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Depending on your site host, you should have access to raw site data which includes reffering URLs, navigation within your site, page exits, search engine refferals and so on. Your host should also offer some type of online program to review these log files. If you are looking for a low cost application to dive further into your logs, take a look at WebLog Expert.
I did the month long free trial of opentracker.net, which I loved, but when it got down to signing up, I started looking around to see what I could get for the same price(or free) with no link showing on my pages. I already got a decent stats package with my host, but wanted more detail such as clickstream analysis, and page by page history (i.e. they started on home page, then clicked on bonus page after 30 seconds, then clicked on xyz review after 45 seconds). To me, this is critical to see if the layout and flow of your site is consistent with your vision for the site. I ended up doing a free account at http://www.statcounter.com which provided some of this for free.
What I ended up paying for was something completely different. VisitorVille provides all of the above with a twist: they show you your site in a 3D environment where each of your pages are high rise buildings in a city, and the visitors to your site are people walking around between the buildings in real time. For people like me that obsess about each visitor, it is awesome. They have the added benefit of enabling a “live chat” ability as part of your tracking. So you can see someone clicking around on your site, right click on them and say chat, and a live chat type window will pop up asking if they have any questions (or whatever you want it to say). This can be done with or without having a live chat icon on your pages. If you have less than 200 uniques a day it is only $15 or so a month. They also offer traditional “report style” reporting like everyone else which is useful for aggregate information.
Reading the above it sounds like I am a salesman for them (and I did sign up as an affiliate), but I am really tight with funds for my sites, but this was one I paid for with no regrets. BTW I should mention that you can monitor multiple sites for the same price. You price only goes up if you have more than 200 daily uniques across all sites you are monitoring etc.
I am still new so I don’t know if I can put my aff link here, but here it is. Mods remove it if it is a no-no.
http://www.visitorville.com/?id=590CBW
Statcounter works well.
I used it till I got on Google Analytics…that program is awesome and free! (There is a wait list though. I waited about 4 weeks)
Statcounter is great. I use both their free and paid versions – perfect for what I need.
I use statcounter.com as my baseline tracker for new or lower traffic sites. It give pretty decent information. For high traffic sites you need to look at more robust systems, but they cost…
Tip for all contemplating between free tracking providers: don’t use Extreme Tracking – or at least don’t do it if you are not extremely confident, because everybody can check those stats. Bingobugle.com is a fine example of this, just click the icon found at the bottom of the page to see their stats.
I use StatCounter and Google Analytics. Google pretty much blows any other stats package away, and it’s free (just the waiting list as mentioned). Used to be Urchin before Google bought them, which was known as one of the top weblog analyzers out there. I still use StatCounter as well, as I like how their daily reports are presented, and it’s easier to figure out who is a real person visiting your site (where they came from and where they went), you have to dig a little in Google Analytics to get to this data.
Still waiting on Google Analytics for my own site, but I did get to peak at 4flushs stats and it is awesome!
