As I set up my blog I want to post my minireviews of different components that I find useful. After a brief stint with Google Analytics I’ve convinced myself to buy Mint.
First, a word about how web analytics works. There are really two different classes:
- Log parsers. Your site keeps logs of visitor information in standard log files. There are many packages out there which read those logs and prepare reports. The information they can extract is limited by the kind of data that happens to be logged. A popular example would be AWStats.
- Javascript triggered loggers which interrogate the visitor for additional information and save those data to a SQL database. Examples here would be Google Analytics and reinvigorate. Generally this second option provides you with much more information than the first, but the data are all collected by (for example) Google, stored and analyzed by google, and presented back to you by Google. The examples listed are free to the web site owner, but have a cost in that you are essentially trading away your user’s browsing habit information. This may or may not be a concern for you.
Now back to Mint. Functionally, Mint falls into the second category in that it collects additional information from your users and stores it in a SQL database but with two key differences. First, Mint is a PHP software package that you buy for a one-time price of $30 per domain (sub-domains are included in the main domain license) and install it on your hosting in the /mint subdirectory. So it is running on your own server, and you own the data. Note that you also need to provide it with a SQL database to store data, but for most hosting companies this is a 10 second process to set up a new database, and it will happily coexist on an existing database if you prefer not to create another.