When it comes to finding out how well your website is doing, the best solution for website analytics is obviously Google Analytics, right? After all, they tell you everything you need to know to help improve your website’s effectiveness and it’s free, so what could be better? But before leaping headfirst into the gaggle of Google fans, maybe it’s best to see if there are any Google Analytics alternatives that might be more suited to your particular needs.

Maybe you can’t afford to be using something that’s free. One of the biggest knocks is that Google doesn’t provide real-time information. Clients paying big money want to know quickly how their investment is doing; they don’t want to wait around until Google decides to deliver. And Google decides what reports you get, not you. Some people also worry that their data is stored on Google servers, not theirs. Others are concerned about integrating website results with mobile and social media to get a full picture of their marketing effectiveness.

So what alternatives do you have? Although we all seem to be in love with Google, don’t forget there are other players in town. Yahoo!, for example, also has a free, full-featured enterprise analytics solution at http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/. Rob Diana offers a great list of 25 Free Google Analytics Alternatives on his blog post at Regular Geek.

For the more technologically advanced, Piwik is a name that came up often in my research as an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It promises real-time web analytics reports, ownership of your web analytics data, easy User Interface, and the ability to build your own web analytics plugins.

If it’s crucial that you immediately know what’s going on at your site, Chartbeat has a real-time dashboard that allows you to closely monitor site visits so you can make revisions on the go. It starts with a free 30-day trial, and then it costs from $10 per month and up, depending on the level of service.

Clicky offers real-time stats, but it promises that its data provides a clear and easy-to-understand picture of what’s happening on your site right now. It also monitors your Twitter follower count and has an iPhone version available. It’s free for sites with less than 3,000 daily page-views.

Believe it or not, there is actually an organization that focuses on this very topic—the Web Analytics Association in Wakefield, MA. This organization offers articles, events, networking and education for those who really want to build their skills in this area.

So, you can take the easy route and use what everyone else is using with Google Analytics, or you can analyze your choices and possibly find an alternative that works better for you. If your website is small or doesn’t get a lot of traffic, you might be fine just using Google Analytics to find adaptations you can make to increase its effectiveness and help it grow. But, if you’ve working on a larger site, a retail site, or one that is getting a lot of traffic, you might need to look at an alternative to provide you with more data in a faster fashion.