WARNING: This is a nerdy post. If you can’t bear the thought of reading about a webpage stats service, stop reading now.
If there’s someone who does everything they do better than Google, than I don’t know who it is. I signed up a month ago to try and get a Google Analytics invitation, and it came on Wednesday morning. So now that I’ve had some time to get some visitors on the blog, and to play around with it, there is some really cool stuff in there.
Obviously it looks like it’s primarily designed for proper e-commerce type applications rather than blogs, cause there’d be heaps more features that you’d use if you were selling stuff, but it is still freaking cool for a stats nerd like myself who loves finding trends and pretty graphs. The whole thing just works the way you always feel like these type things should work. You click on a data element and it lets you drill down into performance over time of that particular stat, so that you can even see how trends in browser usage are heading or whether or not your design that looks crap on 800×600 is hurting that many people.
And it’s just got so many stats in there. You’ve got the customary map of the world to see where visitors are coming from. You’ve got unique visitors, dissected in just about every way imaginable, you can see an overlay page - which is probably the coolest thing, which lets you see which links are being clicked on every page so that you can work out how to restructure your page to better suit the people getting on there. It’s very, very cool (in a deeply uncool kind of way). Every graph can be shown in more than one way, when you see your referral graph you can also see the average number of page views per visit. It’s really, really clever.
So if you’ve got a site, I highly recommend trying to get an invite. Especially if you like looking at fun graphs and playing around with stats. Google just got even cooler.
Added in some pretty graph screenshots
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mmm. I signed up for an invite quite a while ago - no invite for me yet
The same as me bec, I have been waiting about a month. The same as google writley
Well, you know what they say - “All Google things come to those who wait”
There is something about blogging and an insatiable desire to see who has hit your site, how they got there, where they come from… Sitemeter is ok, but google seems brighter and better at everything. I’ll be signing up! Just for monitoring purposes of course.
I’ve mostly found that I really like the immediacy of Sitemeter - the hits come up straight away, and if there’s a criticism of Google’s service it’s that. So I think I’ll keep tracking with Sitemeter for the moment (as well), but there certainly are some very pretty graphs on the Google Service. And it goes to a depth (and keeps records) that Sitemeter doesn’t come close to.
I could be wrong, but isn’t Sitemeter ‘free’ only for a two week period? Or is there an alternate way of doing things with them?
Nup, you can sign up to get their two week free trial of their “Premium Service”, or you can sign up for the free, free, free service with extra freeness. Which doesn’t cost anything. Ever. It’s free like that.
And you can get pretty maps of the world indicating your global readership…
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