The market of free tracking services is full of good and bad tools. So I collected the best and most innovative tracking services that are available. They are useful for every webmaster to optimize/monetize his site and see what content is appealing to the masses.

Google Analytics is a great user tracking service because it shows you most of all important information you need about your visitors like where they from, what site referred them (and links, keywords etc…). Also it creates handy graphs to easily see how your site grows or not.

whos.amung.us does not offer a lot of statistics (just 3) but 2 very useful services. The first good one is a live-counter, which of course shows the number of current visitors and the page they are browsing on. The second tool is a “normal” graph that displays a few colored bars. The last but very cool one, is a map which allows you, in addition to see what page your visitors are browsing, to locate each user on a map.

Feedjit, originally designed for blogs, is a nice tool to study where your visitors are from, how they have been referred to your site and how they leave your site again. By the way Feedjit just exists since 3 months but already has 3 million widget impressions per week.

FireStats is a plugin for Wordpress (a blogging platform). The ajax-driven startpage gives you a quick overview of whats happening on your blog. See user locations, browsers, referrer, page visits…

getClicky, an analytics tool for blogs and small sites (it costs a few dollars for bigger sites). Among the basic features and graphs, Clicky displays the user activity on a map. And beside its fully customizable dashboard it works with users that have disabled JavaScript which is not the standard.

ENQUISITE isn’t a user tracking service like FireStats or Google Analytics but it strengths are the analysis of search engines. ENQUISITE reports how users entered your site and offers a search engine ranking-analysis that gives you information about your SEO, SEM, PPC and ROI and presents you tricks’n tips to optimize your site.

If you want to have stats and graphs about your site’s feed activity, Feedburner is the service you need! It enables you to see how many people are reading your feeds and what reader they use. They also offer a nice badge which shows the number of current readers. Since Google acquired Feedburner in may 2007, PRO stats are available for free.