Alex Pooley's Blog

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I think web analytics suffers from a lack of sophistication. Right now most analytics packages are pretty raw. They show you traffic from the perspective of time, source, geography, and a few other things and then leave you to draw your own conclusions. But, many conclusions can be drawn without human intervention yet they are not.

For example, does it really matter that 5 people viewed my blog at 800×600 resolution? Or, that 10 readers were from Canada? What really matters is what these numbers can tell me. Say I had 11 readers, and 10 were from Canada, now that would tell me something! Or, what if I was receiving hits from search users that I had not been targeting in my writing?

I’m not sure why packages aren’t doing this. My guess is that a lot of the people creating these packages don’t actually know what people want to see. I’ve only experienced free packages though, so maybe the “pay for” packages are better? There’s a couple of free analytics systems I’ve been trying out that I recommend you look in to instead of the usual Google Analytics (by the way, what happened to Google’s acquisition of MeasureMap?).

• 103bees - Much cleaner interface than Google’s Analytics. Emphasizes what people are searching to get to your site. Read more here and here.
• HitTail - They try to help you decide what to write about next by processing what people are searching to get to your site. It’s a cool idea, but the algorithms are closed with little hint of what’s going on, so I’m left not knowing how to interpret my “suggestions”. For all I know it could just be a trained monkey picking stuff for me to write. Read more here.
• Clicky - This is a neat little package that has more emphasis on following your readers around your blog. It provides details on sessions, and what sort of things were clicked. Definitely worth checking out.
• FeedBurner - I’m sure you know about FeedBurner. They recently increased the free services to include more metrics. FeedBurner has great detail on how people are reading your feeds. FeedBurner also tracks outgoing links which is handy to have. But I usually use the next package on the list for that information.
• MyBlogLog - You can see part of this service running on the right of my blog with the pictures of people passing through the blog. MyBlogLog is not really an analytics package, yet it forms part of my primary analytics tooling. This is probably saying something about the existing analytics packages! The thing I like about MyBlogLog’s statistics is that you can very quickly see how people are finding your pages, what they are landing on, and how they are leaving. I would like to see other “real” analytics packages take this viewport and allow me to drill down.

There may be some magically brilliant analytics package out there that I don’t know of, and if there is, please tell me! Unfortunately, right now I am dissatisfied with my analytics systems as they leave way too much of the decision making in my hands. I would like to see an analytics package that does not suffer from a lack of sophistication, but instead acts a bit like an employee that makes useful suggestions based on an automated digestion of the data.