Best Free Website Analytics Tools
Web designers are often website owners. If you fall into this category, you have probably already realized the importance of knowing and understanding who is coming to your site and what they are doing while they’re there. Whether you are running a blog or an e-commerce site, this information is vital. That’s why it’s key to have a good set of tools providing you with website analytics. There are lots of tools out there, all with different features and different prices. In this post, I’m showing you the best free analytics tools available.
Clicky
Clicky prides itself on providing real time analytics. The UI is very clean and functional, and there is also a dedicated iPhone version.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is probably the most popular free analytics tool available. One of my favorite features is it’s custom reporting.
Reinvigorate
Reinvigorate also provides real-time stat tracking and can alert you when a visitor performs a particular action on your site. It also features heat map technology that lets you see where visitors are clicking.
Piwik
Piwik is open source and is built with PHP and MySQL. To use it, you have to install it on your own server, which is a simple process and only takes about 5 minutes.
Yahoo! Web Analytics
Yahoo! Web Analytics is a free full featured enterprise analytics solution with powerful and flexible dashboards, segmentation tools, and campaign management features.
WordPress.com Stats
If your site runs on WordPress and your not crazy about being overwhelmed with too many features, then WordPress.com Stats might be right for you.
Woopra
Woopra claims to be the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. Judging by the quality of it’s user interface, they might be right.
FireStats
FireStats doesn’t feature a lot of fancy graphs and charts, but some may find this refreshing.
GoingUp
With an AJAX-rich interface, GoingUp! combines powerful web-analytics with top notch SEO tools.
Mint
Okay, Mint isn’t exactly free. However, for only a flat fee of $30 dollars and considering all of it’s features, it might as well be free.
Blog Tracker
Blog Tracker is a light weight analytics tool for blogs.
77 comments
Paula
January 18, 2010Tasty Comment Tannu. Well done.
emsairmailtracking
February 9, 2010I want to use Piwik to trace my website emsairmailtracking.com
Michael P.
March 12, 2010Is the a limit on how long your comments can be? Timed out about 5 times when trying to post a 8 line long comment.
Fabian Ahmadi
March 26, 2010Great article on web analytics tools. I’m trying to increase awareness among the legal community that a web analytics tool is a requirement for any professional website. I think the list you’ve provided here is a great starting point for small law firms interested in getting started collecting data on their website. For anyone interested, I recently posted an article about web analytics specifically geared towards the legal community: PPC and SEO: Why Lawyers Need Web Analytics
KiH
March 30, 2010Mouse tracking is another cool technology to see how your visitors interact with your website. Check out http://www.picnet.com.au/met because they do this and so much more. They’re also close to releasing a version with Google Analytics data integrated in to the system.
iceman
April 13, 2010Is that any tools no need to install script?
Henrik
April 27, 2010Allow me to suggest another new tool.
UserReport.com is a free analytics service that generates detailed statistics about the demographic profile of visitors to a website. The product is targeted towards webmasters and contains a free survey-tool as well as a free feedback-forum called CrowdIntelligence.
Ted Thompson
April 30, 2010Thanks for the list, will have to check some of these out.
Joel Kirkpatrick
June 7, 2010GoingUp is not functional.
They have no end user support.
They have no knowledge base.
They have no community forum.
They do not answer user queries.
Data can ‘go stale’ and there is no fix for that event.
These flaws are more than a year old and have not been addressed by GoingUP.
Get Clicky. They only allow one site per free trial version, you must purchase an upgrade to add any websites to track.
Google Analytics, currently stalled, with no information forthcoming about why data is not being collected or reported. Newly added sites show they detect the codes, and waiting on data, but it does not show and the site does not issue any reports.
This flaw happens with GA about one per year, and it can last more than a month. Just look into the complaints about ‘no data’ and you will find many.
Icann
June 8, 2010Newly added sites show they detect the codes, and waiting on data, but it does not show and the site does not issue any reports.
Tattoo Paper
July 2, 2010Thank you so much for the informative post. For reasons I cannot figure out, Google Analytics has stopped working for me. I have a dialog with a Google employee on their forum but this has not gotten anywhere. Your information will help me take the blindfolds off again as I jump to another analytics tool.
Copenhagenpictures
July 31, 2010Tanxxxxx for this article. Clicky is the service to choose for me
Keep up the good work.
Dan
Innercenter
August 15, 2010I have switched to Site Meter from GA.. good riddance!!
vuitton
August 16, 2010I have a dialog with a Google employee on their forum but this has not gotten anywhere. Your information will help me take the blindfolds off again as I jump to another analytics to
Matt Thomas
August 19, 2010I like just using my server stats.. but statcounter is quite good as well and hidden. Thanks for the great site.
Tad Dishmon
September 27, 2010What? I dont know about that! you got anything to support it?
Paul T
October 16, 2010Which of the analytic tools would you choose over all the others? Ok…. I have 75 sites and climbing right now. Without going into each and every site, is there a way for me to add analytics to each of these sites?
S Rahul Bose
March 5, 2012If you meant, without altering any code in your site at all. No, its not possible.
I guess you dont want to add the tracking code in each page of each of the 75 sites. Guess you would be having some kind of include code that goes into all pages.
May be you could have one include page in one of your 75 sites, and each site include this single page.
Google analytics is quite customizable. Try it.
Ether
October 19, 2010In my opinion a combination of Google Analytics and Mint is the perfect solution. GA for in-depth stats and Mint for real time traffic observation.
declan sullivan
October 29, 2010GoingUp is not functional.
They have no end user support.
They have no knowledge base.
They have no community forum.
They do not answer user queries.
Data can ‘go stale’ and there is no fix for that event.
These flaws are more than a year old and have not been addressed by GoingUP.
Get Clicky. They only allow one site per free trial version, you must purchase an upgrade to add any websites to track.
Google Analytics, currently stalled, with no information forthcoming about why data is not being collected or reported. Newly added sites show they detect the codes, and waiting on data, but it does not show and the site does not issue any reports.
This flaw happens with GA about one per year, and it can last more than a month. Just look into the complaints about ‘no data’ and you will find many.
dcecatiello
November 3, 2010Reading an older book on web analytics. Your opinion on AWStats and ClickTrack? What I’m seeing is that you still need a combination of analytics tools to get complete information.
Petya Miteva
November 17, 2010Hey guys, I actually work for a company which develops our own web analytics solution. The thing is, it all started out with my boss trying to get the most relevant data about his campaigns (it was a matter of life and death) but no tool was good enough. That’s why he got together with a friend and they came up with what is now called Lytiks. We’re trying to incorporate what makes the most sense for any SMB owner or marketer. And of course, I use it myself to track our own traffic. For example, right now I’m going to give you a link with a tag on it, so I can see if anyone clicked on it by segmenting it out
Check it out if you’re curious (it’s also free): http://bit.ly/bKRnZy
Also, we love responding to people’s questions, so shoot us an email if you prefer!
Paul T
November 26, 2010Happy Thanksgiving!!!
ali
March 6, 2011Thank you for the list. What about awstats or webalizer? Are these tools categorized under another name as Website Analytics Tools?
laser training alberta
May 23, 2011I would put my money on goingup… really a nice service… used it and found its service very satisfactory.
Natalie
January 16, 2012Article unfortunately does not cover GoSquared.com at all, which is probably the best tool out there with its easy to understand design, live chat, campaign tracking and all of the features the other platforms have…
Easy Social Media
January 17, 2012I’ve only ever used Google Analytics, and I think I would be very unlikely to stray from this as obviously they have billions of dollars development at their disposal whereas the others are much smaller scale. Still worth knowing whats out there though!