Google Analytics offers various ways to view the data & make comparisons, which is great. But if you need a totally unique view or want to make comparisons with another data source, you’re limited.
Excellent Analytics is an Excel plug-in for importing web analytics data from Google Analytics in to an Excel spreadsheet.
So, you can easily build queries with all dimensions and metrics available or apply filters to create advanced queries
The plug-in is open source & for improving it further, it can be found here.
Tracer is a free web-based service which offers a new type of website-analytics function. It tracks "what’s being copied from your website (including images)".
Besides keeping the logs, it also adds the "copied website’s" link to the information copied, which may help the content to spread in a better (than nothing) copyrighted way & to get new visitors.
Most importantly, the application helps analyzing which parts of the content is more copied & more important in the eyes of the visitors.
Usage is very simple. Just include a "one-line" script to the website to be tracked & that’s all.
P.S. Tracer is currently in beta status & accepts new accounts periodically.
JAWStats is a companion to the famous AWStats statistics (which comes default by many hosting accounts).
It has a better presentation of data with Flash charts, Ajaxed & better organized interface.
For JAWStats to work, AWStats needs to be installed on the system.
Good thing with the application is, it doesn’t modify current AWStats settings & files. Simply reads & presents them in another way.
JAWStats is very easy to install, you can make it up in few minutes & has support for theming.
Requirements: PHP
Grape is a simple open source web statistics application with a clean interface.
It can display several statistics information like:
- Visits (unique & total)
- Referrers
- OS of the visitors
- Spying on users
- & more
There is an admin interface which allows you to add new statistics tracking extensions.
Statistics are stored in a MySQL database & can be queried for any time interval.
Grape works both with PHP4 & PHP5 without an OS requirement.
Requirements: PHP 4.3+, MySQL 4+
PHP Web Stat is an open source statistics application that requires no databases.
It creates its own log files & displays the data according to these information.
To make it run, a code must be installed to webpages. Nice thing about how it works is, the PHP file installed is included via JavaScript and this will make the stats work even if caching is enabled. If the user’s JavaScript is turned off, it will call the PHP file directly.
It has a very simple interface but displays the information needed very well.
Also, several settings can be configured via an admin screen.
P.S. Although the demo is in German, application is multilingual & already has the English support in the download package.
Google Analytics has a fresh & nice feature that Ajax & Flash developers will like. Yes, it is now possible to track pageviews in Ajax & Flash applications. And, it is simple.
It is enough to call a function named _trackPageview when an Ajax request or Flash event is called.
An example provided by Google is:
...
http_request.onreadystatechange = sendAlert;
http_request.open(’GET’, url, true);
http_request.send(null);
}
function sendAlert() {
if (http_request.readyState == 4) {
if (http_request.status == 200) {
alert(http_request.responseText);
pageTracker._trackPageview("/pagefilename1" ); }
else {
alert(’Error.’);
}
}
}
…
To summarize, after an Ajax request is made, the function is called with the page name that is viewed. And, Analytics tracks this page name.
An important usage tip about this feature is that, Google Analytics codes are normally installed just before the </body> tag. When calling _trackPageview function, you’ll need to use it after the Analytics codes are included. Which means installing the Analytics codes just after the <body> tag is a guaranteed solution.
Google is presenting detailed info & examples for both Ajax & Flash.
P.S. The feature is only available with the new Analytics code: the gaJsHos one.
Logdy is a real-time web analytics service that provides all the information you may need about your website.
With an easy to use, plain and Ajaxed interface, Logdy makes it very easy to drill down every detail even to the user level.
For example, you can filter:
Visitors from x country > who used Google > reached your contact page > using "contact" keyword.
Logdy enables you to reach data (in real-time) like:
- Visitors: daily, weekly, monthly summaries, countries, languages, timezones.
- Sources of visitors: keywords, search engines, referring pages, referring domains and more.
- Visitor navigation: entry pages, exit pages, pages popularity, visit depths, visit duration.
- Outbound links and pages.
- Technical stuff: browsers, browser types, platforms, screen resolutions, screen color depths.
A beautiful feature is "outbound links report". It shows which links your visitors click on your website & even magnify the users who clicked them like every other report.
You can instantly share your analytics with other users with the special "share link" which Logdy creates & also get reports to your e-mail.
With a 1-click "cookie install", you may choose not to track yourself in the analytics for more objective results.
To sum up, Logdy is a very user-friendly service for reaching the deepest parts of your stats in real-time.
The service has a free 1 website plan besides the bigger & paid ones. You can find the pricing for the service here.
P.S. This post is a sponsored site review.
Google Trends for Websites is a web-based service where you can compare the visitor statistics of websites.
The data displayed is daily unique visitors (after logging in, you can see the numbers that graphs represent) and currently, up to 5 websites can be compared.
Google Ad Planner provides you information about websites by simply entering demographics and sites associated with your target audience. This is a tool to be used when you are planning or searching for websites to advertise.
Ad Planner, currently, can be used by invitation only. You can apply for it here.
More info can be found at Inside Adwords blog.
Requirements: No Requirements
Woopra is a feature-rich free web-tracking and analytics tool that analyzes your website in real time.
Using Woopra, you can view visitor activity in detail, tag visitors to realize them in their next visits, instant-chat with visitors and even get notified from the site activities that you set.
For developers, Woopra provides a full featured API that allows extracting a website’s data into several common web 2.0 formats, making it useful for use within your own application.
This free desktop site analysis tool is definitely worth to try.
Requirements: Java SE 1.6+
ClickHeat is an open source heatmap statistics application & PHP class that visualizes your visitors clicking activities which is a very nice way of getting a snapshot of your visitor’s browsing behaviors.
Heatmaps can also be generated using its heatmap class inside other web applications.
ClickHeat is lightweight as very few function calls to log a click, no server load rise should be noticed. For tweakenings with the settings check the performance & optimization page.
Requirements: Apache or Lighttpd (other may work fine), PHP, GD2 (PNG support needed).
