5 Alternatives to Google Analytics

Posted: Mon 19 Apr, 2010

So Google Analytics isn't the perfect creature you always thought it was? If you've been using Google's service for long enough, you might understand that while Analytics is the giant in the room, there is enough space left for other providers.

Problems with Google Analytics include the inability to see data live (or even on the same day), lack of raw conversion data, true time (eg. Universal Time), ability to add notes, share goals between profiles or switch profiles while maintaining context (switching takes you back to the dashboard). Google's Analytics program also lacks social media metrics and doesn't let you see traffic spikes by source easily - althought there are a number of plugins and Greasemonkey scripts that help extend that functionality. The latest news is that Google are now writing extensions to allow users to opt-out of analytics, whatever browse they're using. However, sometimes a cohesive approach works better, so you might want to investigate some of the alternative providers. 

Here's our pick of the bunch - don't forget you can use as many as you like (at the same time if it helps) as you fill gaps in your site metrics. 

Chartbeat

One of the big let-downs of Google Analytics is that it only allows you to see yesterday's data. This is fine if you've got a low volume site, but a bad thing if you've got an established web presence, as there's no way of seeing the immediate impact of changes made to your site.

Chartbeat fixes this while also providing simple information dashboards -  appealing to those who haven't got over their love affair with classic cars. A regular criticism of Chartbeat is that it lacks features, but we looked deeper and found it worth every cent of the US$10/month it'll cost most site owners to use.

Chartbeat offers a free trial of their software for a short period, and are then priced at ten dollars a month thereafter, which is quite competitive considering their offering.

The software comprises of two main dashboards – the real time user information and historical data ones, alongside a raft of killer features:

• Traffic Alerts - Receive email or SMS alerts if ChartBeat sees an unusual (high/low) amount of traffic
• Downtime Alert - Chartbeat calls this 'responsiveness', but if your site is taking more than (for example) 60 seconds to load, it's something you should know about. Chartbeat will email or SMS you for user page load time (eg. modem user on a large page), server page load time (eg. memory thrashing) or page down (eg. server down)
• Visual Geolocation - see (on a map) where traffic is coming from based on the locations of referring sites
• Brand and Keyword Tracking - we call this Twitter tracking, allowing you to see how you're going (or how your competitors are going) for tweets/mentions on the popular social media platform.
• Replay Feature - if something strange happened to your site, you can see how traffic arrived over a period of time and where from - useful for providing context.
• Scroll Heatmaps - the page density feature gives you information on when people are scrolling, what they're seeing, and where they spend their time - perfect for re-arranging content to maximise impact and understanding the browser window size of your audience
• Reading/Writing/Idle Information - especially useful if you're running a Blog or interactive website, this allows you to segregate visitors into those engaging with your copy, those adding content to your site, and people just twiddling their thumbs.

There's also a Chartbeat iPhone app, so if you have access to the App Store you'll be able to see what your site is doing while you're on holiday (or just away from the computer). While not killer feature for everyone, it's certainly killer if you count yourself among the 45 million people who own an iPhone!

Negatives are the Twitter brand monitoring, which while useful could have provided more compelling insights and extended to other social media, and the "concurrent users" pricing model which isn't always easy to translate to a real website. These are fairly small gripes however, when most sites will fit into the standard plan, and plans above this should be affordable to any users with the traffic to need them.

learn more at http://chartbeat.com/

AWStats

We're big fans of AWStats - we've installed it on over 200 sites, but we're not afraid to admit it's major shortcomings. It's ugly - it hasn't seen a major visual overhaul in nearly 10 years, and it also requires a fair amount of technical knowledge. At the very least, you need to know how to install Perl, know the absolute paths (path to the file on the server's operating system) of your website logs, and to be willing to spend an hour or so tinkering with notepad + ftp. Ideally, you'll have administrator access to the server your site is on, and understand logging settings.

That sounds like a pretty large downside, but the upside is equally large. This isn't one of your Web 2.0, "we've got nice clothes" statistics packages, but one that looks at the raw data generated by your webserver's logging functionality. This gives you the truest picture we've come across of any statistics program - visitors can't opt out of asking you if they can see a webpage.

