Brad Feld

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New And Exciting Stats

Feb 28, 2006
Category Investments

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.)