#measure map

Year of the Dog

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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.

Data Aggregation of Measure Map While Google Analytics Waits

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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.

Webmaster Overview - Google Analytics

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 =)

Measure Map — Alpha Test, Invite Received

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/stechico/64011252/

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

Info Makes the Web Go Round and Round, Google Analytics

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Google Analytics

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!