Good website tracking is a mixed bag. There are the ever popular google analytics and statcounter but these services are third party and have their disadvantages. Getting a custom in house solution to work with any website is almost impossible. Until now.

Why Third Party Tracking isn’t the best

No control

Not being able to have complete control over your statistics and having to go through a third party (even if it is Google) leaves your tracking at the mercy of policy changes. If google should decide one day to use Analytics to track webmasters working on multiple domains and discount those sites (in an effort to fight astro-turfing for instance) you have no way to stop them because you’ve give them the tools to do it.

Statcounter, currently has a log size of the last 100 visitors unless you upgrade. What if one day they decide that they should just cut off most of the features to free users? Or change which services paid users are allowed to use. Once again, webmasters can’t do anything about this.

You might say “but those companies would never do that” and maybe you’re right but what if all it takes is a change in management. You’re left crippled.

Not your server

Having tracking hosted on another server is mostly a disadvantage. With the exception of being pretty safe from having your logs nuked (that depends on how reliable other people are) there are no real advantages to using third party services.

If your server goes down it’s true that your tracking server will still be up but it doesn’t matter because your web server is down why does it matter if your tracking server is still capable of tracking no-traffic? On the other hand it’s very unlikely that web tracking that is done in house will stop working without everything else breaking. Of course, you have no control over the tracking servers if you use a third party so you are at the mercy of their techs.

Problems with doing tracking in house

It costs money. Almost always, and unequivocally; good in house tracking costs money. Today we’ll look at a pretty cheap option called Mint.

Mint’s drawback(s)

For a new user figuring out Mint can be a little confusing. The real problem is just getting the thing. They take the name “Mint” and take it a little far. Try this phrase on for size

The latest and greatest version of Mint can always be found here in the Peppermill. A basic installation—or “Thin Mint” as it is affectionately called—comes with the Default and Backup/Restore Pepper.

This is likely to leave you asking “What is “thin mint,” what is a “pepper,” and what in the world is the “peppermill!?”

No worries though; that’s the hardest part.

There is one other disadvantage. Mint uses javascript tracking which means it doesn’t see bots so you won’t be able to track when google spidered you or if your server is going slow because of a botnet storm DOS attack. This isn’t that big of a deal though.

Mint - In House tracking

While Mint does cost $30 it has numerous advantages over competitors. For one thing it has an active community (peppermill) building plugins (peppers) so there are always new features coming down the pipe for no extra charge. That means that if you want to add features not only can you download them but you can develop them your self.

In the current database of software Mint has plug ins for most major CMS’ so it already works with Wordpress, Drupal and other popular CMS.

Other advantages of an active development community include dashboard widgets, iPhone compatibility, GeoTracking, Error checking and more.

Mint also has a live demo available for anyone to view and a plethora of screen shots and other media files to help you get a feel for what mint is and if you want it.