getclicky is fine below 100,000 page views per day, but I've passed that milestone.
woopra was my favourite for tracking user activity, but 10,000 views per day is barely an hour in the day so not a large enough window.
If you're above 100,000 page views then I think Google Analytics still rocks.
The only issue I've had with Google Analytics is the lack of an API to publish the stats back to the site or elsewhere. But you can get around this by having an email subscription to receive Xml, then deliver that to a public Google Groups set up for announce, and use Yahoo Pipes to parse the attached Xml and re-publish it as JSON... if anyone cares I've published a pipe for this here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=f633ec8e5eabfe3c3...
Local analyzers of server logs do not filter out well robots and also logistics of transferring and updating logs is a pain.
I use Google Analytics, though not everywhere. Almost always I supplement it with some sort of local log processing. Over the time I tried several log analyzing tools, but I kept using only Visitors [1] and WebLogExpert [2]. I remember Web Log Storming [3] was also good: very fast and it allowed to track individual visitors.
Though often I just end up doing some custom logs processing, either by some Python script, or (more common) by some combination of Unix command line tools, directly ssh-ed into the server.
For example, to get real-time referrers:
cat access.log | grep "GET / HTTP" | grep -v '"-"'
[1] http://www.hping.org/visitors
How is it any different?
It looks like the differentiator is a visitor-centric view? Plus more flexible and customizable data?
I run a few membership websites and being able to see visitor's usernames and track their actions that way is invaluable.
GA does a number of things that Clicky doesn't, but the opposite is also true, as you can see by the handy dandy matrix you mentioned.
Disclaimer: I am the developer. :P
The matrix isn't that helpful, though. It's pretty big and uses a lot of clicky-specific phraseology.
For the above URL, it cuts it down to http://www.abc.edu/
Of course, we normally log full referrers, even dynamic ones, so you can see the actual sites linking to you. It's not such a big issue more recently, but it used to be nearly every tracking service would cut out the query parameters, making referrer tracking not very useful.
I suggest adding a column to the chart on the Learn More page that says that.
I would recommend you take a look at http://mixpanel.com and I think you'll see it's exactly what you've been itching for.
Feel free to contact me and I can set you up with an account: suhail[at]mixpanel[dot]com
As long as you're only running a few tests at a time, you're willing to embed javascript on the pages you're testing and let the serving of the tested sections be handled by google (which adds a bit of latency I'd guess, though not much), it's a great way to get into testing. Hands down better than not testing.
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
I really should be using something more sophisticated. But to keep things simple, awstats is just fine.
It's also difficult to weed out new bots with awstats, which bloats traffic results (and my ego!).
Edit: I'll try sharing the script when I head back home
As someone else mentioned, the downside of real-time is that you have to constantly sit and refresh to see what's going on.
I'd like to see a package that notifies me when a significant action happens on my site. Like if I were to start getting hits from a new referrer, or see a statistically significant spike in page views for a certain page. Does anyone know of a solution that does something like this?
http://themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com/2009/01/22/rjmetrics-vs...
For the record, we use Google analytics and of course we are ravenous consumers of our own dogfood.
I tried woopra for a while but it was crap. Never updated any of the stats and many of the charts always showed as loading
I find real-time stats are addictive but ultimately counterproductive. I just refresh, refresh, refresh all day long.
What I like most about Reinvigorate is that the fairly clean UI and no complex charts. All are simple (unlike GA which I can never make sense of.. Yeah I sucked in statistics :( )
IMO it still needs a lot of work, especially with the UI but it seems to do basic stuff well.
- For just tracking traffic -- Google is fine. - For Adwords, Omniture has a slew of products.
Once you add on a couple of layers -- such as an affiliate program, some display and then PPC from Yahoo & MSN .. you will run into a couple of areas .. such as multi-payouts and an issue with attribution.
One client just started using C3 Metrics
Its working for them.
I have also heard a lot of good things about Omniture and have used it a few times.
It could use a lot of work though. I see a lot of opportunities for startups in this space.
Is there one that groups events by visitor (ip address)? I'd like to see a "trail" of use, so I can see what is catching their interest, and in what order.
The realtime stuff is incredibly useful.
Across my variety of sites. Usually a combination of 2 or 3 of them: the reason being that the variance between the stats the all collect means that it's helpful to have more than one stats collator to double check your info :D
Who do you find to be the most accurate?
I see some differences between GA and the others (GA requires JS to be enabled so that may be why).
Woopra I use less for general stats as for "right now" tracking. Whilst clicky I trust most for historical data.(so, those 2 are the most accurate I guess)
Scale is hundreds of millions of events per day, so there's a lot of work that goes in to making it all happen and be useful... lots of summary tables, log files, and the like.