Killer features include:

• The asking price - getting something for free (even with the tech headaches) isn't too much of a burden.
• Controlled access to your data - AWStats is hosted on your own website, so you don't give your visitor information to another company. You can also back it up whenever you like!
• Clarity of information - gives you the simple information like Browser & Operating System usage in a clear format.
• Historical relevance - when you can see year on year trends, you understand visitor behaviour in terms of seasonal trends.
• Email Stats - think your emails aren't going through? AWStats can prove you right (or wrong).
• Analyze anything - the parsing of custom fields allows you to analyze anything you have logs for.
• Custom reporting - don't see the report you need? If you're technical enough (and read the help files), you can make AWStats build it for you. 
• XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attack warnings - having a stats package that checks for the signatures of common worm/virus families can't hurt, can it?
• Geolocation - while other packages offer Country and City, plugging in GeoIP's Organization Database lets you see the companies who see you.

Missing features include anything which the Javascript, 'on-site' or API-based statistics packages get from interacting with your users - no social media insights, no live usage information (unless you parse your log-files very regularly), and a lot of important information needs you to put in the effort to create a custom report - for instance, you can't see which of your Australian visitors are using Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 out of the box. All in all though, for pure statistics and simple graphing AWStats can't be beaten.

learn more at http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

Mint

Mint has been around for a while - just a little bit longer than the product we're comparing it to. The $30 per site license and requirement for PHP & MySQL (plus another technical install) will put off a lot of users, but it has garnered a lot of respect for it's visual design and extensibility. Some of the things we love about it:

• 
  
  Above the line visuals - highlighting of the top results in each section lets you instantly see the big picture.
• Birdfeeder - if you're running RSS feeds, you'll love the ability to see when and where people subscribed, and what the most popular and most commented articles are.
• Flag pages for review - allows you to mark pages for future development/changes and revisit content easily over time.
• Real Estate - shows you screen widths as percentage of visitor base. Tracking the evolution of this allows you to serve content within the most appropriate window size over time, maximising branding impact
• Backup/Restore - we can't fault the ability to look after your data
• Single window view - Mint shows everything you want in a single window (best viewed fullscreen), which allows for heavily customised content. It'll remember your choice of panes, giving you maximum 'one look' insight into your site performance.
• Peppers - Mint has an almost fanatical base of web developers and a well-structured API, and Peppers are how you extend it. These plugins include:
  • Behaviour - tracking AJAX events lets you see what's happening when people are loading in-page content. 
  • Campaign Monitor Subscribers - does what it says on the tin. If you're managing newsletter subscribers through CM, it's nice to have an eye on the numbers.
  • Download Counter - tracking file downloads by type is useful if you're running an online shop, blogging platform or distributing information.
  • Growl Notifier - Growl is an OS X (Mac) application that notifies you of events. Knowing when key clients are looking at your site helps you time calls and emails for maximum impact.
  • Link Spice - tag your URL's with custom names and group into categories. Incredible for tracking landing pages and marketing campaigns and assessing impact.
  • Morning Coffee - view Clicky and Pmetrics stats from within Mint's interface.
  • Outbound - displays the destination and frequency of outbound links.
  • Prank - checks the Google PageRank of each page on your site at regular intervals.
  • QuickTime - shows QuickTime installations by platform and percentage of visitor base.
  • Trends - basic trends are a must-have so this pepper is a welcome addition. This pepper uses clear and visual indicators next to raw %age growth/decline to provide a dense but clear view.
  • Tweets/TwitterCounter - use either of these to display # of twitter followers over time.

As you can see from the list above, the main beef with Mint is the lack of features built into the core functionality. While modular content and extensibility are a good thing, the default installation is light-weight to say the least. Mint's display feels less 'snappy' than that of it's competitors, often showing you a circular loading icon when you want to be looking at content. Peppers are a great way of providing functionality (although at the expense of speed), yet you'll want double the list above to feel really happy with the data you receive.

learn more at http://www.haveamint.com/ or visit the live demo.

