Recently I was looking for alternatives to Google Analytics just because I wanted something else. I got tired of using so many sites everyday, one for statistics, another one for advertising, another one for email and so on.
What I found is Piwik. It is a self-hosted solution which gives you full control over the system and you get to keep all of your data private. In case you forgot, google uses the information it aggregates from tracking your site to help itself in other areas. This is also great if your site is a walled garden and you want to keep google out for privacy reasons.
From Piwik’s site:
Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the five minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track (or use an existing plugin to do it automatically for you).
Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed real time reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more.
The way that you track visitors is with a snippet of javascript, the same way as google analytics. Piwik does have to run on a server that supports PHP and MySQL. Install is just as easy as installing WordPress, just need a database ready for it to setup.
The really awesome thing about Piwik is all of the functionality is built with plugins and it’s open source and it sits on your own server and you can get it in your own language. What does that mean? You can build that functionality into your web analytics application that you always wanted but some of the other providers fail to provide.
Some of the cool plugins you can find are: Click heatmap, LiveOverView, Average page number in search engines, Visitor Forecast
You also get an API that you can interact with and basically do anything within the system and extract data in multiple formats(csv, xml, json).
I am actually using it and I couldn’t be happier with the results, unless I get more visitors 
Now I reduced the number of websites I need to use daily by one.
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