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.