Posted by trista13 on March 16, 2011 at 6:23pm
I'm fairly new to Drupal, but have created some sites before. In the past, I typically used Google Analytics to monitor the site traffic and noticed that there is a Google Analytics module, but I was wondering what others thought of it and if there might be a better solution with a Drupal site.
Thanks!
Comments
The Google Analytics module
The Google Analytics module is a solid one, which we've used at Drexel since implementing Drupal. It's pretty much plug-and-play, with some nice customization features for selective tracking etc. GA hasn't steered us wrong yet.
Open Web Analytics
Someone steered towards Open Web Analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics -- http://drupal.org/project/owa
But I haven't implemented it. Looks like the last update was Dec 2010 on the module...
http://drupal.org/project/owa
There's also Piwik
Which has a Drupal module (http://drupal.org/project/piwik). I've been trying out both. Piwik is like a scaled back version of G.A., but it has the advantage of allowing you to put the software on your own server (vs. giving Google access to your data). If keeping data private doesn't matter, go with Google Analytics.
Most of our library clients
Most of our library clients use Google Analytics.
Locally hosted web analytics require a lot of resources, and I don't recommend that approach to libraries who don't have system administration resources, a good internal network infrastructure, and a server (virtual or physical) to dedicate to the task.