RSS feed for InstantSpot site Aaron Lynch

Feedburner StandardStats

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:08:23 GMT

A few weeks ago I blogged about the greatness that is Feedburner StandardStats (formerly Blogbeat) but at the time it was not available for the public. I stumbled upon this post on Feedburner.

Looks like it is now ready for use!

In my opinion, this is the absolute best stat tracking service going right now.

From their post:

This initial release of site statistics includes:

Visitor summary, detail and trends
Page summary, detail and trends
Referral and Search trends
Inbound referral traffic breakdown, grouped by domain and broken out in detail
Outbound click breakdown
Visitor city cloud and live geographic visitor detail
Percentage inbound traffic from search and the queries that drove the traffic
Percentage of visitors that are new to your site today
Browser and OS breakdown, with trend indicators
Detailed historical traffic by page and by date

Screenshot of their dashboard:

BlogBeat...finally!

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:44:10 GMT

For some time now, I have been envious of the stat tracking service Dave uses (BlogBeat) since they closed down new sign-ups as soon as they were acquired by Feedburner. Well all that has changed thanks to Feedburner.

One of the many services Feedburner offers is Site Stats tracking. First impression: very very nice looking interface. Quite a bit more polished than Icerocket's tracking app. One thing that was a little odd, since it is Feedburner they are much more keyed on "burning your feed" etc. But, if you just want to use their Site Stats, you can still do so even if you don't use their feed burning-ness(?).

[pictures will be coming, but I don't have the time right now so be patient :) ]

Once you have signed up for your Feedburner account, you need to click on My Feeds and enter in the http://path to your site. This will take you through a couple steps and eventually get you back to the dashboard.

[there will be some pics here too, shh]

In the dashboard you should see a section on the left nav for Site Stats. There is a link to activate the stat tracking, and should give you a couple options on what to track. I just chose them all to be safe :). You will also see a drop down of different blogging apps that the script is configured to work with. Go ahead and click on that to find out what your Feedburner identification (for this "feed") is.

[yeah, pics]

If you plan on using this for your InstantSpot site tracking and once you have the ID, click on the Tracking Script Manager and select the Feedburner option and simply paste your ID in that field. (well, hit save also)

If this service turns out to be just the exact same level of service that I have seen in Dave's Blogbeat tracker, then I think my search for a great (and free) stat tracker is over.

More on IceRocket's free stat tracker

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:42:52 GMT

I have been relaying my experiences with IceRocket's stat tracker, so I figure another update is appropriate.

Recently, I noticed a dramatic drop in this site's statistics. For quite a while I just chalked it up to people not digging the ajlcom...(I know, inconceivable right?).

Well, in reality it was that IceRocket stopped collecting/reporting stats on sites with multiple domains. I was getting all the stats for www.AaronJLynch.com but, as it turned out, none for ajlcom.InstantSpot.com.

My AaronJLynch.com site has been around much longer, but the way that the search engines spider InstantSpot has really boosted the relevance of the ajlcom.InstantSpot.com traffic.

I quick email to IceRocket about the issue and they replied back that they are going to try and get that issue addressed in their next release (i think he said in the next week).

Another IceRocket follow-up

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 18:05:57 GMT

Basics: I am still on the search for a good, free stat tracker.

Details: Let me start by saying the IceRocket guy(s) state clearly this tracker is a beta product. (related posts: Another-free-stat-tracker , IceRocket-followup--Is-it-really-realtime )

The IceRocket tracker seemed, at first, to be the answer to my search for a free, real-time, reliable stat tracking service. At the time of my last post, their “Last Visits” section was real time and pretty cool to use and the rest of the stats sections updated every hour or so.

Something has changed since then. The “Last Visits” seems to be still working fine, I can see all of the Google search traffic coming in for example...but the rest of the stats aren't accurate or timely anymore. These new inconsistencies seemed to have cropped up after they fixed a problem with the “Last Visits” section not function for a couple days.

