Darice de Cuba

Last time a wrote about Mint and my stats it was to report some issues I was having. Since then I switched to Simplelog thus starting over with a clean database. This wasn’t necessary but rather my own choice as I wanted a fresh start. Simplelog includes adding Mint to the weblog through the admin so you don’t have to manually add the javascript. Considering Mint is PHP and Simplelog Rails some .htaccess lines are needed to exclude Mint directory from Rails.

With the the fresh install of my weblog I removed all physical files including photos because of Google. My Mint stats where full of Google Images referrers. But that didn’t help much because a month later Google still has everything cached so now my site reports a 404 page. Add the stupidity of people you get that most of them keep clicking away to try getting the images. Even though my 404 page states clearly:

“If you come from Google or other search engine looking for photos, they are not online anymore!”

I know there is nothing you can do about it except blocking all search engine access. But don’t we all want clean traffic? I mean the occasional stray visitors is not bad but if you are a small website like mine with few visitors those people who come looking for anything but your website really becomes annoying.

Recently I read about Clicky which is an online based stats application. The basic package is free with a 21 day premium trial and there is a premium option of $2 a month. I decided to give it a try to compare it to Mint. For a free application it’s not bad and it’s handy for small websites with little visitors. But for lots of traffic Mint wins out in being more synoptic in my opinion. This is more a personal preference. And there always is the downside of having your information kept by a third party. When their servers are down you can’t access your stats, if you use the free package and something goes wrong with your data you can’t do much about it. Even so with the free package your date is only stored for a few weeks.

And most important for me, blocking your own visits. I don’t see that option in Clicky. Maybe I missed it but it records my visits too. I remember when I first started out with my own website and was looking for a stats app, that was the biggest point. No one wants to see their own visits on their website.

Further Mint allows to setup what you want to see with Peppers. I liked the location options of Clicky so I installed Geo Mint pepper. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well, it only shows a few visitors. I haven’t yet looked into it to see if the problem was my installation or the Pepper itself. But that isn’t a real priority as I can see the country through the provider domain.

My 10 must haves for a stats(web analytics) application:

1. Block my own visits
2. Synoptic overview
3. Detailed visitors info
4. Must be able to block images.google
5. Regular update
6. Good support
7. Feed tracker non PHP dependable
8. Nice design
9. Flexible
10. Easy to install

So summing it up if you are really into your web stats Mint is the way to go. But if you don’t have a problem with using a third party and have a reasonable traffic amount Clicky isn’t bad. But again you don’t have that much control over your data, you depend on others.

And as for my own stats issues, hopefully there will be a solution to keep the records as clean and useful as possibly.