Google Analytics Alternatives for Real Time Stats are hard to find. As we know, Google analytics is a popular web analytics software from google. GA not only tracks traffic count but also other parameters like browser, operating system, screen resolution, keywords, landing pages, exit pages and bounce rate. This information is easily accessible and you can also use comparison with previous months, run tests and analyze trends of your traffic. All of these features are available for free of cost and anyone with google account can benefit from these features.
Google offers excellent traffic analytics features from their urchin analytics but there are many reasons for users to switch to alternatives.
Google offers excellent traffic analytics features from their urchin analytics but there are many reasons for users to switch to alternatives.
- Impression Limit - Every Site under your free analytics profile has limit of say roughly, 1-mill impressions. You have to upgrade to commercial account. (Fair but limits are not specified in FAQ or any other docs of analytics.
- Footprint Trace - If anyone wants to find out your other niche site then all they need is google analytics UA id or adsense id.
- Google Spying - By going under the umbrella of google, lot of your website and server data is under scrutiny. You don't want google to chase your membership site content, guarded content under scrutiny of both google and other marketers.
- Loss of Keywords - After new privacy policy change from google and SSL based search for logged in users, Google analytics isn't sending all the keyword data.
In order to avoid such reliance on google, i'm listing some of the best google analytics alternatives in this hub.
Icerocket Tracker (Free)
It's very simple web analytics software that uses archin like interface. It reminds me of old google analytics interface where you used to get javascript rendered analytics data. It has similar features to that of google analytics and allows multiple sites under single profile. Icerocket also ranks your site as per the traffic and showcases on their search engine feed. It's accurate, simple and free to use. It's not real time analytics software.
Clicky (Free and Paid)
Clicky is real time analytics software that keeps eye on every action made by user on your website. Other than that it also tracks- searches, keywords, geolocation, IP and few other features that are found in almost every premium analytics software. Single user account supports only one site tracking and for multiple sites, you need to upgrade your account. Free account also has limit of 50K count, upgraded version seems to have no such limitations.
Piwik (Free)
Piwik is hosted analytics solutions for your wbsite. You need to host the script on your hosted account before using this analytics service. It has features similar to woopra and google analytics. It shows real time stats of your website and other folders hosted on your account. You'll also find wordpress and joomla plugin that allows you to view short traffic analysis snippet inside dashboard. Piwik also suffers from footprint tracing due to the exposed code and has performance issues due to real time tracking.
Woopra (Free and Paid)
Woopra offers free and paid plans for their web analytics service. Free plan has limitations of impressions, stats features and is pretty much useless if you've large traffic. If you upgrade to premium or paid plan then you'll be able to track large traffic multiple sites and get all the populat analytics features that you find in competitor packages. It has real time chat feature that you can add to your site to chat with visitors. Woopra has wordpress and other CMS plugins for those who want to integrate it.
Mint (Paid)
Mint offers analytics at affordable price of 30$/domain for lifetime updates and stats. Mint shows very extensive data related to your traffic and other parameters that you find on google analytics. It has everything that you get from google analytics and plus your site will not be able to go under footprint trace. Only drawback of mint is that there is no global dashboard to handle multiple domains and you have to manage analytics of individual sites on their respective dashboards. Keeping these few disadvantages aside, mint is one good analytics software worth spending money into.
CPanel Analytics Softwares
Almost every linux shared host offers cpanel or custom control panel with analytics script embeded in it. Some of the scripts calculate raw traffic like - search engine bots, user content bots, terminal browsers and few other data fetchers. These softwares are good to observe the data which is rarely calculated by your web analytics software.
- Analog
- Webalizer
- AWstats
These three analytics scripts can be found on almost every linux shared host. Unless you've some specific tracking needs, these scripts are rarely needed. Non-cpanel hosts have their own custom scripts for analytics which you can see in your control panel dashboards.
Stat Counters
These days very few sites use stat counters as people are talking a lot about google analytics. Though these counters have less features than analytics, some counters offer features which are enough for the need of small sites. Stat counters offer visible or invisible counters on your site, so you need to select the javascript code appropriately.
- Histats - This is real time stat counter, has powerful tracking features like keywords, search engine, geolocation and few other action based features. It is similar to clicky analytics but interface is purely based on flash and is cluttered in comparison to getclicky.
- Statcounter - It has limitation of 250,00,000 impressions per site. SC offers some excellent analytics features but still they don't promote the service like analytics, but more of counter.
- Gostats - Visible hit counter but offers features similar to statcounter and getclicky. Premium version allows hidden code for stats.
- Koego - It's remote hosted counter service that is more suitable for blogs than websites. It offers excellent set of tools for you to use.
I've tested few more analytics software but didn't found them worthy of brief review in this hub. You can try these analytics services if you are not satisfied with any of the analytics service mentioned previously on this hub. Crazyegg
- Slimstat
- Tracewatch
- Open Web Analytics
- Firestats
- Reinvigorate
- Foxmetrics
- Goingup
- Wordpress Stats (for wordpress hosted sites)
I hope the information in this hub is useful for you. If you know any other analytics service not mentioned in this hub then feel free to comment.
