I’ve been using Google Analytics for most of my websites for quite some time. Philosophically, I’d prefer a self-hosted solution though. In the past I’ve used Webalizer and I still use awstats for my ad-hoc, static website, but these programs are a bit primitive and limited compared to Analytics.
Of the newer programs that I’ve been looking into Piwik looks the most promising to me, but there’s also Obsessive Website Statistics which looks pretty reasonable. W3Perl looks pretty, but seems rather spartan.
An example of Piwik in action
One of the things that has made me a bit shy of Google Analytics is its reliance on JavaScript, a dependence that means that I can’t gather statistics about robots or other user agents lacking JavaScript support. On the other hand, this method lets you gather much more data for the clients that do support JavaScript. Piwik depends on JavaScript in the same way as Google Analytics does. This can be seen as either an advantage or a disadvantage depending on your view on this issue.
I’d have to install Piwik to determine my view…
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