entry points, ad conversion, time and duration of a visit. The downsides: it’s a Windows app, was acquired by Lyris some time ago and has since become much more expensive and is hardly ever updated. However, I really like the ease of use, and it generates pretty conservative stats, which I find very useful if you don’t have to impress anyone. A year ago, I’d have said this is the best solution out there, but the Lyris acquisition hasn’t done it any good.

2. Piwik: This is easily the winner in the “most promising” category. It’s a branch of phpMyVisites, a very nice open source analytics project, and now, they’re focusing on a plugin architecture much like Mint, which is also available as a REST service to consume outside of piwik. I started playing around with it, and will most likely settle for it for smaller projects despite its early stage.

In both cases, I’m still not satisfied with the way IP addresses keep being stored, which is in contradiction with privacy legislation in some countries such as Germany, and as they’re only necessary for GeoIP analysis, it would actually be possible to store hashes of IP addresses and still get valid results without the opportunity to spy on individual users. The “best” analytics software should definitely take privacy into account. I’ll be looking into this issue with Piwik.

Keep up the nice work on your blog,
Bernd

Dear Marc ,
as we all know Google analytic is the best in the whole world ,
cause the best Search Engine Google is back of this ….

The best software package I’ve used for gathering data and reporting it is Splunk. (www.splunk.com) It’s basically a search engine for IT data. You target it to watch your logs or other data sources and it acts like Google, indexing it all and allowing you to do complex queries and statistical analysis on it.

They provide a free version which allows you to index up to 500mb of data per day, however there is no authentication or user-level restrictions on it. The enterprise version allows you to restrict access to various users and index more than 500mb per day. We have an enterprise license on our Splunk server, allowing us to index and report on any number of metrics or data across our entire network and IT operations.

I’ve heard good things about Google Analytics, but frankly, I’ll never use it.
Mint, Google Analytics, they both require you to include a chunk of code in every one of your pages.

My main problem with this is if their site is responding slow or has issues, or people have it blocked (Firefox Addons, corporate firewalls, etc) then your site will have issues ranging from slower page loading times to missing inaccurate statistics.

Also due to the fact that it’s embedded client side code, it can’t track several things.

No, the best analytics software simply HAS to be accurate 100%.
The only way to accomplish this is to use analytic software that utilizes web server logs.

Sadly, here, there isn’t a really good solution. In my opinion the open source ‘awstats’ is the best for me. I’ve tried several, and awstats I liked the best. Urchin used to be great, but since Google bought them they have let Urchin die a slow death and I’m not even sure you can even purchase it anymore.

I’ve had on my ‘To-Do’ list for years now ‘Make a cutting edge top of the line free and open source log file analyzer that smashes Awstats into the ground’

However I haven’t got around to doing it.

I don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on commercial products, so for me, the best is awstats.

Google analytycs is very good. You can integrate Analytics with Adsense if you want!

I really like Clicky Web Analytics but also I am OK using Google Analytics. It is true that Urchin was far better because it was installed right on your server with no slowing down.

im looking for some top analytics software for the company i work for.does anyone know where i can get some from? and which one is better than google analytics?

http://www.crawltrack.net/

Try this if piwik dosnt work ( Its still beta ;( )

Quote Robbert:

“No, the best analytics software simply HAS to be accurate 100%.
The only way to accomplish this is to use analytic software that utilizes web server logs.”

That is not entirely true. If your site is using cache heavily, then lots of hits don’t even appear in the webserver logs, because they are cached by the browsers. The most accurate way is that chunk of code in all of your pages because even if it’s cached, it still sends signals to your analytics tool. It all depends on how ‘good’ that analytics tool is offcourse…

Forgot to mention: Check out Woopra, realtime statistics. It really kicks butt!
It is still in beta though….

http://www.woopra.com

Google Analytics and Mint are two very useful tools if you know how to read them.

I’ve been using Google analytics for a while now, but I’ve already hit their profile limit.

I’ve tried mint, but more recently been using piwik.

I like Piwik because there are Adobe Air applications that can analyze the data from multiple Piwik installations into 1 nice dashboard.

Google Analytics is not so good. It never track all the visitors. I tried my self.
I need a good program too, but what is the best even is paid? At this moment i don`t know.

I realise this post is more than a year old.
Has anyone here used omniture? SiteCatalyst or Discover?

