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Five excellent free/almost free analytics tools
Written by Allen Stern - November 2, 2006
Doing proper analysis of your web app or blog is critical to its success. It is vital that you monitor the who, what, when, where and why visitors are coming to your web site. If you expect to get VC money or to be able to sell advertising, you must prove the traffic your site receives. I love analytics and have reviewed somewhere close to 200 tools over the years. I have come up with what I consider to be five of the top analytics tools that are either free or very low cost. These tools will help you answer the 5 w's of your web site. List is in no specific order and all of the tools I am suggesting just require a few lines of javascript code in your footer include to get them working. Less than 10 minutes setup.
ExtremeTracking
Product Link | Product DemoPrice: $54/yr or $6.25/month full version, free version also available - must show stats icon
Pros:
- Excellent IP tools - find out exactly where your visitors are coming from down to the individual company or location
- You can drill down to a specific page and get all of the stats just for that individual page
- Tracks connection speed, OS, browser, java/javascript, screen colors and resolutions
- CSV downloads
- Ability to exclude IPs from reporting (good for excluding yourself, team, etc.)
- Poor history - only offers full access for last 300 visitors, then is grouped by day, week, etc.
- Not the prettiest thing in the world
- Free version allows anyone to view your stats
Mint
Product Link | Product DemoPrice: $30 one-time
Pros:
- Very Web 2.0, excellent design and usability
- Lots of "Pepper" - plugins
- a forum for help and the creator actually helps with installation and usage questions
- RSS Feeds
- History is limited beyond 24 hours back
- No ability to customize time period for reports
- No export option outside of RSS
- Only can exclude one IP address
Google Analytics
Product Link | Product TourPrice: Free
Pros:
- Tied in with Google AdWords and Google Checkout
- Free and no icon required
- Provides good basic stats
- Good export options - text, csv, xml
- Not the most indepth tool
- Works the best when you use AdWords and/or Checkout
- Can't exclude IPs
HitBox
Product Link | Product DemoPrice: $323/yr, $34.95/month
Pros:
- Full featured web analytics tool
- Ability to receive reports via e-mail
- Provides good basic stats
- Good export options - text, csv, xml
- Higher cost
- Reports limited to 100 web pages
- Reports are huge and take some time to generate
SiteMeter
Product Link | Product DemoPrice: Free, must display stats icon
Pros:
- Real-time stats
- Ability to receive reports via e-mail
- Provides good basic stats
- Pretty cool traffic predictor
- Must display a SiteMeter icon on your site
- Heavy advertising on report display
- Not the prettiest design
Summary
I use Mint, Google Analytics and ExtremeTracking on CenterNetworks. I think together they provide the most comprehensive coverage for my needs. Each tool has its own pros and cons so you can decide what you need/want for your web site/blog. I would suggest at a minimum you use Google Analytics because it is free. And get it working today. Each day you wait, is another day of no ability to speak to your traffic. Even if you never look at a report, do it anyway. When you get your funding, sell the site, or get your first advertiser, you can thank me :).
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We use hitbox at Disney Internet Group. It's alright but the tracking codes are a downright pain.
For my sites I recently made the switch from Google Analytics to StatCounter.com. Google Analytics is more in depth and has a better interface, but StatCounter.com is real-time and fast.
I always ran into the issue of Google Analytics taking forever to load. That may be fine as far as loading the page, but it stalls on-load javascripts from executing (including event attachments which can be crucial for a web app). Also, that means it wasnt getting all my hits.
My hitcount went up by about 20% when I switched. :)
Jimmy - that's interesting, I would have thought that Disney would have a more robust corporate solution like the full WebSideStory, Omniture or Webtrends (yuk!)
I think Google Analytics is good as a "free" tool - remember you get what you pay for. I find it very limiting on the referrers. I love looking at where people come from so for me I need extremetracking for this.
thanks for sharing your insights on this. Would you say that you select a tool depending on the type of website (blog, static, dynamic, shop) or by the specific need of the website?
I really like Clicky because of its strength in real-time analysis. I use it on my blog in combination with Google Analytics, which I now use more for trend analysis.
I use the free web statistics http://www.phpmyvisites.us/ phpmyvisits it is very good imo! you control your data :-) Mint is very poor for websites with many visits the DB gets too big.