molly.com
Monday 9 April 2007
Oh Lord Won’t You Buy Me A Perfect Stats App?
I need suggestions for the perfect Web analytics. Google? Mint? I’m starting to lose my grip on really informative, and dare I use two u’s in order: Usable use statistics for Web servers.
Suggestions, anecdotes, questions and general grumblings? Let’s have ‘em!
Filed under: software, web design and development, hardware, innovation
Posted by: Molly | 3:14 pm |
April 9th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Personally I use Shaun Inman’s Mint. It’s great and does everything I want. On a monthly basis I also analyze the raw Apache logs so I get an idea about search engine bots and other machines accessing my site.
I tried Google analytics once but wasn’t satisfied with the flood of information and the not-so-beautiful layout. Besides, I prefer a local solution to a hosted one.
April 9th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
It depends on what info you want. Analytics is definitely aimed more at the marketer than the blogger or web designer. It’s great for our advertising staff here at the newspapers I work for. But, it’s damn near unbearable for me, the web designer. Mint is much more useful of designers. Mint is also pretty great for bloggers (Measure map may have been the best thing out there for bloggers, but it got shoved under the rug by Google). Reinvigorate looks nice, but I’ve not tried it.
Bottom line: it depends on what ino you’re interested in. Who are you, and what info matters to you?
April 9th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
I use Google Analytics and am pretty happy with it. It’s a little more business/marketing focused than specifically blog focused, but that can be useful at times too. The other bonus is that it’s free, so given we operate a half dozen smaller sites rather than one big one, it saves on fees compared to Mint etc.
I find Google Analytics gives me what I need as a starting point — of course like everyone I also keep an eye on Google Alerts, Technorati, etc too.
HTH
April 9th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
They all suck, if you ask me. I have yet to find a stats application that handles my needs well.
I currently use Urchin (the software version of what is now Google Analytics) and it works reasonably well, better than everything else I’ve tried. Unfortunately, Google killed this product when it bought Urchin so it’s orphaned.
Mint looks good for bloggers but doesn’t scale for someone like me with 15 sites to track.
Whatever you use, take its numbers with a grain of salt. And if you use two different stats apps, expect to find yourself in the same situation as the proverbial man with two watches…
April 9th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
I’ve been through them all, and Mint is by far the best! Analytics is good if you’re too cheap to spend the $30 for Mint, but really it’s woth every cent…
April 9th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Analytics looks good, and I like the content view. But I’ve found it unreliable. In the past 72 hours, it missed at least 48 hours of data, based on another page view monitor I’m using as backup.
Who do you call when your free product doesn’t work?
April 9th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I’ve not really found anything that works. Even when I ran a network - quite a few years ago, now! - I resorted to basic stats and MS Excel. And I evaluated a lot of packages; even authorized the spending of a few dollars to buy some.
I’ve been thinking about starting an open-source stats project, but I don’t think it would be used. My experience indicates that most SysAdmins don’t care about the stats, anyway. (Quite a bit of experience, by the way!
Too many years on 24/7 call-out.)
C’est la statistics, I guess.
Carolyn Ann
April 9th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
I find Google Analytics too hard to read if you aren’t solely concerned about adwords - it’s not a webadmin’s friend, it’s a web marketer’s friend.
At the end of the day my host provides Webalizer stats and I’ve long experience reading those; not perfect but they’re consistent. I’d prefer it if I had more access to tweak the reports but ultimately the amount of work required for me to set up and run the stats package myself is too much for the return.
I’ve been thinking of adding some in-page stat counter for comparison with Webalizer but I’m yet to find a good one, let alone a good free one
I used to use NedStats until they quietly changed their terms (after years of great service) and popup-bombed my sites overnight.
I signed up for MeasureMap just in time to never receive an account - it was frozen then swallowed by Google, apparently never to be seen again.
April 9th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Can’t say I’ve tried Google Analytics, but I was a user of Mint v1 and just upgraded to v2 today. It works great for me and looks awesome, but I only have 1 site and I imagine it would be unbearable to use for more than 3 or 4.
