Analytics - Tracking actions per user

Question

One of our customers has a web application that requires login, and they would like to get Google Analytics to track it per user - to know which users came to their site.
From what I read on Google forums, Google doesn't support such tracking.
I was wondering:
a) Do I understand correctly that Google doesn't support that?
b) Does anyone know of a analytics tool that does support such action? The only one I've found was Pmetrics (which is Clicky??), but I would like to have something to compare it to, or if someone who uses this feature on Clicky/Pmetrics could tell me how well it works (there's no demo for this feature on their site)

Answer 1

You could use Piwki and create a plugin to track users. It shouldn't be that difficult.

Answer 2

Not 100% sure, but I suspect you could use the Custom Variables feature of GA and create very granular variables to track on. Whilst I think you could probably implement some code as per below (modified from the google examples), I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a good idea.

pageTracker._setCustomVar( 
      1,                // This custom var is set to slot #1 
      "MemberID",       // The name of the custom variable 
      "12345678",       // The member id value, could read from a query param  
      1                 // Sets the scope to visitor-level 
 ); 
pageTracker._trackPageview(); 

As I said though, definitely consider whether it is valuable tracking individuals in such granularity - considering privacy and practical reporting considerations.