Mint Web Stats

September 26, 2006

I purchased Mint a week or two ago, and I have to say that for $30 it’s a steal. I’ve used a few other statistical packages over the years, and the only things they seem to be good at are the tools I don’t need. I know there are people out there who care, maybe even get excited about terms like “Visitor Segment Performance” and “Goals & Funnel Process”, but my business is software design. I have under a dozen total pages on my website at the moment, and all I want to know is how many people are looking at them, and what they’re saying about my products. Most statistics packages can’t even get that right; they snip the end off of dynamic URLs when reporting the referrer, making blog and forum URLs (perhaps the most important sources of information) useless to me.

Mint gets it all right. It’s an easy to use package that seems like it’s tailored for people like me. Everything it comes with by default is actually useful to me, and the tools it didn’t have were easy to add via its plugin system. On top of this, it manages to be beautifully designed as well. How many other website admin tools do you know that have their own official Dashboard Widget?

Marc Charbonneau is a mobile software engineer in Portland, OR. Want to reply to this article? Get in touch on Twitter @mbcharbonneau.