Alternatives to Google Analytics

Google Analytics rocks, really it does, but it’s not the only game in town when it comes to web analytics.

There are a number of reasons you might be looking for alternatives to Google Analytics.

You want two analytics programs — You want to use two analytics packages to cross check for accuracy and for redundancy
You don’t trust Google – You have privacy or other concerns with Google as a company
You need additional functionality – Google just isn’t getting it done for you

Our friends at ConversionChamp give some useful tips on how to find an alternative. But we’ve research many of the options out there, and these are the ones that stand out to us.

Let’s get started.

Clicky

Clicky has a long list of the ways in which it is better than other services, but here are some of the features I like.

Way before Google Analytics got its interface upgrade, Clicky had easy to understand charts and graphs – and a couple of unique (at the time) features too. One of these was its real-time view of who’s on your site. Called Spy, the feature includes countries, referrers, domains and searches and a map you can zoom in on. Clicky also offers the option to see live web analytics while you are on your site, so you can see how many people are visiting the page you are on.

Clicky has two more excellent features: the ability to set up alerts triggered by certain actions on your site, and the option to get analytics for your Twitter account. The Twitter interface looks at senders, recipients, hashtags and links as well as sentiment. Clicky has recently introduced heatmaps and soon plans to include uptime monitoring for paid users, making it a good all-around solution.

It’s got an attractive interface and you can track multiple sites if you upgrade to one of their paid plans. These range from $9.99 to $19.99 a month, with custom plans also available.

GoSquared

The GoSquared web interface is a dashboard with a number of widgets to show important metrics such as traffic, popular content and more.

GoSquared allows you to set custom events and get dashboard notifications.

Plans range from $9-$99 per month, based on the number of pageviews your sites generate.

However you can also unlock additional pageviews by completing certain actions to earn rewards. It’s not clear whether these roll over each month (update: they do!). Once you have used up your monthly pageview allocation, ~~GoSquared stops monitoring till the start of your next month~~ you can’t see data till the start of the next month, though GoSquared keeps monitoring behind the scenes. This could be a problem if you are using it as your main analytics package and get a traffic spike.

Woopra

Woopra also has an attractive web dashboard featuring many of the standard analytics reports.

It’s a great way to instantly view what’s happening on your site.

One interesting feature in Woopra include the ability to track blog authors, categories, comments and search via its WordPress plugin which also allows you to ignore administrators.

It also has customer tagging, a retention report (good to see if your content remains popular with visitors) and the creation of custom events to track. Another of Woopra’s strengths is its filtering capabilities which you can use to refine almost any aspect of web metrics you want to track.

Interstingly, Woopra includes a live chat feature which you can use to talk to your customers the moment they pop up on your site.

KISSMetrics

The headline on the KISSMetrics home page reads “Google Analytics Tells You What Happened, KISSmetrics Tells You Who Did It.”

KISSMetrics is focused on web analytics at the individual level, with the “Customer Lifetime Value” metric being a centerpiece of their analytics reporting. With KISSMetrics you are able to go back and look at an individual’s interaction history.

KISSMetrics has solutions for SaaS, mobile apps, ecommerce platforms and more.

It offers funnel reports, detailed visitor actions and easy ways to segment your visitors and track the user life cycle (which is something you can’t get from other tools). Pricing starts at $49 per month for basic plans, with advanced plans starting at $499 per month.

CrazyEgg

We can’t leave our own Crazy Egg out of the mix. Crazy Egg tracks clicks to improve the User Experience and/or conversion rates on your web pages.

Crazy Egg is superior to the Google Analytics Overlay Report for a number of reasons.

First, Crazy Egg allows you to view clicks as a heat map, confetti map or overlay report or in a list view (which is exportable.) Google Analytics only has an Overlay report.

The confetti map allows segmentation by referral source, keyword, country, time of day, etc.

Second, Google Analytics tracks all clicks to the same URL together. In other words, if you have three links to the same page, the Google Analytics Overlay Report doesn’t differentiate between the three. Crazy Egg does.

Lastly, Crazy Egg provides a scroll map report that shows your visitors scrolling behavior on the page.

Plans range from $9 to $99 per month.

Other Alternatives to Google Analytics

In addition to the services listed above, there are plenty of other analytics packages you can try. Here are some of them:

Advanced Web Stats has a free version which allows you to track goals, geography, navigation, filters, visitor segmentation, server traffic and more. Licensed use starts at $395 though bloggers who review the software can get it for free.
AwStats is the program that most web hosts make available for free (along with Webalizer). It analyzes you server log files and you can find out what robots and spiders do on your site. The trouble with packages like these is that you are not sure what happens after people visit a page on your site.
Chartbeat offers a live dashboard showing data including desktop and mobile users, Twitter links and mentions, traffic sources, page and server load, top pages and more. It includes scroll mapping and the ability to figure out whether visitors are idle or are actually doing something on your site. There’s just one plan at $9.95 a month.
FoxMetrics provides person-level visitor tracking and allows unprecedented customization for tracking events such as installation of software and downloading media. Plans start at $20 a month.
GoingUp adds something to the analytics mix with SEO rank tracking, keyword position tracking, page optimization and additional SEO tools.
Hubspot offers a marketing analytics service focusing on social media and other channels and how these relate to leads, ROI, and search. Prices for its marketing package start at $200 a month.
Mint is hosted on your website. As well as the standard metrics, you can also track feed subscriptions and image search and it has a number of plugins to enhance functionality. There is a one-off charge of $30 for this software.
MixPanel’s strength is conversion funnels and visitor retention tracking. You can set up complex queries easily without the need for programming skill. Pricing is based on event tracking. There is a free level up to 25,000 data points and paid plans start at $150 a month.
Piwik is an open-source software alternative to popular analytics programs which has many of the same features as other solutions.
Reinvigorate offers desktop and web tracking, heatmaps, live visitor tracking, visitor naming, referral tracking and page level statistics with prices starting at $10 per month.
StatCounter offers many of the same features as other analytics programs. There is a free level, with pricing starting at $5 per month.