April 9th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
I’ve actually been using Google Analytics for some time, but it’s definitely missing some features I’ve been wanting.
I just noticed that FeedBurner has some analytics features now though, and some of them provide a bit of the missing functionality I’ve been looking for.
April 9th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Consider getclicky.com
April 9th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
In my professional and personal web experiences I have tried many stats packages. From AWstats to a Webtrends license that cost 6 thousand dollars a year. I honestly believe that unless you have very specific needs, the free Google Analytics provides more info than most people need and does it in a friendly way that most web people can understand. If you are looking for a lot of bang for your buck, go Google unless stats are mission critical.
April 9th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I love Google Analytics, but the deal-breaker (and by deal-breaker, I mean the thing that keeps me from using it exclusively) is that the results are not real-time, which is a staple of most good stats applications.
Feedburner is obviously crucial for tracking feed data, since most stats applications require an embedded javascript snippet, which doesn’t mix well with rss or atom.
Crazy Egg is just cool, with it’s visual site overlays. Granted, Google has this too, but Google doesn’t have heat maps. Besides that, Crazy Egg’s overlays are prettier than Google’s.
I’ve also come to appreciate AW Stats, which came installed with cPanel on my server. Since AW Stats derives it’s information directly from your server logs, it often offers unique bits of information that no other service is able to acquire.
When all is said and done, however, Clicky is probably the best I’ve found. It gives you very extensive information on your traffic, very similar to Google analytics. It uses a Google maps mash-up to give you a geographic view of your visitors, which is pretty neat. Best of all, the results are real-time.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Hey Molly,
Like a previous comment, it depends on what do you want to use with your analytics tool. If its from a marketers point of view, conversions, ROI then use Google Analytics, heard they have a coporate offering at a price. If its just stats that you want, then i suggest use any of the open source alternatives like Awstats or webalizer.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Here is what I want in an stats counter:
1) All the web designer stuff: browser, res, os, color, etc.
2) IP, geolocation, etc.
3) Referals and what page folks were most interested in.
For years and years, I used and paid for thecounter.com as they fulfilled all of the above requirements. But over time and under Jupiter Media’s oversight, the site became more and more littered with ads and crap. It became hard to read my stats. And then I got crabby that I was paying for a service that was littering 60% of the real estate up with crap.
So, I canceled my account for a combo of reading my server logs, statcounter.com, and Google analytics.
My server logs are good but almost too much at times. Google Analytics is over kill on the marketing side and no IP addresses for me. Statcounter.com is good with all the stats I want, but the UI is too cluttered.
Mint does not work, as I have several blogs on the same domain that need to be separate.
If Statcounter.com would clean up their UI, I would pay for their premium features and dump Google Analytics.
Needless to say, I am not happy and inquiring minds want to know what the ___ happened to Jeff Veen’s team at Google? Did they get bought and eaten up in the name of User Experience but no blogging stats product?
April 9th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
You get what you pay for! Like others have said, Google Analytics is free and it offers an amazing variety of information, but the two biggest problems are the interface is HORRID and results are typically delayed about 4 hours behind real time. Personally, I can’t stand the product.
In my opinion, the only two analyzers worth a damn are Mint and Clicky. Mint (haveamint.com) is a $30 one-time fee per domain, but it is an installed solution which means you have to host the whole thing on your own server - beware, lots of hosts do not like you to install your own stats software on their servers. It also requires PHP and MySQL.
Clicky (getclicky.com) is a hosted solution, which means the only thing you have to do is install a small snippet of code (javascript) on your site and you’re good to go. It is free for sites with less than 1000 daily page views, but the premium version is only $15/year and includes several extra features (like RSS feeds) - definitely worth it.
April 10th, 2007 at 2:15 am
Hi,
I don’t know if it will move again (since it was swallowed by Google), but Measure Map seems a really big improvement in the way statistical data is given to the user : essential data presented in an easy way, easy filtering. You will find an article about it here : http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/04/web-analytics-tools-does-user-interface-ui-matter.html
Hope it will help
April 10th, 2007 at 2:48 am
I use both Google Analytics on sites where I do not have access to the stats logs or client sites where marketing is an issue. I also have it on my own site simply so that I can play with it. I have also been playing is MapSurface, but that appears to have gone the way of the dodo.
