7 wonderful tools to analyze and improve your web presence
Written on Aug 23, 2009 // Net.Working or sharing on the web means having a presence. That presence needs to be monitored and supervised, to be optimized and improved. Common web analytics tools can not, alone, give to the user a full view of his social presence. As I’ve not been able to find a complete tool to analyze all the aspects of my ’second life’ everyday I use lots of useful and very targeted tools. I surely wouldn’t have the same web experience I’m having without the seven tools I’m going to review below.
Bit.ly
Sharing is the revolution of the new web era. Work documents or emotions, articles or movies, you need to share a lot to be known and appreciated. We share through a lot of ways. Twitter, Facebook and obviously Digg are all places where linking is veeery appreciated. Just look at twitter advanced search page: there’s just one filter you can apply to the texts, and is about tweets containing or not a link.
Old way of analyzing what you share was based on how many people landed where you wanted to address them. This is terribly useless right now, as lots of the links we share on the web are someonelse’s work. If I want to know how many people followed my echo to xxx article, I obviously can not ask him to tell me 
.
Bit.ly is my favourite url shortener and link analyzer. They provide an easy and complete interface to monitor your shared links success. Who shared it after you, where he shared it, how many clicks it received and so on.
For example when I tweet something containing a link ( 90% of my tweets ) I can monitor directly from bit.ly if someone retweeted it or shared it without quoting the source (this often happens after several levels retweets). An other nice stat you can achieve by comparing bit.ly with your favourite analytics tool, is how many people clicked on links heading to your website/blog and how many actually reached the site.
Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/intl/it_ALL/analytics/
Ok maybe that’s the most famous web analytics tool and it probably doesn’t really need any explanation, but I’d like to highlight why I think it’s good at something. Yeah I said that in this rude way because it totally lacks usability.
Google Analytics allow any user to have multiple accounts managed through a simple interface. The main page shows the daily/monthly and weekly main stats, even giving a trend expressed via a percentage (positive or negative).
Inside the application each single account got a lot of stats and it’s quite a mess to discover what you really need and what you can completely ignore. Anyway I found some useful metrics in the content and in the traffic sources areas. In the content one, as soon as you connected your adsense account with the GA one, you can see detailed stats for your revenues. For example you can easily locate webpages with higher CTR or the ones make you earn the most but with less CTR.
Another complex but useful tool Google offers is an highly configurable custom reporting. Using an incredibly not-intuitive drag & drop interface it is possible to combine nearly any data with any other one, giving the user a terribly powerful tool. In case you want to start getting some useful staff from this tool I suggest you to read this introduction article, created by Google staff itself.
Feedburner
Another Google (acquired) product, less generic then the previous one and targeted to certain users, Feedburner lets you analyze the traffic received and generated (two different and equally important aspects) by a feed.
Differently from Google Analytics, Feedburner is very essential, clean and usable. Every kind of data is easily reachable and readable and no space is left to useless stats. From the mainpage of each feed (yes this supports multiple account too) you can jump to the most interesting metrics : from the views to the reaches, from the most read single articles to the readers (apps) analysis, you can pass to a map which shows how your feed is distribuited geographically speaking.
But as I specified in the title and introduction of this article, it’s not just an analysis fact. Feedburner allows the user to personalize and optimize his feed, giving him the possibility to make any kind of feed compatible with any kind of reader (browser or external program). FB (no, not facebook) even helps the user spreading its content, giving badges and emails signatures, optimizing the html version of each feed with backlinks to original articles and making it easy for the end user to share via most common social media.
An other interesting ($$) aspect of Google’s enhancements to original FeedBurner form is Adsense integration. Every publisher can connect his Feedburner account to his Adsense one and then put contextual banners inside the feed! This is probably quite invasive, but a good resource for getting an extra in own adsense revenues. Via the configuration panel provided by Adsense, the user can choose the frequency of the ad (every X articles put an ad) so that, not being a black hat, he can both earn and don’t desturb readers.
MyBlogLog
Probably referring to a previous era of the web, this Yahoo product is useful in one single aspect in my opinion : get to know your readers. Completely targeted for blog, but usable without any contraindication in any kind of website, MyBlogLog shows registered users avatars and details.
