piksels

Mint vs Google Analytics
Five days ago I decided to purchase a copy of Mint. For those who aren’t familiar with Mint, it is a web analytics program (tracks visitors, referrals, popular pages, etc).
I had read about Mint several times, and even visited their website once or twice before, but never decided it was worth forking up $30 for, until now.

I’ve been using GoogleAnalytics for about 1,5 years now, and it is truly great. There is so much to love about GoogleAnalytics: it’s free, it’s accurate, it’s relatively easy to use, and it’s possibilities are endless. You can track visitors, traffic sources, keywords, content, marketing campaigns, etc. You can do so much with it, that it is unbelievable that it is free.

Mint can’t even do half of what GoogleAnalytics can, and costs $30 more, so why did I switch? Because I was curious. But luckily they ended up being the best 30 dollars I spent last week, and here’s why:

Fast & Lightweight
Mint is fast. Very fast. Both for tracking visitors as well as displaying data. The visitor tracking script is less than half the size of Google’s, so for the people worried about bogging down their website with nasty scripts, Mint is definitely for you.
From the moment I open my browser, using Mint it takes me less than 8 seconds to display all data I am looking for (honestly), and it shows it to me all on one page. This is truly refreshing after having to spend a minute or two going through Google Analytics.

Instant updates (yes, instant)
Unlike GoogleAnalytics, Mint’s data is stored on your own MySQL server. And every time you refresh your analytics you get fresh results. Sure this may not be important for many people, but having to wait in 4 hour intervals for GoogleAnalytics to update may be annoying for some people.

The great thing about this as well is that you can have hourly reports and see during which time of the day you have the most visitors.

And here another example of hourly reports:

Local Data
Having data on your own server means you have complete access to it. Trying to make a third party application for GoogleAnalytics is quite difficult as they haven’t opened up their API (yet). But this is great for PHP or flash Gurus who want to make some nice live visualizations of the data.

Plugins, 3rd Party Apps, Themes
Using Mint reminds me of Wordpress. Similar to Wordpress you download plugins and install them through the dashboard. Good examples of 3rd party apps are Widgets for OSX (or Gadgets for Vista) which allow you track the number of visitors straight from your desktop (very handy).

But I think my favourite plugin is the Feedburner plugin, and I love it twice as much because Google still hasn’t gotten around implementing it into GoogleAnalytics (even though they own Feedburner now…)

Oversight
Displaying all of the information on one page allows you to easily and quickly find anything you are looking for. You can customize the order in which the information is displayed, and you can choose which information you want to hide.

This is what it looks like on my wide-screen monitor:

Bea-u-ti-ful!
Mint looks good, no doubt about it.
And yes, functionality > looks… but Mint is definitely a sight for sore eyes.

But it’s not all peachy…
Mint does cost $30 dollars per site, and is therefore not for everyone.

Conclusion
Purchasing Mint was the best $30 dollars I spent last month, but mostly because it truly matched what I was looking for.
Anyone who uses the advanced features in GoogleAnalytics will miss them in Mint. But if you are like most people who are only interested in tracking the number of visitors, traffic sources, popular pages, visitor location, browser/platform/resolution, etc then Mint is definitely for you.

I highly recommend Mint for anyone (with $30 bucks) who is looking for a fast, accurate, lightweight replacement for Google Analytics.

For me (and for most people) Google Analytics is mainly just a tool to see how many hits we are getting, where they are coming from, etc. It is a shame because if anyone takes a couple extra minutes to really look at what its telling us, we can actually learn something about our visitors.

Here’s a chart showing where Piksel’s visitors are coming from.

It’s no surprise that they majority of users are coming from the social news network Digg. Being ‘dugg’ can send a site tens of thousands of visitors within a matter of hours, but to no surprise, the page hits won’t last for long, and after 2-3 days the typical digg users will be long gone. From the thousands of digg visitors, you would be lucky to even have 1% return to your site. If someone were to ask whether I preferred 10,000 digg visitors or 1,000 StumbleUpon visitors, I would have to go with the StumbleUpon. And here’s why:

Above is a chart showing the time the users spent on the site, and how many of them stayed on the site and viewed more pages. Although digg users come in large volumes, they clearly spend the least amount of time on the site. While in complete contrast, StumbleUpon users spend noticeably more time on the site, and are more likely to browse more than one page of your site.

Don’t get me wrong, the being ‘dugg’ is great (as long as your server stays up). It gives you exposure, it gets you out there, and everyone knows that with such a large amount of traffic there are bound to be visitors which will come back. But in the end it is a question of quality vs quantity. Do you want your visitors to take their time to read it, or do you want to get as many advertisement clicks as possible?

I will be posting more about visitor culture, and interesting ways on how to use Google Analytics soon.

-joel