

Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Analytics - gokhan

Here in Turkey, some Google services sharing the same IP block with YouTube are banned, including Google Analytics. Classic Analytics code prevents browsers from completely loading, resulting in page load time hell. An alternative is the asynchronous code (http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html), but there's no point of using a serviceunable to track page views.<p>What are the alternative services you recommend? I just installed Clicky but wanted to know my options.
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paraschopra
Open source: <http://piwik.org>

Clicky: <http://getclicky.com/> (This is a good one)

Woopra: <http://woopra.com/>

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mitchellhislop
+1 to clicky. The real time stats are a very nice addition to a solid suite of
tools.

My one gripe with them is they seem to do more processing of the data, rather
than just letting you find the numbers you need. I am a data hound, so YMMV

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schammy
Could you elaborate on your gripe? (I'm the co-founder/lead dev)

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ApolloRising
Why do you say this on your site: * Note: we do not allow any individual sites
that receive over 500,000 daily page views.

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schammy
Well the more traffic a site has, the more resources we need to process that
traffic. 500,000 daily page views is currently the max we allow to ensure our
service runs smoothly for everyone. This limit is higher than most other
analytics services allow, and easily covers 99.9% of the sites on the
internet.

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ihodes
<http://haveamint.com/> is a nice product by Shaun Inman. It's $30 for a site
license, though.

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dhimes
I was happy to pay the $30, FWIW

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dpezely
What are your criteria for analytics?

If you require third-party reporting for vetting your traffic numbers to
potential advertisers, there are services such as Quantcast.com.

The big fish in the game is Omniture.com, recently acquired by Adobe. It's
worth looking at their documentation because they have become (arguably) the
de facto standard in many areas of web analytics, particularly marketing
analytics for websites. Knowing their jargon and how they bucket data can be
useful in those conversations.

Many people want free as in zero out-of-pocket expense and freedom to
customize. More on that below...

The trade-off with completely free techniques is that you lose any demographic
or psychographic profiling that a larger service provider might offer. If this
subject matters to you, BlueKai.com would be a good starting point, but be
prepared to talk about marketing "funnels". (Not sure if they accommodate
beyond US, though.)

For leveraging this class of data, real-time ad networks such as Adchemy.com
use these technique to drive traffic. They'll likely be expanding beyond US
soon. [full disclosure: my current employer is a partner of theirs]

Back to free:

If you simply want to know basic facts about traffic landing on your pages and
considering the HN crowd, you could likely get by with a little JavaScript
code that generates a URL with query-strings identifying those facts. Then use
JS to insert an image into the page, fetching a 1x1 transparent pixel from
your own server, thereby logging the facts. Various tools for analyzing HTTP
logs are available for bucketing, graphing, etc.

The Nginx HTTP server has native support for serving transparent pixels and
has a very light load (e.g., an Intel Atom CPU on your DSL line is more than
adequate; under US$200 complete). Since it's all under your control, this
approach can still work with dynamic IP addressing of the pixel server.

Some relevant JS fields and function calls include: navigator.cookieEnabled,
screen.height, screen.width, screen.colorDepth, navigator.plugins['Shockwave
Flash'], window.ActiveXObject() with "ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash" [but
search for caveats regarding known bugs with Flash 6.0.21, .23, .29].

Add your own session ID to the query-string, and you have unique visitor
journey tracking as well. Usual caveats apply due to visitors who clear
cookies, etc.

Again, considering the HN crowd, this minimal treatment should be sufficient.

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Concours
<http://piwik.org/> , you may need to host it on your own servers.

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mootothemax
Second vote for Piwik. It's free and open-source, install it on one domain and
you can then add multiple sites to it, just like Google Analytics. In fact,
I've found it's significantly sped up my page loading times, although need to
test this further.

In addition there are plugins for every major CMS and blogging system out
there. I'm just waiting for the time that the ClickHeat* plugin works :)

* ClickHeat is a free heatmap available here: <http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html>

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eberfreitas
Reinvigorate is doing a great job. It's in beta stage, but you can apply for
an invitation: <http://reinvigorate.net>

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Freebytes
Do not forget to voice your opinion with your government about your discontent
in them blocking Google while you are at it. (Write a letter or protest.)
There is really no reason why Google should be blocked by your country.

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eliot_sykes
Good to hear you've installed Clicky, I use them over Google Analytics (and am
very happy) as I'm admittedly paranoid but uncomfortable about giving Google
precise traffic stats when they know how much you spend on Adwords.

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byoung2
Make sure you don't have AdSense installed as well!

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andrewhyde
<http://chartbeat.com> is great for real time views but not sure about for
your case.

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Skyline
chartbeat is also great if you're running a Wordpress blog

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brazzy
AWStats is a tool that generates statistic pages from the server logs. It
doesn't even require you to put anything on the pages; all you need is access
to the logs. It doesn't offer quite as much information as Google Analytics,
but it's pretty good.

<http://awstats.sourceforge.net/>

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bearwithclaws
+1 for Mixpanel.

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bdickason
This talk from Mike McDermott of Freshbooks is really great:
[http://carsonified.com/blog/business/mike-mcderment-of-
fresh...](http://carsonified.com/blog/business/mike-mcderment-of-freshbooks-
on-web-app-marketing-metrics/)

Explains exactly what to track and how to code it yourself.

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pavs
Yahoo: <http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/>

Sitemeter: <http://www.sitemeter.com/>

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dangrossman
I've run <http://www.w3counter.com> for the past 6 years. It's free, though
occasionally a bit slow.

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ajbatac
I've used Woopra. There is a free version for small sites.
<http://www.woopra.com/plans/>

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Kilimanjaro
I'd love to see one completely done in html5/css3/svg/canvas

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mitchellhislop
[http://thenextweb.com/me/2010/06/04/woopra-gets-a-shiny-
new-...](http://thenextweb.com/me/2010/06/04/woopra-gets-a-shiny-new-
html5-web-version/)

Looks like Woopra heard you

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l4u
i use piwik but you need to host it yourself

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apphacker
Site Catalyst:
[http://www.omniture.com/en/products/online_analytics/sitecat...](http://www.omniture.com/en/products/online_analytics/sitecatalyst)
It's not free though. :/

