After recently launching the new Creative Slice website we had the opportunity to upgrade our webstats package. While AWStats was working relatively well the results were always exaggerated and we were not able to track a visitors path through the site.
So after reading multiple reviews and trying out Web CEO and ClickTracks (nice windows interface but no Apple or Linux support), we setup Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) which does a very thorough job of capturing everything one could want in a web stats package (including adwords campaign integration). However the Google Analytics interface takes some learning and results are delayed by up to 24hrs.
Then we found Mint, a simple stats package which installs directly on your server and offers incredibly detailed and easy to read results. While we will continue to keep Google Analytics to log adwords results and for the more advanced features (we especially enjoyed the site overlay feature) Mint is clearly the every day winner for Creative Slice and for our clients because of the following:
- Real time reporting.
- An active community of programmers developing plugins (Pepper) to add functionality.
- Results are easy to quickly read, understand and act on.
- Installs directly on your server (unlike Google Analytics which links to the google site via javascript every time a visitor enters your site)
Please leave a comment, we enjoy hearing your feedback and/or questions.