However, stats solutions such as Google, MapSurface and Mint rely on javascript to log visitors. If a visitor has javascript disabled, then there is no record of their visit. Furthermore, to track unique visitors (at least in Google), cookies are placed in their browser; so again, with cookies disabled/blocked there is no tracking. The automatic blocking of third-party cookies is very common.
Ideally stats should come from a self-hosted server-side solution. My own host supplies Urchin for each user (the best bits of Google without the marketing crap or the need for javascript!), and other hosts I’ve used include Webalizer. Incidentally, I’ve found Webalizer to contain enough information for most of my clients that use it - including referrers and search strings, which is useful.
One final issue regards how often the stats are updated - the concept of ‘live’ stats. I genuinely do not understand why live stats are necessary? How is it more useful to know “what is happening right now?” Compared to “what happened yesterday at 10.45 am?” Most of the stats packages that have been mentioned allow you to filter the results to specific periods anyway. By NOT having live stats, you can’t keep looking at them every five minutes to check if anybody else has visited your website! Much better for productivity!
April 10th, 2007 at 7:03 am
Mint works great for me personally, but I work at a company that hosts several hundred client websites running on several servers running several different OSs. Since we offer stats with our hosting packages, we can’t just give every customer a Mint licence, so we hook them all up with AWStats. It’s ugly, but it’s open source, and does the job well.
April 10th, 2007 at 8:22 am
The most accurate results are obtained with a combination of log analysis and JavaScript tags. Neither are perfect, but they compliment each other well. Getting a single package that does both well tends to be expensive though, especially as the market has quickly moved towards hosted/JavaScript-only solutions over the last few years. NetTracker sits in both camps, but isn’t for the faint-hearted.
Back in the real-world:
AWStats: Free, open-source log analytics which wipes the floor with the likes of Webalizer and Analog.
IndexTools: Hosted JS package that offers 90% of the functionality of high-end stuff like SiteCatalyst for a small fraction of the cost.
April 10th, 2007 at 10:54 am
I used Google Analytics on our corporate sites at work, and it seems pretty good to me. The major problem with it is the effect it has on the occassion that Google’s server is running slowly. Because it’s loading an external Javascript file, it freezes your whole site while it fetchs it.
Apart from that, I love webalizer for its sheer speed of processing, although it’s a little on the ugly side.
IMHO WebTrends is bloated evilness, so should be avoided at all costs.
April 10th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
If you have really specfic requirements, then roll your own (or get someone to do it for you). Not log analysis, but something like Shaun Inman’s ShortStat (written in PHP) and extended to meet your needs might be the best way forward?
April 10th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
I’m using both Mint and Google Analytics. I use Mint most of the time for topline stats, and Google Analytics when I want to dig a little deeper.
April 10th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I aggree with Joseph, you get what you pay for, or you provide what you need for your clients.. For example:
Google analytics, free but cramed with to much crap for your clent, and you endup generating repots for them.
Mint, sexy interface, simple clean stats but you have to pay for it. http://haveamint.com
Clicky, again, was great when it was free but now you have to pay for all of the nice bits, like the stats via RSS. http://getclicky.com
Which brings me on to my next point, PulseRSS can provide key web site statistics for FREE via RSS, XML and another flavors, it’s not any of the above but i have been using it for a month and really like it. http://pulserss.com
April 10th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
How about basil. It scales perfectly well for blogs and has all the features that mint AND measuremap have. And unlike measuremap, it is available. Yes, so you have to pay for it but $25 is about the same as a large pizza here and with the support and future upgrades, it is well worth it.
Ms. Jen, it meets all the requirements you talk about and has a roadmap that only makes it more appeasing.
