January16

Seeking Gold Statistics? Use Measure Map!

For the past six months I’ve been using statcounter.com to track my site’s usage statistics. And why not? It’s free and it supplies me with quite a bit of juicy stats. The only quip I have with the service is that the free account only comes with 100 log entries – which means that when visitor #101 visits your site, you lose the information from #1, and the cycle continues. So if you’re looking at statistics such as browser-usage, resolution, etc., your information is only as good as your last 100 hits (not to be confused with visitors).

With the recent influx of new, and extremely worthwhile, solution startups, I’ve been chomping at the bit to get hooked into some alpha/beta/preview testing. I finally succeeded when I was invited to try out Odeo.com before they went public (Odeo.com is a nice podcasting community site) and then hit gold again when I was able to test out the new browser, Flock.

I found tons and tons of nice new solutions to test out here and there, but there seemed to be a major void in the area of web site statistic tracking.

Then, out of the blue, came Mint, a totally sweet PHP, MySQL and JavaScript engine that keeps track of all the fun stuff for you. Only problem here, I missed out on the beta and now it costs money. MONEY!?! Who has that?

Luckily I caught a post over at Jeffery Veen’s site talking about Adaptive Path’s new tracking solution called Measure Map. I hopped on the waiting list to try this out and was contacted shortly after the year began. I quickly signed up and added the necessary code to my page to start utilizing the service.

Basically, Measure Map rocks. There are four main categories that are tracked: Visitors, Links (to and from), Comments and Posts. The interface is designed very cleanly and completely with the user in mind. In addition, almost every page features a smaller flash application for you to choose your date, or date span. Also tracked are browsers, countries and times your users visited.

Unlike statcounter, Measure Map doesn’t log IP address. If they do, I don’t see it. At first I wanted this feature because in statcounter, I can tell who has looked at what (for a very small group of people), but now I’m fine with that. Measure Map tells me beyond the last 100 hits and that makes me happy. It also tells me that I have X number of visitors and Y% has been there before. Perfect.

I’m sure that the Measure Map that I see now won’t be the final product released to the entire public... I’m betting quite a bit of tweaks are made between now and whenever it’s released. I would like to see some more basic stats, if possible, like screen resolution, javascript usage and specific browser (IE 5.0 vs IE 5.5) percentages. Maybe features like that will be added, maybe not.

Oh, I almost forgot one of the coolest features... RSS feeds with your stats! Now you don’t have to worry about logging in every day to see what the stats were... you get it sent to you automatically. Mucho Bueno!!!

Nice job to the peeps over at Adaptive Path, keep up the good work! If you’d like to sign up for an invitation, you can do so from Measure Map’s home page.

+ original post date: January 16, 2006 01:47 PM
+ categories: This Is Cool, This Site, Web Stuff