(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:27 am)
NOTE: This article covers the OLD version of Google Analytics at the time of this writing. The current version of Analytics, launched in 2007, is much different.
At the end of October, I moved to a new server and decided to stop using the web traffic logging provided by Mint. There were three reasons behind this decision:
- I was spending way too much time checking my stats.
Someone mentioned to me that the size of my WordPress database was surprisingly large. Let me guess…you’re running stats? went the comment.
I was reading in the old host’s acceptable use policy for databases that stat logging was specifically disallowed. Ooops.
So I dropped Mint and tried surviving on Google Analytics and the free version of Statcounter. That experiment has ended today, and I’ve decided to reinstall Mint.
Why I Track Stats
Since the vast majority of blog visitors do not leave comments, watching web statistics is one of the primary feedback mechanisms that help me assess what’s going on with my writing. The raw numbers of interest to a blogger are page views and unique visitors; it’s very satisfying to see the numbers slowly rise over time. When there’s a big spike in traffic, that often means that there is something interesting going on elsewhere on the Internet with my name attached to it somehow, and that’s good to know. Also of interest are search terms used to find the site, popular content, and who has linked to me. To a lesser extent, I’m also interested in what outbound links people are clicking on. This gives me a view of how people are using the site, what’s popular, what’s not, and what’s surprising. I once saw a whole bunch of hits from a webmail system from a university, and I later learned that The Printable CEO™ stuff had been making the rounds there. Fascinating! All three stat trackers I’ve mentioned rely on Javascript to tickle a webservice on a server to log a visit. The advantage of these services over regular web server log analyzers (Analog, Webalyzer, HTTPAnalyze) is realtime statistics; I can see what’s going on at any time of the day to watch trends unfold. With a server log package, the stats are usually available at the end of the day, when it’s too late to do anything about a rise in traffic. Anyway, the javascript-based stat trackers require that there’s a webservice for the database to communicate with. For Google Analytics and Statcounter, the servers are under their control. With Mint, you use your website as the server (requirements: a PHP-enabled web server and a MySQL database). Here’s how they compare:Comparing Cost
- Mint costs $30/site, and logs everything to your own MySQL database.
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Google Analytics is free and doesn’t have any limits I know of. UPDATE: It might actually not store data past a month, not sure.
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Statcounter is free for up to 100 logged visits at a time. For site that gets more than 50-100 hits a day, you’ll need to pay a monthly fee (minimum: $9 for 1000 hits logged, $29 gets you 25K).
I keep the free version of StatCounter enabled because I’ve always used it, so I can see the the history of web traffic from the day I started blogging.
Comparing Realtime Utility
- Mint reports activity to the minute, and is extendable through plugins (called “Peppers”) that add additional tracking capabilities. You can get a list of Mint plugins to see what extensions have already been authored.
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Statcounter is also up-to-date on a minute-by-minute basis. However, the aforementioned log limit for the free version makes trendwatching over several days difficult without paying at least $29/month. Since Mint itself costs $30 for one-time use, it’s a better deal.
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Google Analytics is not up-to-the-minute. It seems to take between 4 hours-24 hours to update with the latest data. This is far better than the week it took when the service was hammered by new registrants, but still Mint and Statcounter handily trounce it. Google Analytics is getting faster, but the delay is such that I don’t feel it’s particularly real-time.
Comparing Quality of Experience
Mint’s front end is attractive, robust, and highly useful. The base installation is good for tracking data over a period of time, searches, and referrers. With extensions, you can track downloads, outclicks, and trends, all within the same slickly-designed GUI. Thumbs up! Very Web 2.0! The one thing that is missing is visitor tracking; I know there is a SessionTracker plugin, but it’s not as useful as Statcounter’s implementation.
Statcounter looks more like an old-school web app, but it provides lots of useful ways of digging through the actual behaviors of your site visitors. In this regard I like it better than Mint, particularly for its visitor tracking capabilities. You can start with a hit from a search result, and then track the trail of page visits to see how people are exploring your site. The SessionTracker pepper for Mint does allow you to see visitor paths, but it doesn’t let you track from the very first hit. It is essentially a stand-alone plugin co-existing in the same UI shell, so it can’t integrate the data from other parts of Mint (i.e. the keyword search data is is not cross-referenced into the session trail). Statcounter also seems to do a better job of reverse DNS lookup to convert numeric IP numbers to their domain names without making you wait; they probably cache the DNS information. While Mint CAN do the reverse lookup with the XXX Strong Mint plugin, it takes a lot of time and you will have to wait many seconds for each lookup to complete, not to mention that this may bog down your server if you have a large log; this is not the sort of thing you would want to do on a shared server.
