Can’t get enough data about my blogs—but how much is enough for everyone else?
June 22, 2008 by Tris Hussey
Filed under Business News
I admit it, I’m a data junkie. I will pour over the stats for my blogs for, well, let’s say I can do it for a long time. Oh and not just one source of data either. Oh that would be just too easy, too simple. No, I have redundant webstats tools. It seems like I can’t get enough data. I always want to know more about visitors, page views, popularity, etc.
I tried Google Trends for website when it hit the scene this week and, like Corvida notes on RWW, it sucks for “normal” blogs. Which is a pity because it might have been a great, easy tool for people to get the “big picture” on their stats. Which makes me wonder, have we made stats so hard?
Blog stats and the KISS of death
As I’m pouring over my daily dose of data I think about the bloggers I work with everyday. They want to know pretty simple things. What is popular and how much traffic, that pretty much covers it.
It seems that, however, we should be able to provide more information to “normal” folks more easily.
Years ago I used a log-based stats program that had a great “dashboard” concept, you just looked and knew where you were at with red and green arrow. Woopra has that in a ticker at the bottom of the window (easily overlooked IMHO), Google Analytics has a nice comparative view (given metric vs. the average). The problem I’ve found is that too often it’s too hard for average or busy bloggers to take advantage of these tools because they just aren’t clear and easy to find.
Yes, WordPress stats are good and simple, but maybe too simple. See the best kind of webstats would be ones that give you a heads up view of your data and point out “interesting” things for you to delve into more. The “yo, this is cool, check it out” part is only half the battle though, what people need is the virtual guide to help in the delving process.
Haven’t seen that yet.
I have lots for Woopra in this regard. GA? Not so much, unless someone figures out a way to connect to it somehow.
Sigh, I can only hope.
Completely understandable. In fact, the tools are so complicated that the only stat I pay attention to these days are my RSS subscriber stats. That’s it. That tells me everything I need to know.
I use several stats. I love woopra, but I also use Wordpress.com stats, http://w3counter.com/ stats, and Shortstats.
Connor P
http://www.connorp.com/
Thanks for the comments!
See Corvida, that’s the inherent problem. Webstats don’t need to be hard to get. You’re missing out on a ton of cool and useful information about your posts and writing.
Connor, and I thought I was bad! Right now I’m just doing GA, Woopra and a couple b5 tools.
Again, I’m only really looking for patterns in the data. Numbers are nice, but deceptive. The trends and patterns are where the fun is.