If you’re serious about blogging, it’s very important to keep track of statistics relating to your blog. Where are your readers are coming from? How many visitors and pageviews per day do you have? Once on your site, where do the readers click? How many pages does each reader view? All of these factors and more are important, as they increase loyalty, make your blog rank higher, and bring you more profit in terms of advertising leverage.
So how do you keep track of all this information? There are many free services out there to help you out. Let’s take a look at a few of the better tools:
Google Analytics
You knew that was coming, didn’t you? Google Analytics is known well for it’s comprehensive monitoring. The problem with Analytics is that it provides you with almost too much information, and can at times be overwhelming. Regardless, it’s a great program that if used correctly, can prove to bring in more traffic. Google Analytics also integrates with AdWords to maximize your advertising efforts, if you can figure out how to use it to it’s full potential.
MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog is nothing short of exceptional in the blogosphere, as it not only provides quick, useful information for free (they also have a paid service,) but the MyBlogLog Communities can help gain readership by participating in the blog community in your niche. They even provide widgets to place on your site if you feel particularly social.
Their monitoring tool gives you daily updates (for free) on where readers came from, what pages they viewed, and what they clicked on. The free version updates once per day and only gives you the top 10 out of each report. If you’re using more than one monitoring program, that should be plenty. Otherwise their paid subscription updates in real-time and gives you all of the info. Here’s my profile.
103 Bees
While a little lesser-known, 103bees is a nice little tracking tool. It gives you info on what amount of your traffic was organic (search results,) type-in/bookmarks/referral traffic, as well as paid traffic. 103bees also shows you a breakdown of which search engines your organic traffic came through, and what you top search terms and keywords are. Another fun project through them is the Honeypot, which are user-submitted “weird” search terms that brought people to their page. You’ll just have to see it to understand. They call it the Web’s Funniest Search Queries.
Reinvigorate
The only reason Reinvigorate is low on the list is because it’s a Beta program, and I’m not sure if everybody can join or not. Out of all of these I think Reinvigorate is my favorite. It’s a very graphical, user-friendly interface of your traffic. I honestly don’t know how it could get much better. It provides you with a ton of information about your traffic, even the users that are currently visiting your blog, in real time. It will show you what pages they’re viewing, and give you a “path” that each user took to and from your blog. You can see a geographical representation of your traffic (what part of the world they’re in,) and a time-zone graph. I don’t know how useful that part is, but it’s cool.
It will even let you assign names to specific IP addresses so you know when your buddy John came to visit, what browser and platform he was using, what pages he viewed, what his monitor resolution was, etc. I could literally go on and on about this program, so please just go apply for the Beta.
Google Alerts
I know Google Alerts isn’t a monitoring program like the others, but it’s essential in keeping track of what people are saying about you, when your pages are indexed, and when people link to you. When I first set up AutomoBlog, I set up Google Alerts to notify me every time the word “AutomoBlog” was indexed. I did the same with “egonitron.” You can specify to include all instances, or just the ones that show up on News, Blogs, Web, or Groups. You can also set it up to notify you as it happens, or only get a report once a day, or once a week.
Any Suggestions?
Did I miss your favorite monitoring tool? Let me know about it. Of course there is Feedburner (for feeds, not site stats,) Mint, and many more out there, but these are a few of the better tools I’ve personally used, are free, and would recommend to anyone. And I only had 5 to choose from!
This post is part of Problogger’s group writing project.
I use MyBlogLog and Statcounter. Thinking of adding google analytics now that they have upgraded their interface.
Good tips, have a look at my group writing project.
Thank you for these tool suggestions. I haven’t tried 103bees and Reinvigorate yet. I also suggest that you check out Performancing Metrics.
@Ali: I’ve seen a lot of people using statcounter. Is the the one that puts the colorful little box at the bottom of each page? Not a big fan of that.
@Janette: Make sure to check out Reinvigorate and let me know what you think.
This is some good information for a beginner like me. egonitron = blogroll
Reinvigorate sounds interesting. I applied for a beta over there.