April 11th, 2007 at 2:05 am
Google Analytics is good if you take into account that it requires JavaScript and thus doesn’t capture every visitor. If you’re interested in capturing everyone and everything, you need a server-side solution, and Mint looks like a good match there. Since Google Analytics is free and just 3 lines of code added to your page template, having both seems like a good solution to me.
As I use DreamHost, I have Analog (http://www.analog.cx/) installed on all of my domains, so I use that for server-side statistics, but I use Google Analytics as well, because it visualizes the data so much better and is a tad more informative to me.
April 11th, 2007 at 2:07 am
Hm, forget my mention of Mint, since that also requires JavaScript. AWStats might be a good server-side solution. Or Analog as I already mentioned.
April 11th, 2007 at 3:05 am
+1 for basil.
It was a pleasure to install. Literally took me 2 minutes!! And the support is excellent when I had problems with an additional license purchase. It is perfect for blogs and although I would have preferred if the terminology was more blog like (like measuremap), the current dashboard is great.
Also to Asbjorn and everyone else who are complaining about Javascript tagging; IMHO I think this is a better way to capture visitors. Bottom line is no stats package is perfect but I would rather not deal with the referrer spam and mundane interfaces of server log analysis systems.
April 11th, 2007 at 6:35 am
Useful and actionable statistics only come by identifying goals and key performance indicators. Because most people don’t do that, any analytics page is basically fine. If you do want to create a KPI worksheet, I’d recommend the Web Analytics Demystified book by Eric Peterson. It is on my short list of books that every web developer should read, but most haven’t.
April 13th, 2007 at 6:16 am
I don’t have any packages to recommend, but I’ve gotta agree with what people are saying about javascript-off users. Since I discovered the NoScript Firefox extension I’ve joined that crowd, but who really knows how many of us there are?
Best experience with NoScript has got to be at clagnut.com where you get the nice message: “Lucky you – no ads for non-JavaScript folks.”
April 13th, 2007 at 6:52 am
freegames
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April 14th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
i’m still waiting for the lord to buy me a mercedes benz, Molly…
April 15th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
AWstats
Why? Because it’s free, powerful, featureful and because it’s open-source.
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
Gérard
April 18th, 2007 at 7:16 am
I do also use Google Analytics and it works enough well, though sometimes it “loses” data.
The best aspect af Analytics is it’s integrated in your general Google Account, like gmail, adsense and so on.
Anyway some hosting providers also sell an “integrated” statystics service, which you can use without adding any code to your pages; normally it’s pretty cheap.
I bought it from my hosting-provider, aruba.it, and it works very well (better then Analytics for some functions). The service is called LiveStats.xsp and is based on a DeepMetrix software.
April 20th, 2007 at 11:15 am
I have Google Analytics too, and because it’s free I hang on to it, but honestly I rarely log in to look at my stats. The whole interface seems convoluted, and has more information than most people probably know what to do with!
As an alternative I’ve been using a FeedBurner/pMetrics combo for the past several weeks, which I really liked. It was simple enough for at-a-glance info, and comprehensive enough to be really useful. Then pMetrics took a nose-dive last week until further notice. After reading through some of the comments here I decided to give Clicky a try. It looks exactly like pMetrics! Since I just signed up there’s no data yet, but I know there’s an affiliation of some sort between pMetrics and Clicky, so I’m hoping Clicky will be comparable.
April 21st, 2007 at 9:00 am
[…] When it comes to metrics and website analysis, the question of which provider to use is forever on the minds of every conscientious blogger, marketer and website owner. The shift in popularity between metrics providers seems equally as constant. Some swear by Google Analytics, some say have a Mint! I suggest you get Clicky. […]
April 30th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
I also use Shaun Inman’s Mint .
May 9th, 2007 at 5:25 am
Since the new, Veen et al-redesigned Google Analytics is launching now, the beautiful combo of Google structure/scale and MeasureMap usefulness is probably the way to go!
March 7th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
thanks molly
March 17th, 2008 at 6:57 am
thanks
March 30th, 2008 at 9:45 am
thanks
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Nice job.
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July 24th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
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July 24th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
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July 24th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
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October 16th, 2008 at 4:42 am
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