What better way to start than with the things I really like:
1. Freshness. The fact I can see results in realtime is great, I used to check Google each morning to see how I was doing (egotistical or what? :p), and this satisfies my urge for more frequent updates.
2. Extensible. I like that it’s extensible and largely open-source (albeit under a commercial license). For instance, one of my favourite add-ins (in Mint speak—pepper) is Session Tracker which shows me recent sessions, and how they got here! I can also have a panel showing info from FeedBurner, so I don’t need to visit 2 sites.
3. Clean. Everything is visible through the one page, and updates are performed in a behind-the-scenes-AJAX-goodness kind of way. Google was a bit too clunky for my liking—it seemed to jump and move around everywhere.
However, there are a few things that I do prefer Google for:
1. Exit ratio’s. These let me know the number of users that would head off elsewhere from a page in my site, this gave me an idea about the stickiness of content—whether I had posts of a high enough value to keep people looking around.
2. Pages per visit. As far as I’m aware this isn’t supported directly in Mint (perhaps there’s some pepper to do this?) and it was again useful to determine how active users were once they came to my site. All helpful in tuning content. For instance, I found that with a few of my Rails articles, over 50% of visitors then visited other pages on my site. A good indicator I’m getting some good traffic of people interested in Rails.
3. Depth of data. Google Analytics also had a number of extremely useful widgets to let me see various bits of info about my top visited content—compare visits over the last month for instance, or show the top referrers for any given page.
4. Length of Visit. I can see how long people spent on any given page, for instance on average people spend around 2mins looking at my homepage, and approximately 5mins for my article on Rails’ validation. Again, this is very useful to determine whether someone is actually reading the whole piece, whether they see it’s not for them soon (or just give up with the incoherence ;).
So, if you like your stats simple, clean, and fresh I’d highly recommend it, especially at just $30. The difficulty I had with installation was largely down to a slightly non-standard configuration. However, I don’t think it provides (nor really intended to provide) statistics as detailed and deep as Google’s.
Anyone have any great Mint add-ons they’ve found and could recommend to fill the stats holes I have?