I'm leaning more towards live+historical analytic tools like Woopra and to some extent clicktale. These have absolutely changed the way we look at our web visi

I'm leaning more towards live+historical analytic tools like Woopra and to some extent clicktale. These have absolutely changed the way we look at our web visitors. Now hosting feels a bit like being a BBS sysop, especially on our medium-to-small sites. Google Analytics still makes good quick reports that are useful when discussing traffic with investors/advertisers. Yet we're using their dashboard less and less now that the live tools provide us some decent statistics for our smaller sites. I have to agree adding an API for Google Analytics would be great. Woopra has neat javascript tricks where you can add additional information about the user from your backend to be passed to woopra. So in the GUI interface we can tie traffic to actual usernames (avatar images, too) rather than IP addresses. This is hard to describe how useful it is--- nameless IP addresses and user-agent strings lead you to "guess" when users are the same and it doesn't help across machines. When you can see how a specific customer uses your site over a month or two, it can help a lot in understanding what you've done wrong and right with your site. Quick advice: If you have a small website (50k-1k page views a day) and you're not using something like woopra and clicktale to understand what your users do when they visit your sites, you're losing a great opportunity to make your site better for customers. Edit: A quick search turned up a few other live-analytic hybrids out there I hadn't seen before. Like whoson.com seems to have a self-hosted version. Might experiment with those, too.