To be more specific, the number one requirement is that the statistics would have to be so reliable that I could price a couple of products according to that information.
If I can't take a printout to an ad agency or some other business the data is worthless to me. What would be the industry standard, and what could you recommend personally?
No other free web analytics services has a chance against GA. There are many paid web analytics services out there, but they are just too expensive... and honestly, do so many more things that you'll potentially never use, AND, do the same GA does.
I've used Google Analytics since it came out, but what I'm looking for here is a confirmation of the value of the data in business transactions. If I'm selling ad space, will the data be considered reliable by any major company in the US? While I personally think it should be, I can't afford to deal with uncertainties.
yeah I want something more deep that google analytics... that are a great free tool, but I think that this is more deep: check it http://crazyegg.com/ and this http://www.haveamint.com/ I never use both but looks so professional, any review of that both sites?
Crazy Egg is good, in that it tracks client-side actions like clicks and hotspots, so it could be worth looking into if you're after something more to do with "does this sell this page?" rather than "what's happening on this page?"
For the sake of the argument, let's assume I go with Mint. After the first six months I take the data to, say, a major ad network. Then, based on the collected data I say we got 4 million unique visitors during that time.
The real question here was: will they believe those stats or not? Is Mint reliable enough to base actual business decisions on? This might be a no-brainer, but I'm looking for actual, first-hand, confirmed knowledge on the subject.
Asking "will they believe those stats or not?" is a ludicrous question, that no-one can answer. I don't see how one stats tracker can be seen as more reliable or true than any other - they all work the same way, they can just track different things. Google Analytics I would imagine is the most reliable/consistent.