Blog Tipz

Google Analytics, while powerful in its ability to help you analyze your visitors, falls short in a number of areas that other services can better manage. For example, anyone obsessed with stats will find it hard to analyze what is currently happening on your website. Information like this can be particularly useful if one of your posts has been Dugg or has hit a number of other social websites.

I last covered a large variety of these analytics services nearly two years ago, but some of these services have evolved since then, and I feel it is time to look at some of them again.

What Many of These Services Excel At

• Dedicated support, as many of these companies rely on new customers as their main source of income.
• Cleaner interfaces that make viewing stats easier.
• More tools, such as heatmap and mouse click tracking.
• Real-time stats for sites that are being hit with lots of traffic.

Keep in mind that there are other great services out there that may come close to Google Analytics, but these are some of the more unique services that excel in particular areas.

1. Woopra

Now used on more than a hundred thousand websites, one of the main features of Woopra is the revolutionary server architecture, allowing you to instantly see which pages are being hit the hardest, as well as being able to manage multiple blogs and websites. I can’t forget the live chat feature, which provides a “click-to-chat” feature to communicate with your visitors.

2. Mint

Mint breaks down visits, referrers, searches, pages, feed subscriptions, user agents, and more down into easily-digestible charts and graphs to help you better understand what is happening on your site and how people are interacting. Plans are $30 per site.

3. LiveStats

LiveStats provides (for a fee: $5.99 to $49.99 per month) a service with a clean interface and the ability to share how many visitors are on your site with your fans. It hasn’t been built to replace Google Analytics, but to provide an interface for quickly viewing all your stats.

4. Clicky

Clicky is positioning itself against Google Analytics, Woopra, Charbeat, Piwik, StatCounter, and SiteMeter, by offering a clearer look at your stats, as well as a dedicated mobile version, as well as several unique tools such as search keyword rankings, visitor hostnames, outbound link tracking, and more. Plans range from free to “Custom,” each depending on the features you want and how many visitors your site receives monthly.

5. Reinvigorate

Currently in beta, Reinvigorate aims to provide a look at your influence on the web in real-time. You’ll be able to track your stats from your desktop, view heat maps, and quickly dig in and discover all the relevant metrics about your site. The site is a Media Temple Venture Company.

6. W3Counter

Another service that is quickly growing, the site offers the ability to quickly view stats that really matter – view people currently online, view a live visitor map, learn what sites started linking to you today, and discover what new search phrases are bringing you traffic.

7. Piwik

What separates Pwik from other competing services is that it is completely free and open-source, which means developers will be able to build their own plugins for the system and you won’t have to store data with Google or any other service. The interface may not be as clean as some of the other services, but it includes a lot of the common features.

8. ChartBeat

ChartBeat is being used by a number of high-profile websites, and it can help you understand visitor engagement and provide analytics in real-time. One of the draw-backs is the pricing: all plans start at $9.99 and go up to $99.95/month, depending on the number of sites and how many visitors are concurrently on your site (1,000 for the Standard Plan).

9. Quantcast

Quantcast is aimed at much larger sites, but now they have global and local audience insights built into their tools. The service should be more accurate than Compete and Alexa, as it uses an embed code.

10. ClickTale

ClickTale certainly isn’t for all sites. They have more than 40,000 customers, but if you receive more than 400 pageviews/month (nearly all sites), then you’ll need to fork over $99/month (and that’s only up to 20,000 pageviews). However, a lot of tools including real-time monitoring, campaign tracking, page reports, and mouse move heatmaps have been built into the service.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is used on many of the most popular websites, as it offers a set of tools that were once part of a much more comprehensive web analytics suite Google Purchased—later released into their own branded version. However, there are many free (and sometimes paid) alternatives that offer competing services with much cleaner interfaces and other features.