What is the Best Analytics Software?: Analytics

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.