The Year of the Dog seems to provide a bigger bark. It also provides new opportunities to learn new thing http://www.37signals.com/ buying spree of Web 2.0 app-groups, I just wonder when and if they’ll ever re-align their own site to Web 2.0 standards. One can wish but all can be surprised. I guess that’s what makes Technology so interesting—anything is possible.
PS. There’s suppose to be a rumored launch of Campfire sometime this week by the great folks of 37signals.
So it has been only 3–4 days since I’ve installed gAnalystics and Measure Map to gather information on this site’s traffic. The biggest con with gAnalytics would probably be it’s time-period to gather the latest information from your site(s). It says that it takes 12 hours but it seems that it’s more than this some times.
Meanwhile, while gAnalytics comes short on update time, it sure does make up for it on the reporting side. I have mine set to Webmaster View and this bad boy just list the following:
Yes, that list should be enough for the above-average Webmaster. If this ain’t your cup of tea and just need something to keep a track of: visitors; links coming in from other blogs; comments posted; posts that are being visited; browser data from those visits; countries from which those visitors are from; and the time of day those visits came … then Measure Map is your soup-of-the-day. Not only that, it’s hands down sexier than gAnalytics and more user-friendly. What else can you expect from a product built by one of the top user-experience firms of our times, Adaptive Path.
So whether it be getting down and dirty to analyze all those marketing data, or simply checking out which of your blog posts are the most interesting, these two applications should do the trick accordingly. Besides the FREE-ness, you can have both of them running simultaneously to cover all your bases. If I may suggest a feature to leave of with, I’d like to see Measure Map offer a way to track multiple blogs. This would just be dandy instead of making different accounts. That, or submitting different emails in hope to get additional invites =)
What a nice way start a Wednesday, aka. “Hump Day”. Other than the FREE Wednesday lunch meals we get here at MA, I finally received an invite to give Measure Map a test-drive early this morning. Thank you MM/AP–family!
I know its kind of early to speculate on which are bugs or what have you, but the first two gripes I have would probably be: how long URLs are treated, and the extra table-rows under “What’s Happening on your Blog” section on the member’s Overview page. Other than that, I commend MM/AP for something that ranks as a should-be-great-app for everyone! This should shake things up a bit—especially in the Blogosphere.
I wonder if this is due to my recently posted entry on Google Analytics? =) Either way, it should be nice to compare these two analytical tools. At least the comparable features in each application. I’ll give some updates if I find interesting stuff between the two.
Updates
With the recent announcement of Google’s rebranded Urchin, Google Analytics is FREE for people to use and improve their website’s traffic and selling point. The only limitation to this would be for the particular site to have less than 5 million page views per month. Unless your site pumps iron like the people over at the GYM, you should be OK with this. If this is not the case for your site’s traffic but are an AdWords user, you’re in there like swimwear.
I haven’t taken a closer look at this yet as Google seems to be upgrading the old accounts from Urchin to their new system. However, I did manage to sneak a peek on one of the account information pages. It seems that you can have more than one website per account. That would probably be why-should-I-use-this reason #2.
With Adaptive Path’s Measure Map and Inman’s Mint, I wonder how gAnalytics* would do with the blogosphere citizens. It’ll be very interesting to get some type of comparison between those three apps above in terms of everyday needs, functionality and usability. Maybe its time for me to upgrade from PHPee’s Power Phlogger to one of these. I’d probably try out gAnalytics since its FREE and open to the public versus Measure Map which is still in beta and invite-only mode… hope to get my invite soon =)
Note: Amit Agarwal wrote an informative article of gAnalytics* which lists 10 interesting things about it.
*gAnalytics—I thought I’d try slanging. Besides, it follows gMail. That and OM did it to GYM. HA!