Reinvigorate

Reinvigorate is a new offering from MediaTemple which is currently in beta and well worth watching. We're not 100% sure how it'll pan out at the moment, but it's worth a look for the following features:

• Real-time desktop interface - allows you to monitor your website in real-time from your computer, especially useful when combined with goals/funnels for online shop orders
• Heatmaps (real ones) - lets you see where people's cursors are hovering and for how long, providing information on the visual impact of your website
• Predict your day - we love the simple dashboard which uses current trends to give you an estimate of daily statistics, and puts the most needed information right where you need it
• Curve overlays - traffic isn't easy to analyse when you're seeing swings over time (and each day), but Reinvigoration's overlays provide a level of clarity and take the headache out.

We found the curve overlays on traffic reports very useful for management-level reporting, but there were a few concerns with the product. One is the significant stakeholding from MediaTemple, a company known for time it takes to get a response from their support department. We're hoping this won't be the case with this product.
learn more at http://www.reinvigorate.net/

Woopra

Woopra's logo epitomises everything bad about Web 2.0 branding. The name says nothing about the service, the gradient (vertical) + drop shadow (2px deep, 135 degree angle) + font (Trebuchet MS) scream out "generic" and "lightweight". The mask/lidded eyes of the two O's imply that data is hidden from view, and it's difficult to spell. So it's worth putting aside branding prejudice when looking at this surprisingly useful stats package.

Killer features include:

• Geographical live view - see where your visitors are coming from alongside personal and demographic information (eg. browser, IP address, path through site, user history, language, operating system and screen resolution)
• Snappy Desktop interface - Woopra feels fast, using your graphics card to render charts instead of drawing them on the server and sending through the images.
• Multiple site/blog management - it's very easy to connect sites together and see them side by side, preventing the username/password hell that goes with having multiple accounts.
• Deep Stats - taking the opposite approach to AWStats, Woopra lets you filter stats to understand user profiles by combined demographic - useful if you want to compare users from different countries (or using different screen sizes/languages) interact with yout site.
• Live Chat - Woopra allows you to start a live chat with visitors. Although this is potentially intrusive, for certain demographics this feature is expected. Tying it into conversion statistics and demographics makes a lot of sense.
• Windows, Mac and Linux clients - it's nice to see that Woopra don't care which operating system is used.
• Clear presentation of data - this is true of all of the packages covered, but woopra uses a dark background with good use of contrast and colour synergy to ease eyestrain and make their package feel more relaxing to use.

Things which could be improved start off with the plan selection and pricing. The Bronze plan @ USD$4.95/month is reasonable value, but the number of page views is very limiting and only having 6 months of data stored is shocking. This goes up to 3 years when looking at the Titanium and Kyptonite plans, but by then you're paying USD$1000 or more per annum. Although there are understandable issues with storing the massive amount of data that site logs generate, for this price you'd expect more, especially as Woopra could allow you to download your data to the desktop app they want you to use, if the problem is to ease load on their servers. We see more it as a nasty plan migration option. We're not too happy that the free plan only stores 13 weeks of data and no SSL support (making it useless to a large number of online shop checkouts, members areas etc). This makes it harder to evaluate the service. However, looking deeper into the 'Ads: Yes: part of that pricing plan makes it clear Woopra won't put ads on your website, and that seems fair.

In summary, Woopra is developed by ex-Google engineers and the quality of the interface shows. The flip side is that it has only been out of beta 6 months, and looks very pricey over three years compared with other options.

learn more at http://www.woopra.com

Summary

Google Analytics alongside Chartbeat and AWStats seems to be the right approach for the majority of data-centric users, while for a $30 one-off fee, adding Mint and a whole lot of Peppers seems a no-brainer for anyone on an Apache server with a PHP website. In the course of this post, we also began to evaluate Clicky again, which will be covered in detail soon. We've got high hopes for it following it's movement to a CDN (Content Delivery Network) and a raft of new features, but with downtime last year (August, September, October 2009), the removal of the Twitter Followers feature (Jan 2010) and a failed micropayment service (Contenture, May 2009) to it's name, it has a lot of credibility to catch up on.