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.
Jan 18, 2010
Tasty Comment Tannu. Well done.
Feb 9, 2010
I want to use Piwik to trace my website emsairmailtracking.com
Mar 12, 2010
Is the a limit on how long your comments can be? Timed out about 5 times when trying to post a 8 line long comment.
Mar 26, 2010
Great 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
Mar 30, 2010
Mouse 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.
Apr 13, 2010
Is that any tools no need to install script?
Apr 27, 2010
Allow 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.
Apr 30, 2010
Thanks for the list, will have to check some of these out.
Jun 7, 2010
GoingUp 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.
Jun 8, 2010
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.
Jul 2, 2010
Thank 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.
Jul 31, 2010
Tanxxxxx for this article. Clicky is the service to choose for me
Keep up the good work.
Dan
Aug 15, 2010
I have switched to Site Meter from GA.. good riddance!!
Aug 16, 2010
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 to
Aug 19, 2010
I like just using my server stats.. but statcounter is quite good as well and hidden. Thanks for the great site.