The stats offered are not noteworthy and too limited even if a ‘pro’ (paid) version is available (never tested sorry… ) but that’s not what is useful about mybloglog. If you think that fidelization is 3000 times more important than new visits you will easily understand how to use MBL. A new profiled user came to your website, you see him, you watch his profile, maybe got similar IT interest to you, you go to his blog, he got bloglog, sees you, you see his twitter contact etc. It’s like the approaching before a web date .
Unfortunately this system got lots of limitations. For example it would be nice to see profiled user behaviour on your website, if they commented etc. As I said it’s probably an old service as twitter+wordpress interaction might produce a better analysis environment, with integrated comments, more meaningful profiles & more interactivity both from the blogger and the reader.
Statcounter
Statcounter plays the same game as Google Analytics but in a totally different way. Less stats, more semplicity, more immediacy. I use it as a quick look tool, the everyhour check of every project.
Stats offered are not great but fine. The whole analytics tool is mediocre but gives a good idea of how the things are going with a website. Statcounter supports multiple accounts and as GA does gives a quick look to all the accounts in the first page after logging in. Inside each account you found what you expect to find: daily visits and page views, new and returning visitors.
If you take a closer look there are mainly two great stats I usually directly bookmark for each website immediatly after its launch or a new article: recent came from and recent keyword activity. Those two reports are nearly realtime (I think no more then 5 mins late) and offers immediatly a scene of where people found you and how the found you. I think they still got problems with url shortening services (like most analytics tools) but using something like bit.ly ( see above ) you can interpolate datas and get an idea of the whole thing.
For those who are interested statcounter also offer a per-visitor detail, with map, location, ip, host and path. Useful for analyzing behaviours.
Koego
I already reviewed Koego on this blog cause I got amazed by its easyness, caring about details and precision on the stats. Even if they define themselves as ‘The Most Comprehensive Blog Analytics for Bloggers’ I believe they should define as ‘presence analytics‘. Koego is growing costantly and it’s easy to see that they are going into the deep social to give their score (the blogger’s ego) a true validity within the web.
Differently from above tools, Koego is a single account product, so you can’t have a cross-site statistic. Anyway the single site dashboard is rich of useful stats: obviously your ego (measuring your influence on the web) page views and visitors, but also new referrers and keywords and an activity log (per day stats).
Looking a bit more inside, you can find many useful numbers. My favourite is the grouped keyword report. Instead of analyzing each keyword, Koego group them by word. For example if people found me on google searching for “dropbox”, “gentoo dropbox” and “skype dropbox” I would find 3 records for “dropbox”. Smart and easy but I never found this feature anywhere else.
Other interesting and in-development features are about social media. Since it was launched, Koego offered a great referrers partioning, highlighting social media websites and blogging tools. While growing up they added an integrated twitter stats ( there are external tools like tweetstats doing the same ) for your account and twitter notifications. They will add more social media in the future for sure!
Who’s Amung
I wrote two times about Who’s Amung, criticizing and then plausing them. I like their particular and targeted service a lot. For those who don’t know, it’s a live visitors tracker. This means it won’t track paths and detailed stats about your visitors, but just tell you how many users there are in you site (and in a certain page) at the same time.
Even if you won’t get keyword or referrer analysis, you can always use Who’s Amung to get up to date on which pages of your website are popular in a certain moment and to gather informations about high traffic hours ( the app has a great history so that you can analyze your trend in a certain period). The tool itself is very useful to understand what users are doing and in case of needing (errors, or if you want to deviate the traffic to a certain page) it is possible to act changing something and influencing the current day stats.
As the web is really a matter of hours (maybe minutes) getting real time informations is essential for a prompt answer.
A live map is provided both from site and via a customizable widget, and gives realtime informations about visitors in your website. They also provide widgets for numeric stats.
My 2 cents
The perfect tool does not exists and I believe won’t ever exist for a simple fact: our needings change too fast. If yesterday I just needed to read my stats the next day and act as consequence, today I need to know what’s happening right now. If before I was satisfied by knowing how my website was going, now I need to know who linked me, where and why. I need stats about my social media, my presence and influence on the web.
Pisa,Italy. 