Moral of the Story: If you need to have accurate and trustworthy stats, don't use IceRocket yet...it seems like they are under active development (at least thats what I hope it is).

IceRocket follow-up: Is it really real-time?

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 18:36:42 GMT

Just a quick follow-up to my previous post on the newest free stat tracker I am running on this site.

Like other stat trackers, IceRocket has the site's statistics broken out in to various tabs to allow more focused info.

Summary - Summary of hits and unique vistiors. Hourly, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly with the ability to select date ranges and such.
Rank - Daily Rank trend. IceRocket ranks their tracked sites. (not sure exactly what it is based on...visitors? hits? some combination?)
History - Daily History trend. This is somehow related to ranking...not sure.
Content - See what pages are being visited on your site. Daily or Monthly with the ability to selecte a date range.
Referrers - Just what you think it is, what site referred that visitor. Daily or Monthly with the ability to selecte a date range.
Keywords - See what searches you are turning up in. Daily or Monthly with the ability to select a date range.
Countries - See where your visitors come from. Daily or Monthly with the ability to select a date range.
Last Visits - THE ONLY REAL TIME SECTION - See what new visitors are rolling in. This is real time and pretty neat to watch on a heavy traffic day. Details what link was clicked, the source of that link, the user's OS, the user's browser, the user's screen resolution, the user's country of origin and their IP. Daily or Monthly with the ability to select a date range.

I think I still like IceRocket better than Google Analytics...for its simplicity and at least part of it is real time. If you only check your statistics every few hours then IceRocket would appear nearly real time to you. I think they update the other sections (the tabs other than "Last Visits") every couple hours or so.

Another free stat tracker

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:47:59 GMT

Not too long ago I made a switch back to Google Analytics (from MyBlogLog) and while Analytics is very feature-rich...it just isn't fast enough! When I go to look at my statistics, I want to see up-to-the-minute data. We are in the information age (or something like that) and we need info right now, not a few hours from now.

Not to mention Dave's tracker (BlogBeat) really is real time and he gets all sorts of cool visitor info while I get to stare at stale, old and busted info. (Unfortunately BlogBeat isn't accepting new registrations right now!)

Enter IceRocket's Tracker: Supposedly real-time stat tracking, and best of all free. They pretty much cover all that you could want from a basic stat tracker. So, we will see how IceRocket fares in my quest for my stat tracker.

Google Analytics is back...for now

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:17:34 GMT

Some time ago I made a post about how I tried Analytics out for awhile, and ultimately returned to using MyBlogLog for tracking stats. The main thing I enjoyed about MyBlogLog was its simplicity, and it didn't seem to slow anything down on page loads.

If you are a MyBlogLog user, then you have noticed how they have turned that tracking tool into some sort of community kind of centered around site traffic (??). Well, I this morning I realized that I wanted stats...only stats. So, back to Analytics for me. Another determining factor in that decision was that I have seen a lot of improvement in the Analytics tool.

Are there any simpler, better, FREE stat tracking tools out there? Dave uses BlogBeat and it seems awesome. Which is probably the reason Feedburner acquired them and shut down new signups!

Robots and main page accessibility

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

On my quest towards e-stardom (aka a relevant and content-rich website), I realized that the navigation towards my older "news items" was somewhat lacking. My solution for this problem was to create a side bar menu that would contain all of the news item titles in descending date order (aka newest first).

A day or two after this change, I began to notice a positive side-effect to including all of these titles as links on the main page...The robots (spiders) were crawling all through my site! I'm not 100% sure, but I can't imagine how this increased indexing would hurt my chances of being returned in some search results.

In a possibly related subject, a Google search for 'Aaron Lynch' now returns this page in the top 10 search results (#6 as of this entry) and an MSN search returns www.AaronJLynch.com as #3!

Does anybody want my autograph?

UPDATE 1/25/06: Either Google has changed my ranking somehow, or my switch to BlogCFC has harmed my accessibility somehow. I now turn up on like page 5 or something terrible. Back to the drawing board!