Google Analytics feels to me like a hybrid Web 2.0 application, and at first glance provides TONS of useful information and pretty graphs. It has a neat graphical overlay of popular clicks and their position on the page, neat mapping capabilities, flexible date range-based statistical sorting, and a full complement of export capabilities. It also integrates with your AdWords campaigns and gives you all the information you need to track the performance of your content. However, for my needs I don’t find it particularly fun to use because the information I need is buried under layers of menus. I can’t track session trails through the site in the way I’d like to. It takes several clicks through several menus to get the referrer, keyword search, and popularity results, and I can never remember which is which. Factor in its lag time in updating, and the experience is less than satisfying. With Mint, I can get the big picture of what’s going on with my web traffic all on one page. With Google Analytics, I’ve got to dig through a lot of reports. Plus, Mint just looks better.
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p>In short, Mint does a great job of giving me the information I need to see trends. Statcounter does a better job of showing how people (anonymously, I should mention) are spending their time exploring the site over a period of time. Google Analytics does a lot of that too, but requires too much clicking and page refreshing to build the same picture, with less detail than either Statcounter or Mint. Perhaps all this clicking and raw data is the nature of “web analytics”, and I just don’t get it.
So Mint is Back Online. Long live Mint!
I’m sure there are tons of other tracking services that I could look into, but these are the three I have the most experience with. For inexpensive, realtime tracking of web traffic, I’ve found that I needed Mint back. While I had it uninstalled, I found myself going back to Statcounter every 30 minutes to get that “big picture”, because Google Analytics just wasn’t updating fast enough AND it’s cumbersome to get at the stats that I care most about:
- Current traffic levels by the hour and day
- What’s popular
- Where links are coming from
- What’s being downloaded
- What outgoing links are being clicked
With Google Analytics, getting that information (if it’s even available) takes 8-10 clicks in nested menus. With Mint, it’s just a matter of visiting the page and looking at it. If I was running actual web marketing campaigns on my site, I’m sure Google Analytics would be far more useful, but as that’s not the case it’s not for me. If I had the money I would use Statcounter because I like its drill-down features.
Screenshots: Mint
Here’s what the Preferences screen looks like. It’s all yummy DHTML / AJAX / Web 2.0. Very pretty and functional (in FireFox, anyway).
And here’s my main Mint screen. Additional peppers installed (aka plugins): Outclicks, DLoads, Trends, Notification (this sends me an email if some interesting event occurs, like more pageloads in an hour than is normal), SessionTracker, and Sparks.
I should note that I have been tracking data for less than a day, so there aren’t a whole lot of stats to look at. But you get the idea.
Another note: I recently dropped DLoads because this was apparently the cause of the massive server spikes that got me kicked off my old server…I think DLoad’s method of reading files into PHP to buffer files caused much memory overusage. I switched to Steve Smith’s Download Counter as an alternative.
Dave’s Assessment: This is a good middle ground between the nutty data overload that is Google Analytics, and the more intimate tracking provided by StatCounter.
» Link to Mint home page. And a bonus link to digital renaissance man Shaun Inman, the creator of Mint.
Screenshots: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is capable of displaying a lot of interesting data and reporting, but it’s just overkill for me. There is so much reporting that I’ve just hilighted a few of the features here:
Here’s the main “executive summary” screen for Google Analytics, when you first log-in. Note that there isn’t any data for today yet in the system (it’s already 830AM here).
The top content on my site, apparently. I had to hunt-and-click through the menus on the left to get here.
The always-interesting “So how did people get to my site?” referring sources page.
I’ve never seen this page before, but it looks interesting.
Dave’s assessment: Should I ever run a web marketing campaign and needed to learn how to use all this data, I would look at this again.
» Link to the Google Analytics home page.
