Performancing Metrics

Installation:

The initial installation experience of the package onto ProBlogger was pretty easy. All you have to do is copy and paste some code into your template and it will kick in.

The only problem with installation has been on getting it up and running on the MovableType blogs which are running on an older version. Yet to get them up and running – but this is partly due to my own time constraints.

Usability:

With any new statistics package (or any blogging tool for that matter) there is always a period of acclimatization where you need to get into the rhythm of using it. It would be wrong to say that first impressions of using this tool were as it is easy to use. It tooks some time to learn how to work with it.

The layout of the tools are pretty easy to use. The statistics are broken down into the three main categories of ‘Visitors’, ‘Activity’ and ‘Marketing’. Each of these has a summary page and is then broken down into sub categories of statistics – each with their own page. Most of these pages have the option for you to view statistics in a number of date formats (ie by ‘today’, ‘last week’, ‘last month’ or a date range etc). Some pages have graphs associated with them, others are more text based.

Dashboard:

Once you enter a blog’s metrics page you’re confronted with the dashboard for Performancing’s Metrics. The Dashboard is basically a summary page of the blog’s key statistics and includes three graphs (Visitors, Comments and Adsense Clicks) which can be viewed as 1, 2, 3 or 4 week’s stats.

Visitors Category:

The ‘visitors’ summary page shows three bar charts that graph ‘Visits’ (total number of visitors), ‘Repeat Visitors’ and ‘New Visitors’. Each of these graphs show a number for today’s total visitors as well as the option to view the graph as 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks or 4 weeks of stats. Under the graphs are details of your last 5 visitors by IP address, Geography, Language, Browser, OS, Screen Resolution and referrer.

Activity Category:

The Activity summary page gives some summary activity stats from the different sub categories. It has three bar charts across the top that plot ‘Post Views’, ‘Comments’ and ‘Posts Commented’. Each one can be viewed in a number of time frames ranging from 1 week to 4 weeks. Under this is a summary of your last 5 comments by date/time, email of commenter, the post it was on and the author’s name. (Post Views, Comments Posted, Comments by Post, Categories.

Marketing Category:

Like the other category summary pages this page has three verticle bar graphs across the top that track three stats from the category over 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks. These are ‘Adsense Clicks’, ‘Search Engines’ and ‘Outbound Links’. They also tell you the figures for ‘today’. Under this you get the top 5 (also viewable in other numbers) referrers to your blog.

AdSense Clicks - it tracks the pages on your blog that generate the most clicks via AdSense. The overall amount of AdSense clicks are tracked on a line chart at the top of the page and underneath you can view which pages (posts, front page, category pages – everything) generate clicks.

Referrers - This page tracks how people come to your blog (ie the referring sites). This is graphed in a bar chard (ie the top 5 referrers) and then you have the option to view the top 5, 10, 20 etc by total numbers and percentages.

Search Engines - This page tracks information on how people arrive to your blog via search engines. Graphed are the top 5 search terms people come to you looking for and under the graph are two types of information. Firstly you get a list of the top keywords and secondly you get a summary of which search engines are sending you traffic. ie here at Problogger 69% of SE traffic comes from Google.com, 6% is from Google.co.uk, 3% from Yahoo! etc.

Outbound Links - This last page looks at how people leave your blog. It graphs the top 5 links that they click on to get out (not including AdSense from what I can see). Under the graph is the normal ‘top’ list of links that they click. These are hyper linked so you can click them and visit those sites yourself.

Overall Impressions:

• The basic feature set is great and will server bloggers well. The tools are quick to load and easy to navigate (once you get the hang of them).
• Stats seem to be updating every hour (so it’s not quite real time like SiteMeter – but it’s better than Google Analytics).
• Areas that I’d love to see statistics added in include the ability to track RSS feeds, a more extensive AdSense tracking (and tracking of YPN, Chitika etc would be great of course too). These would make this package very well rounded and would mean that many bloggers could stop using a number of statistics packages and roll all their metrics into one.