Piwik is an open source website analytics application which provides detailed statistics about visitors, keywords, pages & more in real-time.

It can be installed on an any PHP-MySQL compatible webserver & the rest works similar to Google Analytics; inserting the tracking codes into the websites we want to track.

One installation of Piwik can track unlimited number of websites which is great for web design companies who would prefer to offer a branded/customized solution to their customers.

Also, the user interface is fully customizable: you can drag and drop the widgets you want to display and create a report especially tailored to you.

The application is built around plugins which means it is possible to add/remove features easily.

Its open API makes integrations with 3rd party software possible. And, here are 2 desktop applications that use this API to bring Piwik to your desktop:

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GoingUp! is a free web-based website statistics service with powerful SEO features.

The service has a slick Ajaxed interface & offers a complete analytics package with web stats, referring keywords, action/goals & more.

GoingUp! tracks every activity & presents data nicely with charts, heatmaps, flags (for countries), etc.

Some of its SEO features are:

• Inbound Link Monitoring
• Google Page Rank Tracking
• Alexa Rank Tracking
• Keyword Research
• Keyword Position Tracking
• Page Optimizer Tool
• Keyword Density Tool

The service also has some other free SEO tools like "bulk domain analyzer" or "link & SEO optimizer" which can be used directly without the need of signing up.

Open Web Analytics is an open source framework that developers can use to integrate web analytics into any application.

It is built with PHP & besides the standalone usage, it has built-in support for WordPress, Gallery & MediaWiki.

OWA comes with 2 APIs:

• PHP: which makes it easier to integrate into any PHP application
• JavaScript: for usage in non PHP pages/websites

It has powerful tracking/reporting features like heat maps, multiple websites, Google Maps integration, RSS/Atom subscription tracking &standard ones like:

• page views, visits, and unique visitors over time
• unique, new, repeat visitors over time
  
• Click-streams – view the actual click-stream of each visitor
• Click Tracking – Track where exactly on a web page users are clicking and view clicks by browser type
• Click Heat Maps – view a heat map of where users are clicking on your web pages
  
• Visitor Aging – understand the age of your repeat visitors.
• Canned and Custom Time Periods – generate reports using pre-defined reporting periods or custom date ranges
• Refering Page Analysis – View the title, anchor text, and surrounding text of inbound links from refering web pages
• View visits by user agent
• Track entry and exit pages
• Track pages by custom page type

The frameworks uses other open source resources like Open Flash Chart or PHP Mailer & requires PHP 4.2.2+ with GD enabled to run. 

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.

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.

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.