Which web analytics (Google Analytics etc) tools do you use?

Can you start the ball rolling by saying something. I had Google Analytics for Lucifer House. Yet to add for Three Realms. Would look at the information and see if people are coming and bounce rate. But then no clue what to do about it.

I wrote a partial essay and hit the reply button! More than half of that reply went missing!  

I wrote the essay again and this time, I myself had pressed the close button by mistake.  It was a very long essay, like CyberKid's 

Added Bing Webmaster as well but no clue what to do with it either.

Bing Webmaster ( and Google Webmaster Tools - which is more useful than Bing) are not web analytics tools. They only tell you for what search terms your blog was displayed in search results and how many times people clicked on those results.

You can use this data to find out what are the things that you write about which people actually search for. ( Search Traffic > Search Queries )

I use the following web analytics tools.

• Google Analytics
• Clicky - Free for upto 3,000 visits per day
• Piwik - It is like Wordpress Self Hosted. You require hosting for this.

Many here must be familiar with Google Analytics. It is undoubtedly one of the best. As it is from Google, you can safely assume that you will be able to access your traffic data of this day even after 10-20 years.

But there is one thing which I don’t like in GA. It doesn’t tell you what are the pages a particular visitor has viewed on your site. Piwik and Clicky provide this information. (This feature is known as Visitor Log)

The screenshots are for my ICSE Java site (last 17 days) (Click on images for  bigger view)

You can get a list of all your visitors.

On clicking a visitor, you can see all his visits.

On clicking a visit, it shows all the pages the visitor viewed during that visit.

This data is highly useful. If you have many visitors who have a high frequent visit count but viewed only two pages (a blog post page followed by home page) or only one page (the home page), it means that you are not blogging as frequent s your readers expect you to do so. You can draw many more similar inferences from the visitor log.

Another thing I don’t like about GA (and Piwik) is that it doesn’t give accurate visit duration. Visit duration for a page is evaluated as the duration between the page load and the next event. So, if a reader visits a page having a long article and reads it for min and closes it, his visit duration will be 00:00 as there were no subsequent events that took place.

This time I first typed in Word and then copied pasted the content here. 

Only google analytics. 

Some time ago, you said that you were using Piwik also 

ye I used compete and something else too, but since companies care about GA then that's the only thing I use now and removed the rest. 

Recently I came across something called session replay. In session replay, the actions of the user - mouse movements, mouse clicks etc are recorded and you can view like later (like a video). Those who want to explore can check out decibelinsight.com (it offers a trial version of 500 sessions per month). 

Currently using google analytics. Still figuring out how exactly it works. I was quite happy to see my bounce rate then somewhere I found less is good 

Still figuring out how exactly it works.

 Basics or things like goals, funnels, events?

Try http://www.contextera.com which provides analytics on what your user really liked in your site and shared with his social networks. This information is never avaialable with the normal social sharing plugins/buttons.