Is there a faster alternative to Google Analytics?

Question

I like to keep my websites extremely light and fast, but of course I need some kind of user tracking and analytics.

It seems like Google Analytics always takes significant enough processing time that I'd like to replace it with something faster (and/or hosted locally), perhaps having less features.

I really only care about these metrics: browser, OS, referrer, and # hits per page on a given day or week.

Does anyone have any good suggestions, or is Google Analytics really the best option?

Solution 1

It may be the load time that is the main delay. Try hosting the google analytics javascript file locally.

Solution 2

You should try Asynchronous Google Analytics. It loads GA in the background, so the rest of the content on the page is not blocked from rendering:

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html

Additionally, since you first asked this question, Google has upgraded their serving infrastructure. It's now faster, and much more reliable than it was in 2008. For most sites, it's better to use Google's CDN instead of hosting ga.js yourself. Since the official ga.js is on so many sites, most users will have it in their browser cache.

Solution 3

I second hosting the GA javascript file yourself - the only downfall is that if google updates the file your copy will be old and you may miss out on certain features - however you could mitigate this by having a script pull down the latest version each week...

The benefit of hosting yourself is you have complete control over caching etc, and there are less DNS lookups required for your site.

The other issue your probably facing is the delay (which is up to 24 hours) for the data to be updated, but for something that costs nothing I'm not complaining too much :)

Solution 4

I can't believe, that no one has suggested Piwik. In my opinion, it's THE best alternative to Google Analytics out there. It is also coming to full maturity in a couple of weeks.

You should definitely check it out!

Solution 5

a good alternative is reinvigorate. It gives you stats in "real time" and (in my opinion) is a little faster, but it doesn't have as many options as g-analytics.

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Comments

[Kirschbaum]

A good idea, I didn't consider it before, but I realize I can just use cron to grab the new urchin.js every day. Thanks!

[Kirschbaum]

Yes, I could just use cron to get a new urchin.js every night. That's a good idea!

[Liam]

I haven't tested it, but I have read good things about it. It is generally not recommended without a cron job to update it, which rules it out for a lot of shared hosting providers.

[Kirschbaum]

Right. Luckily I can use cron with my hosting provider.

[Llyle]

Sometimes it's better to have facilities such as forums tracked by the hoster's solution.

[kohlerm]

hosting locally has the disadvantage of not using the Google CSN anymore. So even it looks for you like it would be an improvement,people on other continents could see a delay, because the Google scripts would not be hosted nearby anymore

[Bobby Jack]

I don't think it would be about missing features (you're not going to miss a feature you're not using, after all), but more about security holes getting patched that would be the real problem.

[Bobby Jack]

I've never quite understood why this is - I guess I don't fully understand the mechanics of a web browser, even at a very high level. Shouldn't the browser spawn a separate thread for each resource it tries to fetch? Or is this what Google Chrome is all about?

[Chris B.]

If a browser executes javascript, it can write HTML into the page as it renders--so the browser needs to download the javascript resource before it can continue rendering.

[Chris]

Isn't the javascript file only downloaded on the first pageview? Every subsequent pageview would use a cached version.

[I Clark]

If the user has visited any other website using Analytics with urchin.js hosted from Google, then it will be cached in their browser. Downloading it from you will not improve performance.

[sthg]

A good tutorial on how to do this can be found on this site: askapache.com/webmaster/…

[Kirschbaum]

Cool, I'll check it out!

[Roger]

I downloaded ga.js file from google-analytics.com/ga.js and I am hosting it along other js files and css with Google Appengine. It is faster than any other method I've tested till now.

[CoderDennis]

That link leads to a 403 error.

[Leo]

From Google Analytics Help: support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032389?hl=en. Try Save as... analytics.js in Chrome. 'Fail - Blocked', surprise surprise ;)