Ask HN: What do you use for tracking your users? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use for tracking your users?

26 pointshajrice19 comments

I use ClickHeat, GetClicky and Google Analytics. I dont really like the fact that you have to wait an entire day for Google analytics to "swallow" the data.

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As for Analytics: You can see the current day's traffic by extending the view period to include today's date. By default it only displays up to the previous day, but you can usually extend it to include today's date.

For general analytics I use Mint (http://haveamint.com/), it costs $30 (one time fee) per site, but I think it's worth it for the nice UI. They also have lots of great plugins.

I've also been using Mixpanel (http://mixpanel.com/) for tracking more nitty-gritty user actions.

Oh the UI is awesome. I was reading(on Shaun Inman's blog) that he is inspired by geometric relationships, that's basically how he drew the logo for Mint and Fever.

I've also used Shaun Inman's Mint (though an older version, not the current, I'm sure the UI is even better now) and have only ever had good things to say about it. Definitely worth the very reasonable cost.

You actually can get current data with Google Analytics by changing the date field to the current date in the dashboard page. See http://imgur.com/4Y8pO.png.

We made our own. We wanted to track really random stuff like retention rate, ARPU, etc. which is hard for a generic analytics program, or even mixpanel to do.

email me at suhail@mixpanel.com -- curious what we can't do =)

Suhail, don't get me wrong, MixPanel looks awesome and I'm sure it will work for 99.9% of all startups out there, but we're just a little more neurotic about our stuff.

Here is one example that is hard for us to convert.

Monthly Active Users on a sliding scale. This requires 30 db writes every time someone signs on. Which we could do with 30 calls to mixpanel for every user sign on, but we decided to cache the user being counted in the user field and use memcache to batch the stat to one of our servers that will automatically write 30 different entries based on the key.

Hrrrmmm. I typed in clickheat.com into my browser and was surprised that you used that site - of course, I then googled 'clickheat' and noticed an sf.net project... I presume you use that one.

On a serious note, I'd never heard of clickheat before - sounds sort of like http://code.google.com/p/image-tempest/, which was discussed on HN recently.

image-tempest discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=928282

I use Clicky. It's quite good for real-time data. http://getclicky.com

I like ewebcounter.com and userfly.com - both have free versions which suit me just fine.

ewebcounter is my google analytics "sanity check" and real time resource, while userfly lets me view recordings of actual user interaction - VERY useful...

Cheers, Mike : )

I roll my own, these JS solutions miss so much what with NoScript being so popular nowadays.

Clicky tracks visitors with javascript disabled.

I'm writing my own for iPhone apps.

greps & cuts on the access logs.

http://www.woopra.com/ kicks ass for real time traffic watching

+1 for woopra. It really is additive to see people using your site in real time.

My first and only client best deal in town, from arizona has added me on facebook :)

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