Mint – Flexible Web Analytics Program

Web Analytic tools are “must have” for anybody running a website. They give interesting insight into your site’s traffic patterns. The tools give data on number of people visiting your site, the search engine used to arrive at your site, the keyword used in the search engine and much more information about every visitor visiting your site.

Web Analytics Association has the following definition for Web Analytics:

Web Analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.

There are lot of freely available web analytic tools and I have used a couple of them for the past 1 year

1. StatCounter
   The free service of StatCounter has limited functionality and you infer less data with more visitors visiting your blog.
2. Slimstat
   Slimstat is a mod of Shaun Inman’s Shortstat and is very similar to Mint except that it doesn’t have the “fresh look”.
3. Google Analytics
   As mentioned in one of my earlier post, I have used Google Analytics for the past 8 months and I found it difficult to get in terms with the user interface. Of all Google products, I believe Analytics has one of the worst navigation interface.

I had heard about Mint statistics package many times and had seen many positive review written about the application. Yet the 30$ price for the license was a big ask from me and hence resisted myself from trying the tool.

However with some Ad revenues coming in I decided to allocate a part of it to “have a mint” :).

I have been now trying the application from the past 1 month and it’s totally worth the money spent. Its probably the only stats tool that you might need for your weblog.

So what’s great about mint ?

• Go have a look at the official website of Mint; Browse through the features and the screenshots and I am sure you will be tempted to try.
• Next have a look a the Live Demo at Designologue. Note that the demo is running the default “Thin Mint” configuration with no third-party Pepper (plugins) installed.

How is it better than other tools?

• The analytics application is hosted on your server and you have complete control over the configuration and the data collected by the analytics tool.
• Its probably one of the best looking statistical tool.
• You can get information about the visitor count, the referrer, the recent pages, browser used by visitor and all other information in a single page (In Google Analytics you have to make at least 10 clicks to gather the ingratiation displayed by Mint)
• You can refresh information displayed by each widget almost instantly.
• The application is extensible in the sense that you could install many third-party peppers(plugins) to extract and display useful information from the statistical data collected by mint.

All in all a great tool to have as part of your website ! So go ahead a “have a mint“. (Be sure to run the Compatibility suite to check if your hosting supports Mint)

If there are any other web analytics package that you use and would like to recommend, please leave a note in the comment section.