Ask HN : Please Suggest a Real Time Web Analytics Tool

[theone]

For some time I've been using Clicky for my real time analytics. But now that free period is expired, i have to buy a pro version. Before buying I thought it would be better if I could get some opinion on other alternatives as well.

Please share your experience with real time analytics.

[patio11]

I mean this in the nicest possible way: if your time to learn a new analytics tool is cheaper than the $100 or so it costs for Clicky for a year, I would reevaluate whether you need real time analytics. Are you sure staying glued to a constant stream of updates is a productive use of your time at this stage in your startup's life?

[Mystalic]

Mint has not let me down: http://haveamint.com

It's a self-hosted solution, and you can see how people are coming in via referrals, SERPs, etc. in real-time.

[sachinag → Mystalic]

We use Mint and GA. GA for goals and long-term trend planning and all that stuff; Mint purely to see the source of traffic spikes and search keywords that are driving traffic. I've been told that there's good stuff in Peppermill, but haven't been bothered to investigate. (Avinish is pretty insistent that you don't try to track the same stuff with different programs, otherwise you'll go mad trying to reconcile.)

[Jem → Mystalic]

Echoing that. I have 6 Mint licenses, and have recommended it to several clients. It's good stuff.

[borga → Mystalic]

I second that too. It's a nice application and cheap.

[roachsocal]

I would stick with Clicky. If your traffic is under 100,000 pageviews / day, I haven't found a better one.

The founders are very responsive and there's a good community built around it. I use their REST API to actually integrate popularity into my site. Works great.

Sign up here: http://getclicky.com/27959

[paraschopra]

You can signup for a free beta for the product I have been developing: http://www.wingify.com/

In addition to real time analytics, it provides built-in behavioral targeting and multivariate testing (website optimization) capabilities.

Mail me at paras@wingify.com if you are interested

[trefn]

We're working on http://mixpanel.com right now. It's centered around tracking user behavior & interactions, which makes it a great complement to GA.

Signups are open. Feel free to email me at tim@mixpanel.com if you are interested & have questions.

[ivankirigin]

http://chartbeat.com is super duper awesome

[buro9 → ivankirigin]

The Page Load Time numbers for your end users are really useful.

I think it's an oft-neglected metric that is a real difference for your users. You can assess in real time whether a reduced image size, or some different HTML has actually made a perceivable difference in speed to your users.

The translation of this speed into revenue is also something else.

Fuzzy made-up numbers: Above 5 seconds, people leave. Above 2 seconds, people tolerate. Get the page load below 2 seconds, people stick. Get the page load below 1 second and the site starts to become invisible to them and they become highly productive.

[timr → ivankirigin]

...unless you hit the upper limit of 5,000 simultaneous users on your site. Then, it's only sort of awesome.

[_sgo4 → timr]

And how many sites would that ever apply to? Like, 10 total sites?

[timr → _sgo4]

It applies to us. Maybe it's a bigger problem than you think.

(Edit: I just looked at clicky. It's great, and looks like it has a lot of features that we'd use, but your most expensive plan isn't even close to the capacity we would need.)

[_sgo4 → timr]

I dont think it's a big problem :) Justin.tv is certainly amongst the top 1% of sites in the world, in terms of traffic. If you have a site that has more than 5,000 simultaneous users, you are a very very large site. There are very few sites that can claim that kind of traffic.

There aren't many products meant for tracking a site like that, and the ones that do cost thousands per month. You are paying just $10 for chartbeat. They are probably losing a lot of money on your account just on the bandwidth consumed.

I mean in the nicest possible way, but we don't have any desire to track sites that big. The largest we allow is 500,000 daily page views, and sites that big are paying us at leat $100 per month.

[richesh]

I created this page for you, it might help to collect and rate all your options and reasons here:

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/62_What_Is_The_Best_Real...

[dhimes → richesh]

One comment on your page: you don't need a spare server for mint. It's just javascript, and resides on your site. It's no sweat at all to install.

[richesh → dhimes]

The installation points out that you need Apache and MySQL server. I wouldn't want to run this on my production server, so if I was to use Mint I would prefer another server.

[imp]

Been using Clicky Pro for a year now and I like it. I use both it and Google Analytics.

[slig → imp]

+1 I'm still on the 30-dray trial and I'm considering paying for it.

[richesh]

I paid $60 for Clicky for 12 months ($5/month). This is the best service out there, I switched from Google Analytics to Clicky and I've been so happy and its 60 bucks well spent!

[froo]

I liked Woopra when it first came out - http://www.woopra.com/

[catone]

I used to use http://www.w3counter.com/ and never had any problems with it. I honestly don't know how it compares to the rest mentioned here, though, as I have never used them.

[zacharypinter]

Are there any generic event tracking services?

I'd like to be able to log generic events (either serverside or clientside) and then aggregate and display the information in a useful format.

Most of these sites seem to be based on browser sessions.

[davidw]

antirez' thing is here: http://lloogg.com/ - looks like it's still in closed beta, but I bet he'd let people from here have a crack at it.

[apgwoz → davidw]

I like lloogg. My biggest complaint is that if you refresh the console, you lose the aggregate statistics, which is annoying. I haven't used it in a few months though, so maybe that's been fixed.

[udfalkso]

http://reinvigorate.net has been great for me. I am curious what else is out there though, thanks for bringing up the topic.

[theone → udfalkso]

But Reinvigorate is in Beta mode and one needs a key for registering on it. Moreover is there any daily limit on page views it can track?

[dimarco]

We use Woopra for realtime web stats. It now handles HTTPS and has a pretty neat desktop client. We've yet to dive into it's API, but it's available.

[_sgo4]

You basically have four real options for real time analytics, and they all either cost money, or are in beta and soon will cost money.

1. Chartbeat. $10/month. Pretty slick, honestly, especially if you only care about "right now".

2. Woopra. Free while in private beta. Getting accepted into the beta typically takes several weeks. Used to see tons of complaints about bugs and inaccurate stats. Seems to be less of an issue these days.

3. Mint. $30 per site. Self hosted / installed. Plugin system to add custom functionality.

4. Clicky. My personal favorite. Over 100,000 sites use it, so it must be at least pretty good, right?

Disclaimer: I made Clicky.

[richesh → _sgo4]

Great job and a great product! I do have one concern which is that the site is very slow and the scripts on our pages take considerable milliseconds to get. on an average twice as much as Google Analytics. Any reason for this? Also, if we make it so that the scripts load after the page has loaded, will this cause any issues?

I guess I should post this on support

[_sgo4 → richesh]

Unlike Google, we are a small company and don't have millions to throw at hosting data centers all around the world on insanely fast connections. So it is very understandable that our code loads a bit slower. It is certainly a high priorty that our service has as little effect as possible on third party sites, but competing with Google is tough business!

[richesh → _sgo4]

What if you put the scripts on Amazon EC2 (S3 or CloudFront), this will alleviate your server load and put it on Amazon's backbone.

My startup uses Amazon EC2 for hosting etc, and so far I've been very happy. We are not big either, actually we are a two-man team and definitely smaller than even you guys :) But Amazon seems affordable.

Just a thought, but no worries I think the service is still tremendous. Keep up the great job!

[theone → _sgo4]

Good Job Done !!!! Clicky is nice specially that SPY Feature rocks. Just have a query does the Daily Pageviews limit are very stringent.

[_sgo4 → theone]

Thanks. If you compare us to any other analytics servic that charges money, I think you will find our prices for the amount of page views you can track are amongst the very lowest in the business. In fact, as far as I know, we are the lowest. I invite you to prove me wrong!