Stats For Bloggers

What’s the point in all this blogging if you can’t see how popular your content is. Sure the wealth and adulation is good, but what you really want is stats, damn stats….

An essential tool for any blogger is a good stats package. Without statistics and reporting, you are pretty much blogging blind.

I use various packages, depending on the type of information I am looking for. The good thing about many of the available packages is that there are free versions that provide a good amount of information. My host provides Awstats as the stats package that comes free with the hosting. It is pretty good for a detailed overview, but only updates once every 24 hours.

Google Analytics is a free and very complete package that provides an abundance of graphs and allows you to drill down through the traffic data.

This week I started using Performancing Metrics (pMetrics)and I have to say that I like what it offers. What I particularly like is the ability to see the stats data in real time, as the users are on the site. There is none of this having to wait for 24 hours to see how many visitors are on the site or what they are viewing.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is where, at a glance, you can see a nice overview of your traffic data, including the number of visitors, their actions, and what content is popular. You also see the percentage variation of your traffic and the time spent on your site.

For more detailed views, pMetrics provides tabs at the top of the Dashboard. Here you can access information on your visitors, actions, content, links, searches and the real time spy feature.

Visitors

The visitors detail page shows the following information:

• Time of visit
• IP address of user
• Country
• Operating system
• Browser
• Number of actions
• Length of stay on site
• Referrer
• Search terms

You can get more detailed aggregate information of country, city, language, browser, operating system and screen resolution.

Actions

Actions displays user activity, with the option to view by page views, searches, incoming links, outbound links and downloads.

Content

You can view content details by pages, entrance, exit and downloads. Details are displayed as graphs, or if you prefer, as a cloud. The data can also be exported in CSV, XML or JavaScript (JSON) format.

Links

Link information is available for incoming and outgoing links, as well as top referrers, so you can see where all of your traffic is coming from.

Searches

Searches displays details of the searches performed that resulted in people coming to your site. Information is provided for keywords and search engine.

Spy

For those of you who simply like to watch the users flow in when you get a story promoted on Digg, or you get a massive traffic surge from a Stumble, pMetrics’s Spy feature is great. You get to see the river of users coming into your site in real time. Definitely much better than having to wait 24 hours to see what is happening.

If you prefer, you can access your data directly from your favorite feed reader.

What I particularly like about pMetrics is that it offers a great statistics package that is easy to use; it does not present the data in a complex way, thus making it easy to digest the information, without having to devote too much time to the task.

How much does it cost?

• Basic – Free, up to 3 sites, up to 1,000 average daily page views per site. Limited feature set.
• Blogger – $2.99/month or $19.99/year. Up to 3 sites and 10,000 average daily page views total (between all sites). Includes extra features like RSS feeds, Spy, outbound link tracking, download tracking, IP tagging, IP filtering, and more.
• Pro / Small business – $5.99/month or $49.99/year. Up to 10 sites and 50,000 average daily page views total. Includes all features from ‘Blogger’ plan, plus full custom data tracking (usernames, etc), SSL support, full API access, and data export.

When you first register, you get a 21 day free trial of the ‘pro’ service, so you can access all of our features and decide which package will work best for you when your trial is up. Any web sites that get more than 1,000 average daily page views will be automatically disabled after your trial has expired if you decide you do not wish to pay for the service.