I have recently started using the Google Analytics for web traffic analysis for one of my projects. Previously using AWStats the difference in two is quite noticeable. It seems like take a giant leap from DOS to Windows Vista.

Google Analytics is free for everyone who has a hit count of 5 million page view per month or less. That is more than sufficient for every person like you and me. Neither our website nor our blogs get that much hits.

Google Analytics was formerly Urchin until they were purchased by Google. It was formerly not free, but months after acquiring them Google opened it up to the world. Presumably to help drive people to use Adwords since it ties in with Analytics so well. Google Analytics is the most powerful free application. It provides a wealth of statistics, a usable interface, and a lot of ecommerce statistics which are not common in free applications. It’s tie in with Adwords is handy if you do a lot of advertising there. It also uses a javascript tag to report the data so you’re not dealing with hosting your own logfiles. The downside is that the data is often 12 hours behind, so it’s not useful for looking at up to the minute stats. But still, the details it provides are worth the wait.

Some more web traffic analysis tools I am exploring have been

  • StatCounter
  • QuantCast
  • MeasureMap
  • SiteMeter
  • DeepMetrix

Currently, exploring the pros and cons of each, will publish a detailed comparison soon.