Visitorville now has a free version

[pmkpmk]

Visitorville is a mixture of "Sim City" and "Clicktracks". They offered a hosted as well as an installable version. The hosted version had acceptable pricing, the installable version was - for my taste - a bit expensive.

They now started to add a free version:

Everyone loves free food, but have you ever noticed that the food at a free buffet isn't quite as good as the food that people pay for? Well, the same concept applies in VisitorVille. We're not going to give you food that's unfit for human consumption -- but we are going to limit your portions and not give you the organically grown stuff.

The most significant things missing (imho) are: historical reports, click analysis and log analyzing. For the last one I never considered Visitorville anyways though.

[Adam_T]

This has to be one of the funniest stat programs I've ever seen, lol.

It really is like SimCity, I thought you were just making that as a passing remark but it actually is LOL!

[ColinVox]

Visitorville's SimCity like appearance seems quite impractical for real business applications.
I like more the visual conception of Sales-n-Stats product. The visitors are also represented graphically but are bearing more sense for everyday business applications. For example, the fact that the visitor did some important action (e.g. placed a product in shopping cart) in Sales-n-Stats is indicated by special icons.
What visitor is doing at your site is far more important than the color of the bus that he takes to ride from one page to another.

[pmkpmk]

Visitorville's SimCity like appearance seems quite impractical for real business applications.

I tend to agree, yet not wholly. I always think that VV targest mostly the (technical) webmasters, and not the marketeers. If I envision the stereotype of the greasy, ponytailed webmaster, facing 3 or 4 screens with Linux consoles and logfiles scrolling over them. In this mental image, one workstation showing the VV screen would fit very nicely.

The stats package of VV however, IS actually a fully sophisticated, professional stats package equal in strength to Webtrends for example. Plus it has Clicktracks-like click-path analysis. But both are not part of the free package.

What is nice with VV is that you get a live update how frequented your site is. Lights go on and off, buildings grow or shrink over time. It's not the accuracy what makes it interesting, but the occasional glance, the "gut feeling" if your site is doing well or not. With a quick glance, you can identify "underpopulated" areas and for example make them more atracitve.

I personally use Webtrends for stats, Clicktracks for usability testing, and a bunch of custom scripts for special tasks. VV runs in the background, and once in a while I take a peek. Mostly for amusement.

[ColinVox]

Yeah, I agree the reporting part of VV is quite impressive. What I want to say is that live monitoring part can be more of use like it is done in Sales-n-Stats than just plain amusement. Anyhow even a pony tailed webmaster need a good relax :)

[Frequent]

I've now been running the free version on a couple of my smaller sites that are low traffic. I must say it's pretty impressive. I am surprised that more people aren't using it really. My guess is that this will change now that the free version is available. People who only saw it as a toy will finally be able to justify the cost somewhat.

I do wish they sold a log analyzer version that didn't require a monthly subscription though.

Freq---