A very important part of running a website is keeping track of how many users you’ve had and where they’re coming from. This helps you work out ways that you can improve your traffic and the quality of that traffic. Before you can analyse your web stats you need some software to collect that information.
There are literally thousands of different statistics programs out there and they all have different features so finding the right one for your site and your taste is essential. I’m going to do a quick run through of the web statistics programs I like.
Google Analytics
The chances are, if you’ve only heard of one of these programs, it will be this one. Google Analytics is actually the program I use to track my website statistics at the minute. It does offer a lot of features such as ROI (return on investment) calculation which may scare new users a bit.
It produces some nice graphs and maps and is overall a very detailed program.
Clicky Web Analytics
Clicky offers a range of plans that go from free (3000 page views per day) to $49.99 a month (200,000 page views a day). This program has a very large feature list, they’ve even compared it to some other web stats programs here.
Mint
Mint charges a flat $30 per site and unlike the other programs you host it on your own server. I’ve never used Mint on my own sites, but I know a few people who do and they like it.
Again, Mint has a ton of features.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a little different from other stats programs. It shows you your stats in some pretty funky ways such as heat maps and confetti so you can see where your users click most. Crazy Egg also has a range of plans that go from $9 a month to $99 a month. Unfortuatley they don’t have a free plan but they do offer a 30 day money back guarantee.
Reinvigorate
Currently Reinvigorate is an invite only stats program. But you can reguister to get an invite on their site. Reinvigorate offers real time statistics, heatmaps and a load of other features. They also offer a prgram you can install on your computer that will give you up to date statistics for your sites.