Screenshots: StatCounter
The very Web 1.0 main page of StatCounter. Very straightforward. Since I’ve been using StatCounter from the time I started blogging, I can see the traffic plotted all the way back by adjusting the date range. It’s a pain in the ass to do that in Google Analytics (and it doesn’t seem to save data for more than a few months anyway).
I drilled down into the hits for the root page of “davidseah.com”. Since I only have 100 hits logged, and am getting about 200-300 hits per hour, I don’t see much detailed information. Here you can see, though, that there’s one user who has returned 33 times. And he/she uses a Mac! :-)
This is a different user than the one above, but you can get an idea of what StatCounter allows you to do by drilling further down into the stats. You can actually see what a specific user is doing, and where they’re coming from.
You may not know their name, but StatCounter is able to trace the browsing habits of a specific user over time, IF you have enough historical data stored in the databases. That comes back down to how many log entries you’re paying for. If I 25,000 log entries ($29/month), I’d be able to see quite a bit more history and build a better picture of what people are really doing.
BTW, the blurred-out data in the screenshots is just the IP address and reverse-lookup. It’s some cable modem network in the Netherlands. StatCounter doesn’t give you the magical ability to look up personal names.
Dave’s assessment: StatCounter allows you to track the browsing patterns of individual users easily, which is something that Mint and Google Analytics can’t touch. If I was trying to understand the psychology of my visitors to build some kind of mental image of my core audience, I might use something like this. If this kind of tracking bothers you, you might consider blocking cookies from these sites.
» Link to the StatCounter home page.
3 WEEKS LATER…
It’s January 4th, and today I was LifeHackered, which took down my site. The helpful folks at my hosting company (FutureQuest) narrowed down the issue to Mint, which was causing server load spikes in excess of 100+. After they disabled it, loads dropped down back to normal.
I thought about this for a bit, and thought that since Mint peppers don’t share data, they might be invoking a LOT of extra database and CPU activity for every page load. And they might be doing it inefficiently. I uploaded another instance of Mint (the old one was locked out) and used that to change the configuration to unload everything except the default pepper. Then I asked FutureQuest to re-enable it, which they did cautiously. Since then the load apparently has been OK (Mint hasn’t been taken offline again)…2693 page loads in the last hour, and the load has averaged between 1.5 and 3.5. Not great, but not terrible.
Still, this brings up some high traffic considerations when using Mint on a shared server:
Beware of Peppers. They may cause excess CPU utilization, and get you kicked off your shared server when you experience even moderately-high traffic. And yes, I am already cacheing. I see that there’s a benchmark flag built into Mint since 1.24, which might be helpful in tracking down which Peppers are the culprit. However, I’m not sure if it benchmarks the actual ping on each pageload. The default installation by itself seems to work fine.
The Fresh Look is Fleeting. Mint is designed to give you an at-a-glance sense of what’s going on with your website. When you get a lot of traffic, that freshness is harder to catch. I spend a lot of time looking at unique referrers, and when they’re ALL unique and happening several times a minute, you quickly lose ’em. This is probably when using a regular log analysis tool would make more sense, especially if it can tell you WHEN certain pages became popular.
19 Comments
I’m officially getting minted. This was a great comparative review. I’ve used ClickTracks, which was around $10K. It was great for complex analysis like which keyphrases were the ones on which people made purchases. But, it was cumbersome if I wanted to see simple data like a complete list of keyphrases and their volume numbers. I still prefer AWStats for the basics like unique visitors, page views, and the like, but now I’m going to try Mint.
The one thing that still bothers me is the discrepancies I saw between the stats programs. I saw differences of up to 30% between ClickTracks, AWStats, and Urchin (which is now Google Analytics).
Thanks for the review!
Using Analytics as well at the moment and I cannot agree more with you regarding the difficulty to find information!
Will give Mint a shot…once I will get myself a shiny blog hosting service!
Keep up the good work!
Nathan.
Justin: I’ve noticed similar discrepencies as well in total #s between the various stat programs. Some of the factors, I suspect, are how the javascript actually works (or doesn’t), how good the package is at ignoring your own visits, pageviews that aren’t counted by the javascript that ARE included in the full weblogs, and maybe things like automated bots running up the count. I’m curious whether some of my anti-spam blocking software, which intercepts page requests before they load, are counted as hits by something like AWStats.
Nathan: One nice thing about Mint is that it doesn’t require a blogging package…it’s completely stand-alone. It does require licensing to a specific website.
