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 =)