I love stats (also know to serious people as “analytics.”) In the past, I’ve written about the variety of stats packages I use and track regularly (e.g. at least daily.) Today, FeedBurner came out with an upgrade to its stats that add a number of new things, including uncommon uses, the concept of “reach”, and item popularity. Mike Arrington at Techcrunch has a comprehensive post up with screen shots – rather than repeat this here, I’ll simply point you there to take a look.
In other stats news, I thought I’d refresh the list of things I was using. I’ve added a few (such as BlogBeat – which I love) and removed a few (such as MessageMap, which was intolerably slow, getting increasingly “wrong”, and – now that it’s owned by Google, will likely be integrated with Google Analytics, which I still use, sort of.) Here’s the old list as of 8/16/05.
- FeedBurner: Core RSS feed and page view metrics
- AWStats: Core page view metrics
- Google AdSense: Page views by channel, ad click throughs
- Amazon: Online purchase metrics
- Bloglet: Email subscribers
- MyBlogLog: Outbound link tracking
- MeasureMap: Inbound / outbound link tracking (in alpha)
- Technorati: More link tracking
- Feedster: Even more link tracking
Here’s the new list as of today:
- FeedBurner: Core RSS feed, page view metrics, item views, reach, and email stats
- BlogBeat: Core page view metrics (plus feed data via integration with FeedBurner API)
- Google Analytics: Page views
- Amazon: Online purchase metrics
- MyBlogLog: Outbound link tracking
- Technorati: More link tracking
I’ve dumped the others for the following reasons:
- AWStats: Stats weren’t telling me much
- Google AdSense: Google Analytics (and now BlogBeat) gives me much better data
- Bloglet: I dumped Bloglet and use FeedBlitz, which has stats integration with FeedBurner
- MeasureMap: Slow, wrong data, and now part of Google (hence I expect integration into Google Analytics someday)
- Feedster: Increasingly irrelevant / redundant data
Yes – less is more in this case (since I’m getting a lot more data from the services I’m using as they evolve.)