But, the thing is stats tracking is expensive and making it profitable is hard. Performancing was a wonderfull service. But, they just couldn’t manage to make money.
Hopefully, these new start-ups have a solid business plan.
Sorry, had to add.
Statcounter can be invisible as well as visible depending on what you want. It is a good service, if you want a statistics provider. On the other hand if you want something more detailed (i.e. Analytics service), it would dissapoint you.
I have heard that ClickTracks is good. But, its free version is very crippled. It uses raw log files from your server.
http://www.clicktracks.com/
Thanks for the explanation Pallab. If I ever get tired of Reinvigorate or Analytics I might check out Statcounter.
What, Sitemeter doesn’t even get a mention? =)
@Lincoln: hehe, that’s the problem with being limited to a Top 5 list. I’ll probably do a larger list in the future.
Just wondering: have you check out Bumpzee.com? It’s similar to MyBlogLog and Digg (have 2 of those sites’ features).
No SEO, I haven’t seen that yet. I’ll have to check it out. Thanks for the recommendation
These tools are very useful– however, if you put too many javascript tracking codes on your website, it could slow your website down by 10%. I have myBloglog, Google Analytics, and that’s about it. Those are very useful tools though. Thanks for sharing!
Great point Grace, I actually meant to say something about that. Thanks for bringing it up!
You definitely don’t want to use all of these tools at once, but try them out at different times, then decide which one you like better.I have MyBloglog, Analytics, and Reinvigorate on my other blog, and I need to limit that to only 2. But which one to get rid of?
I have Google Analytics, MyBlogLog and of course, Sitemeter. I was going to try out the Auttomatic Stats plugin recently released, but that requires WP 2.1, an WP API and several clicks to your Dashboard on Wordpress.com before you can finally get to the stats. Yeesh. I think my solution works fine for now.
You’re so right about Reinvigorate. I signed up weeks and weeks ago after seeing something good about them and just recently received an invite for the beta. All I can say is W-O-W. It is currently one of my favourite spots to visit. I not usually a stats junkie but having the data in real time as opposed to Google Analytics is just addictive. There are a lot of things to like about the service.
*All real time stats
*Excellent dark theme that is great to look at and full of Ajax goodness.
*Full of stats that really matter to you. They seem to have the figures that I really want to know about – not just esoteric data for the sake of it.
I think that you’re going to be hearing a lot more about this startup in the future once they come out of beta and more bloggers get to have a sweet taste of what they offer.
Thanks for the comment Frank, I agree completely. I was just floored by how great the service is when I tried it. I’m thinking about removing Google Analytics and using Reinvigorate for all my stats. The UI is one of the best I’ve seen. I hope you’re right in that they do get more popular once the service is out of Beta.
Great post. I am using Google Analytics and Mybloglog now. I don’t see the advantage of using more than one traffic stat provider.
BTW, get out Hittail.com to see what long tail searches are hitting your site.
Neo, the only thing that would make me want to use 2 monitoring tools is the different stats they provide, and how easy it is to use them both. It really just depends on what you like to know as far as stats go.
103bees.com (#3 above) also does the long tail searches, and provides other info and tracking details if you’re interested in using that.
hmm, I use google alerts and NEVER thought to add my own domain name. Great suggestion, thanks!
Sure thing Whoo, it’s always a nice ego boost when you see your name mentioned somewhere
Hi Egon – How about the blog/site directory? It can help to increase our visitor?
Ronald: Are you asking me if building a directory on your site is a good way to attract more readers, or if promoting your to directories is worth it?
I’m not sure if this is exactly what you are talking about but I use Technorati to monitor if/when other blogs are talking about one of mine.
@Seo blog: similar, but I find Google Alerts to be a bit more accurate. Reason being, Alerts will tell you every time any given word is mentioned (indexed,) anywhere. It doesn’t have to link to you to count. If you’re really anal about it like me, use both
Cool list. I like the Google alerts idea. Thanks John
Good stuff as i am a newbie trying to get as much info as possible. Thanks
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