Via Steven’s post on site tracking, I found out that Sitemeter was tracking rather more than it really should (use of spyware cookies and all that). This is a shame, as I really loved some things about Sitemeter, and none of the alternatives were able to approach the simple and useful reporting Sitemeter provided. I was particularly fond of their Visitor Detail page (note, that’s a link to a screenshot, not Sitemeter), which contains a good summary of a visitor, where they came from, where they went on my site, and other standard info (OS, browser, location, etc…). They only tracked the last 100 visitors, but that was plenty good enough for me, and the service served me well for the past 9 years or so.
Still, they had frequent downtimes, and they’ve done very little to improve the service over the past 9 years, so I’ve always kept an eye open for alternatives. None of the popular services have ever really satisfied me though. Now comes this news of spyware, which is just a crappy situation, and so I’ve decided to remove all instances of Sitemeter from my site. This is most frustrating and I’m not happy with the situation. I’ve removed it from all blog pages as well as my main page. The rest of the site will have to wait a bit while I breath some life into my crappy, antiquated XSLT content management scheme (hopefully this will be completed by this weekend).
I’ve been playing around with Google Analytics for a bit, but they don’t provide the kind of detail that I want for individual visits (though they’re great for collecting general stats). I just installed StatCounter, which kinda, sorta has a page similar to the visit detail page from Sitemeter. But we’ll have to see how that works out. I’ve heard good things about Mint, and I’ve heard that they have a plugin/extension/whatever-they-call-it that approximates Sitemeter’s visit detail page. However, Mint actually costs money (imagine that!) and I don’t want to pay for something that I’m not even sure will work for me.
Anyone know of another good stat package? Anyone actually use Mint? Again, what I’m really looking for is something that will provide details like this screenshot (perhaps with more details on what pages were actually visited (rather than just entry and exit pages)). [thanks to Robert for the link to details on the spyware cookies]
Update: StatCounter’s visit detail page is pretty good, though you have to click through too many pages to get there.