I am very curious in knowing more about these – Cost, Accuracy, How data is derived – database / logs / code snippet.

Thanks in advance. Some really good products mentioned here.

I am currently using google analytics, piwik and just today started with going up (going up.com)
Mint seems to get a fair mention in the comments above so I will certainly check that out as well.

Unfortunately no products seems to stand out from the crowd. Not yet anyway.

Cheers,
Ed

Google Analytics is simple and install for anybody, even non-technical people. It really has great reporting features allowing for PDF reports on the fly and exports to csv or Excel. The downside to GA is that Google owns the data, not you. Also the data is not portable, so for instance, if your web developer happens to set you up with Google Analytics using their existing account and you change to a new vendor in a year, be prepared to either continue giving them access to your data or starting from scratch. When I install GA I always create a fresh gmail account and GA account for that client so that if we do part ways they can keep their access to GA data.

Piwik is also great and with its open-source approach will be very fun to watch. It requires more technical knowledge to install so most end clients will need their developers assistance. One of the best features of Piwik (and this applies to Mint also) is that the data is real time. Google’s data always takes a few hours to be updated which can seem like EONS when you have a product launch or promotion in which real time data might affect your decision making. In these cases, even if a site has GA installed I might install Piwik as a secondary analytics tool to provide the real time data. I think that with community support and a growing trend to limit the amount of information we provide to Google, Piwik is a great choice. I haven’t used Mint however I think that much of Piwik’s advantages also hold true for Mint. If you need developer support or if some of Mint’s additional plugins are useful to you then Mint is probably a better choice.

Either way I vote for Piwik and Mint because you OWN YOUR OWN DATA.

Omniture is an amazing application. It has grown in the last couple of years and is really becoming an all-in-one solution for analytics integration. They just recently released v14.7 of SiteCatalyst. Read more here: http://eugeneorourke.com/blog/omniture-announces-new-versions-of-sitecatalyst-and-discover/

I would say Google Analytics because you can see everthing what you need as a webmaster and is very easy to use.

There are also some other tools, but every human should know what he want to use.

yes, Google Analytics is not so good. It never track all the visitors. i used the google analytics, but i think the google analytics is the spyware, it get our data with the site…

I can’t believe that nobody has mentioned WebTrends. I have been working with it for 5 years now with the company that I work for. We use the software solution. It has ups and downs, they all do. It does cost, but not high. Support is great. It’s highly customizable. I have actually rewritten the script so it auto tags everything on the pages. Which results in no manual tagging. I also use Google (and many others) on my personal sites because it is free, but it is restrictive. My opinion, If you are willing to pay, but not go broke, use WebTrends.

Has anyone tried Logaholic ?

You might want to give Open Web Analytics (http://www.openwebanalytics.com) a look. It’s a free open source alternative to commercial web analytics solutions. It tracks site usage, campaigns, e-commerce, and conversion goals. It also delivers usability analytics with it’s funnel reports, click heatmaps, and mouse movement recording/playback.

I’ve been using google analytics and piwik. Although I like the UI interface of google analytics, I think piwik does more for me. It allows me to customize the interface and choose on the dashboard what type of data I need including SEO stats of a URL.

GoSquared is actually one of the best because it offers real time tracking.
(Check it out.)":http://www.gosquared.com/livestats/?ref=5953

I have been struggling with this matter for a long time. Google Analytics is really powerfull and free but the interface is too complicated and no real-time analysis. For me the third and the most important thing is that Google Analytics does not provide the tracking with keywords for visits from graphics search – the only indication is the visit comes from “imgres”. If someone deals with graphical content on the site it is VITAL to know what keyword has been used. And here comes with help the Piwik. Piwik is free, has a clean design, shows real time stats and indicates the keyword by which someone visited through the images search.

My desire would be a web stats app that all it has is a huge table containing all the data which you can filter it really would be great for 80% of users. I could pick a column with keywords and filter other columns for it regarding e.g. location, date and hour of visit, time on site … etc.

There are no such analyzers yet, or if you know one please provide the name!

Nobody mentioned kissmetrics.com.
For me, that’s by far the best of all. It’s not very cheap but offers many features including Real-Time Reporting, A/B Split Testing, Retention Reporting, Cohort Analysis etc.
All big sites like Amazon, Ebay, Adobe are using kissmetrics. And I like the UI, it’s simple, nice and easy to use.