Andrea Olivato’s Blog

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

http://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

http://feedburner.google.com/

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

http://www.mybloglog.com/

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

http://www.statcounter.com/

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

http://www. koego.com/

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

http://whos.amung.us/

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.

As the most important thing both for professionsts and companies on the net is “being talked about“, find and monitor buzzes is essential too. Professional analytics applications like Trackset Conversionlab help a lot, crawling the net and finding news, reviews, forum messages and more, containing the website, the brand or some specific keywords chosen by the interested company.

Bloggers usually can not afford such a professional tool and have to find other ways by their own. Google blog search is very useful in this case but it is quite limited and do not give a complete idea of what the net people think about you/your service.

In my opinion the best low-cost (I mean without-any-cost, but it sound worse) way to find people actually talking about you is using Twitter Search.  If your brand/name is not such common it is very easy to obtain a good result with no stress. The following url is what I used to retrieve informations about LangID,the new web service I created some days ago.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=langid.net+OR+%40langid+-from%3Alangid&rpp=50

Let’s see what those parameters mean:

• http://search.twitter.com/search : that’s the base url, you should have understood that
• langid.net+OR+ %40langid : this means I’m looking for people talking about my website (langid.net) or even my twitter account (@langid as %40=@)
• +-from%3Alangid : I used this to exlude myself from the results (my @langid twitter account)
• &rpp=50 : this just means to show me the first 50 results

The result is great, you can see people insulting the service, or even liking it or just spreading the address. But that’s not over.

As TwitterTwitter search apis are very easy to use you can use that result to create a funny, real-time and real-people made ‘talking about us’ page. This is langid talking about us page.

To obtain a similar result you can simply change the url I previously suggested you from search?parameters to search.atom?parameters. Here’s my example :

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=langid.net+OR+%40langid+-from%3Alangid&rpp=5

This would cause twitter server to return a Json file instead of a web document. You can use those data together with a Php/Java parser to obtain a page similar to the LangId one.

This is fascinating in my opinion… anyway as bloggers always have to criticize I will do it too… As you can see from the advanced search webform, it is possible to look for tweets with positive/negative attitude. Unfortunately for twitter guys this just means looking for happy or sad faces ( or   ) inside the tweets. I really (really really really ) would like to see something semantically achieved here…

I have been using koego since its alpha version and as today it reached the beta status I decided to write something about it.

Koego is not just a web analytics tool with some gadgets for bloggers. It was conceived, designed and realized just for blogs. Even if it is still in development it is clear that it’s going to be a complete platform to supervise a blogger activity in all its aspects.

The layout is very minimalistic, simple and clear with few and relaxing colors. The homepage resumes some reports, pointing out the ‘ego‘ of your site. As the name suggests the ego is a kind of score assigned to your site based on many parameters (i don’t know them exactly I think it’s based on visits, visitors, kind of referres, comments and something like that). The ego score is shown in any report you see in the homepage, so that you can understand which referrer/keyword or generic activity is increasing your score the most.

Inside the platform there are a couple of reports that really impressed me. First of all the referrers (sources of traffic) report is very useful. Different kinds of referrers are grouped in a logical order. After the common ‘direct access’, ‘search engines’ and ‘direct link’ you can find Social network, Social bookmarks and Blog Related groups. Social network and Social bookmarks are obviously the respective categories of websites and my favourite Blog related consists in websites which are commonly used by bloggers to improve their blogging experience. So in this category you can find wordpress, mybloglog, various aggregators etc. On the right image you can see grouped referrers and complete referring links. Below the complete referrer report, grouped in the categories I described.

Other interesting reports are the System related ones. Particulary I appreciated the attention paid to categorize and version all the most common operative system. So if you have a visitor coming to your blog with a Mac you will be able to know if he has the latest X version or the previous ones. Linux OS are divided in their most famous distributions, so you can have the detail of Gentoo users (probably if you find someone on your blog from gentoo it’s just me ), Ubuntu ones and so on… Windows is divided by versions too.

The resolutions report is very uncommon too. Insted of giving the single resolution data, it is grouped by types. So you got datas for mobiles, smartphones, small, standard, wide and large screens and finally TVs. You can have a look to OS report on the left image while below you can see the resolutions report for my account.

The latest thing I want to point out is that Koego does not use any flash for charts. Everything is realized by Javascript, drawing in canvas. This makes the page load so much more fluid and quick than in flash based analytics platforms. Also using JS allows users to interact directly with the chart, hiding or showing some datas. Below two lines charts where it is possible to interact.

If you want to use Koego you can ask for an invite to the beta using the form in their sign up page.

Just wanted to deny myself about my previous article about Who’s Amung stat service.

Since one month all the stats provided from who’s service have been perfect, without any downtimes. Congrats to the staff, for resolving stability problem and returned to offer a great stat service.

I always liked who’s amoung service, and I personally congratulated their staff about their brand new web site style. However in the last week I noticed lots of ‘black holes’ in their tracking system.

As you can see from the above image, for each day of the week I got one ore more hours of 0 visitors while the other web analytics tools I do use, reveal a normal activity of the site. I checked some other websites and they seems to have problems located on the same (italian) hour so I believe this can be a generalized problem.

I really hope they are in troubles for having received so many new sign up requests after the new release, and that this is going to be solved soon!

Yes that’s what I mean by : ‘LinuxFeed is growing fast‘

Future Whish List :

• English Version
• Offering a blogging host ( WordPress Based )
• Owning an in-server built OpenId service