Absolutely, the biggest choice is if you want to host the stats solution yourself or not.

Of course, you have to have access to the server, and the tool has to be self-hosted.

Thanks for sharing your experiences!

On to Google Analytics, I just recently acquired an account. The server performance has been acceptable. I am still learning my way around it, but I already don’t like the fact:
You can’t use your back button when mining data. This is a real pain. I have only tried this in Firefox.

I have not found a screen where you can view the landing page & keyword used to find that page. Hopefully they will continue to make this a better web analytics solution.

Interesting to hear. I’ve experienced the same with long response times plus the fact that the Google Analytics JavaScript file is a hefty 17 KB is most likely being a factor.

When it comes to alternatives mathing your criteria , I don’t have any good suggestions, I’m afraid. If you only want simple JavaScript-based stats, I like StatCounter a lot.

I’ve been trying to find an analytics tool that can be self-hosted, or at the very least, be proxied through our site. Mint looks somewhat interesting, but I could not find a free demo of it. The PHP/mysql nature of it makes me want to load test before I buy.

Anybody know of a self-hosted analytics tool they like?

I really don’t want to home-brew it.

I’m sorry, I just heard that you need an invite to use it. When I started using it, I could just use my Google account and start with the service right away.

And unfortunately I can’t find any way to invite people from my account. At least this link explains their current situation: http://www.google.com/analytics/progress.html.

Yes, StatCounter is added through an included script, a short inline script with some parameters, and a noscript block that has an image.

I don’t really know how it would work as a DOM tracker.

The statCounter: how is it added to the page with a JS and and image?

The excellent experiment to turn Extreme Tracker from a kludgey inline JS anno 1990s into a DOM tracker would this apply to the statcounter to: the kludgyness?

Geez…
That sounds like a lot. Maybe I need to look into this. God knows one can accomplish many things in 17kb.

Why? Because my first evaluation showed me a JS file of 17 KB. This is just incredible (it’s outrageous, to be honest), and an absolute no-go. Related to my homepage, this would just double everything you need to download. And adding that the 3 KB size of the Mint script almost made me refuse Mint, you’ll probably know what I mean.

(Okay guys, I’ll nonetheless give GA a try, but only temporarily. I love fast web sites, and I don’t want to bother my users by scripts where they are the last who benefit.)

Thanks for sharing!
That does indeed sound like good news if it happens.

Hello Kalle,

Thank you for your email.

I understand that you would like to change the date format and time zone
of your reports. At this time, all reports are displayed in the American
date format and in Pacific Standard time. However, we understand the need
for users to have reporting in different time zones as well as different
date formats and will take your thoughts into account as we move forward
with our product development.

We greatly appreciate any feedback or suggestions for ways we can improve
Google Analytics. Your comments provide us with the assistance we need to
optimize our program, so please continue to give us feedback in the
future.

If you have any additional questions or concerns, please visit our
Analytics Support at http://www.google.com/support/analytics.

Sincerely,

The Google Analytics Team

I thought that this might be interesting for anyone else that are disturbed by the “awful” US date format ; )

Ah, interesting.

The demand for Google Analytics surpassed even our highest expectations and as a result some customers may temporarily experience report-update delays. All data continues to be collected and no data has been lost. We are currently adding resources to ensure high-quality service. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Ha ha, I know what you mean!
I use two here for the moment, but if Measure Map will ever give me a chance, I guess it will be three, too…