Useful Analytics Strategy for Early-Stage Startups

This idea reminds me greatly of something I learned back around 2003 while demoing our HL2 mod, Dystopia, to the guys at Valve.

During our closed beta testing we'd always dump a heap of "how to play the game" style info onto people who we brought in to help us with testing. I had all this info and a whole elevator pitch ready to give the Valve crew when they sat down to play our game.

They stopped me from giving any info, tips or advice. The way they test games is to watch people play them with out any prep. Just shut your mouth, stand behind them and write down anything that they have trouble with or generally fumble around with. Any part of the game which they couldn't intuitively grasp needed to be reworked.

It was definitely one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. It was truly painful to watch people, my heroes no less, completely fail to work out wtf they were meant to be doing and not explain it.

However it was by far the most productive test session in the 3 years we'd been working on the game. It completely showed our "baby" in a different light and we instantly knew we had a heap of work to do.

Does anyone have experience using Piwik (or another free analytics suite) for individual user analysis?

I run a fairly simple site with a few "interactive parts" and some calls to action, and it would be amazing to see individual tracks of what each visitor did. Do they read the PR text? Do they click on any of the interactives? Etc.

I'm using GA events now, and it gives me a rough idea of what is going on, but not the sequence of events, like what happened before they decided to click on the call to action.

Amy recommendation for tools that can make this happen?