I’ll post some screen shots so people can see.
I actually use Analytics and Mint simultaneously. I know, it’s fairly redundant, but I do love the up-to-the-second recording of Mint locally and the in-depth information of Analytics. Also, if you ever decide to integrate Adsense and/or explore Adwords campaigns, you might more enjoy the Analytics features on that end.
I love Mint. It’s a great snapshot of who’s on and what they’re reading, and is invaluable in helping tweak your content to better serve incoming traffic or optimize how that content’s accessed.
I’m curious about one thing – Are you limited in the # of databases with your host? Why not run Mint on its own database and your WordPress db on another? Realistically, it’s probably 6 of one, half-dozen of the other, but it might help keep load down and would allow you to disable Mint quickly and easily without impacting your WP db.
Nice review David. I didn´t know about Mint until now and I´m considering switching to it.
I´ve been using Analytics for a while and I´m pretty tired of all layers of not-so-useful information. Otherwise, the dashboard map and bar/line graphs are interesting.
Mint remembers me a lot of (mt) AccountCenter. Pleasant and simple, highly intuitive. The only thing I´d miss on Mint are graphics, dashboard.
Travis: That’s what I figure…right now I don’t know how any of that AdSense/Adwords stuff really works :-) Going through the site again to take screenshots, I do have to say I’m pretty impressed with the breadth/depth of the reporting. It’s very slick.
Mark: Good idea. I actually did configure Mint to use its own DB for just those reasons. It might have made a difference on the old host too, now that I think about it, because they used a pool of DB servers. I’m not sure what my current host is doing.
I use Mint and I love it. I also use Analytics, but rarely actually check stats using it. Like you said – it’s rather clunky.
Very thorough and fair review Dave. You bring up a great point about the limitations of the Pepper API. As it stands, if two Pepper want to interoperate the developers need to cooperate on their implementations. Providing an API-level hook that allows one Pepper to extend another is a really powerful idea. While reading the concrete example of one specific use in your post something clicked and I have a pretty good idea of how this functionality could be added to the API. So thanks for the thought-food—not to mention the favorable review!
You know Slimstat is a good one too(from the Shortstat fame). And also has a JS version too. I prefer it over giving user details to another host say Google which is against sites privacy polices so I’m not lying to them!
Hope that isn’t too off topic. Oh and it’s free.
Nathan: Yo man! Now that I’m back on the Mint express, I spent a lot of day checking it. It runs much faster on the new server. Sort of a double-edged sword, because it’s that much easier to get distracted :-)
Shaun: That sounds great! Looking forward to seeing what comes out of that insight. Thanks for making such a great product…it certainly has sucked me back in.
Null: I looked at Slimstat…looks nice! Maybe I will install it on my Dad’s blog so he has something to look at it :-)
Ever seen/used crazyegg? (http://www.crazyegg.com) It’s a comparable price to mint, and I’d be interested in people’s thoughts on it.
I’m using Mint and I’m very happy with it.
Great review anyhow!
Thank you for this David, I was actually considering Mint, Google Analytics is so hard to navigate through. This review is very helpful for me and I’ve bookmarked it for future reference. :)
I am actually quite happy with mint (truth be told).
I’ve had pretty much the same experience as you. The other reason I liked Mint so much is that it is on your own server. When I was using Analytics, I would sometimes see the browser’s request to the Google server taking a long time and I didn’t want that slowing my page loads down.
I really like the RSS feed for the unique referrers too :)
Have you tried the new version of Google Analytics. I’d be interested to know if you would still choose Mint
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/05/google-analytics-is-re-launched-do-these-five-things-first-in-v2.html
Hi I would like to know if you got any Open Source Analytics code written in PHP.
I would like to try to interact with Adwords API and set up campaign dynamically using my traffic stats.
Drop expensive keywords on the fly based on real time stats. Eg. if I pay 0.1 for a keyword that brings me 100 visitors a day but they only visit one page, then I would like to drop it as it isn’t really efficient.
If anyone can help it is much appreciated.
Frank
no offense but this seems like a haphazard review that doesn’t really try to get to know googles style. It has a steeper learning curve and by your language it appears you dont want to be annoyed with learning a new style of doing things.
I feel like you didnt even try you had the winner picked prior to the review process.