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:

• Web­mas­ter Overview (Vis­its and Pageviews, Vis­its by New and Return­ing, Geo Map Over­lay, Vis­its by Source)
• Con­tent Sum­ma­ry (Top 5 Entrances, Top 5 Exists, Top 5 Con­tent)
• Defined Fun­nel Nav­i­ga­tion
• Entrance Bounce Rates
• Goal Track­ing
• Con­tent by Titles
• Web Design Para­me­ters (Brows­er Ver­sions, Plat­form Ver­sions, Brows­er & Plat­form Com­bos, Screen Res­o­lu­tions, Screen Col­ors, Lan­guages, Java Enabled, Flash Ver­sion, Con­nec­tion Speed, Host­names)

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 =)