Not to mention that Mint is so pretty, you’ll be checking your stats more often just to look at it. :)

Think you might have hit on something there with RSS stat tracking - obviously you could use something like FeedBurner to track those, but it would be good to have all these stats under one roof.

Rob.

And, not to mention, Measure Map is extremely based around a blog type structure, and the terminology that goes with that, ie. posts, comments, etc. It’s a different market, certainly to the Google product.

It seemed a little misleading so I just wanted to point out that I believe all three of these packages use JavaScriptto determine visitors. Shaun Inman indicated that this was a concious decision to minimize referral spam, indexes, and feed readers from skewing stats. And while it’s true that some surf without javascript, I’d consider that a low minority. In the end, no software can give you a truly accurate look at your stats but rather allow you to examine trends.

That is also a problem though. Javascriptis turned off by some people…

The major benefit of using Javascriptfor statistics logging is that it’s possible to differentiate between an actual person and webcrawlers or spammers.  The trade-off is not being able to count the tiny percentage of users who have Javascriptdisabled, but that’s not such a big deal.

Oops, sorry to echo basically what Jonathan said.  He posted before I finished my comment.

I installed Analytics yesterday and it does look very strong / complex.  However, although I’ve got everything I need for yesterday, I can’t see a single hit for today ... the delay is too much really (although it may stop me from checking my stats several times per day). 

Don’t know if this is an ongoing situation, or maybe they’re just overwhelmed at launch time?  Anyone else know?

just to add my two-pence. The only packages i’ve had access to are mint & statcounter, both seem great to me, statcounter offers a little more info - but the free account only logs the las 100 hits which can skew things hugely.

I signed up for measure map some time ago but i gues they don’t deem me useful enough to let me test it (perhaps my blog doesn’t get enough traffic for me to hype it - i know they encourage you to blog about it).

As for google - i just can’t get it to work!! the javascripts in there exactly as they want it but when i go to the control area they keep telling me it’s not!! anyone else having this problem? does anyone know of any problems with wordpress or anything simple like that?

Thanks for the first impressions. I think I’ll give Google ANALyTICS a go on my next client site alongside mint, it has been getting pretty bad reviews so far tho’…

Are you seeing any page load speed issued running all three stats apps alongside one another?

PS. something’s gone astray in your post, Mark?

Roj - it took a good 12 hours before my stats showed up.  If you’re javascriptis in, you’ll probably be just fine.

The lag is certainly annoying, although not uncommon with these sorts of high-end stats packages in my experience. Would be good if they could at least get it to within a couple of hours of real-time.

It took a couple of days to show any reports for me, and it still says that I should be able to see reports in 12 hours time, although I can in fact see them already.

Despite these drawbacks, what I have seen of it is very good, and doesn’t seem too slow at loading all the graphs etc (quicker than DeepMetrix Livestats which I’ve used a fair bit), so I’m quite impressed.

Obviously, even when the kinks are ironed out there’ll still be a lot of talk about what Google can do with all the data they’re gathering through Analytics…

cheers david

Then there’s Weed.

Weed - Like mint, but less green, if you know what I mean.

I like GA, but the horrendous IA nearly destroys it. It shows promise, but has a long way to go still.

I started using MM a couple weeks ago… and stopped visiting after a few days. Something about the design and organization of the information really turns me off. I found myself just not caring.

Mint and MM are more specifically geared at blogs as a niche than anything else, GA will appeal to people less interested in simplicity and aesthetics, and who are more interested in a large data dump of stats.

I am perfectly content to use Mint and GA in harmony.

I am also now using Mint and find it generally fantastic. I’m interested however to see that no one here has mentioned Awstats?is there a reason for that?

Like many of you probably, I switched over from Awstats (although, of course, it is still there) to Mint because I simply found that there was more information than I (or, more specifically, my clients) needed with Awstats and also, with CPanel, one has to login to CPanel to view the stats which is not ideal for the client viewing their stats.

Before Mint came along I had been on the lookout for ages for a better stats package like Awstats (which I guess is more of a log interpreter or beautifier isn’t it).

Just wanted to pinch in that some of the stats software that use JavaScriptto collect information also use a <code>noscript</code> tag with an image inside, to track those visitors as well.

Granted, you can’t get as information as with JavaScript, but at least you can find out things like unique number of visitors etc.

Hmm, the live Preview showed HTML tags as ok… :-|

That raises an interesting point (which I’m sure has been expressed elsewhere already): couldn’t systems such as Mint have a little PHP scriptthat records the number of users without JavaScript? It could be configured to perhaps ignore bots and spiders but at least give some indication of how many people are not getting recorded in the stats.

This is exactly what I’ve been looking for (this post). A few months ago I was looking for better stats packages. My webhost has webalizer install, but it’s not exactly what I’m looking for. I use shortstat for a daily view of what’s happening, but it’s not ideal.

I don’t like the idea of using Javascriptto track users, do handheld devices have Javascriptenabled? Also how do you know the percentage of those visits that have it disabled? (Galen put this better)

Hm, I don’t want to spread any false rumors, but just a few minutes ago, I was unable to reach any websites related to Google Analytics. And by this I mean any page that has the google tracker code, and any google websites.

This includes your blog, my blog, a few other blogs of which I know use the tracker code, slashdot (!), and http://www.google.com. Whenever calling up any of these pages, Firefox would try to connect and my status bar said something along the lines of “looking for http://www.google-analytics.com...”, and that process just didn’t seem to end. A further indication that the tracker code is at fault was that the RSS feeds from any of these pages loaded fine. Also, my GMail notifier couldn’t log in. Looks like google was having a litte downtime and pulling everything down with it.

Eek! Stuff like that shouldn’t happen. I wasn’t aware that a broken javascriptlink could just stop a page from loading. Now that I think of it, I should have tried connecting with javascriptdisabled.

On a side note, I’ve been waiting for over three days now for some data to show up.

Nice writeup.  I look forward to MeassureMap.

FYI, there is a FeedBurner stats pepper for Mint, and it works pretty well.

To the guy who said, “you could use something like FeedBurner to track those, but it would be good to have all these stats under one roof"…

There is the pepper (like Balazs said), but we’re working on other/similar solutions for you. Stay tuned.

Has anyone been able to get statistics for the RSS feeds? Is there any way to do that as a lot of the traffic on blogs comes through the feeds.

Jens: Try FeedBurner.

For me, the unique “problem” with Analytics is the SWF graphs, because it can’t show the main elements, with linux flash payers. I have noticied any problem with the MS Windows one.

The reports can be modified as you want. Export and import them to do your own graph. The documentation is good, but can be improved with more examples, like filtering.

Nah, I think I’ll just stick with my simple awstat (or measuremap) :). Google analytic is just slow when you wanted to view the statistic.

Just wanted to add my 2 cents here.  The number of folks who have js turned off at this point is trivial.  Furthermore i would even venture to say that the number of folks who visit your website (i.e. designers and perhaps even the programmer) who have js turned off is nill.

The majority of stats packages out there use JS because unlike other scripting languages (see PHP, CF and ASP) even if your page is cached the JS will still be executed.