I've been playing around with the Measure Map "preview", a new weblog stats package from Adaptive Path. They're calling it an "alpha," but it is way more polished than you'd expect an alpha to be.
First off, I've never really tracked the stats for this blog. Every couple of months I'd check the numbers, but it was never a huge deal. I'm *much* more interested in the stats at my day job, as I've mentioned a few times before (see a bunch of the posts from last May, for example). As I'm still quite interested in web analytics, I thought I'd check out Measure Map.
Right off the bat, I've noticed myself checking my stats a couple of times a day. Heh. They've made it easy and fun to quickly take a look at the numbers. The interface is nice and clean, and some of the flashier elements, like a world map, are fun to play with (hits from Sweden! Cool!).
They've really pared down the "standard" analytics reports to just the core features needed for weblogs: visitors, links (incoming and outgoing), comments, and posts. Unfortunately, I don't have comments on my site, so roughly a quarter of their functionality is useless to me. It might be nice to be able to hide this section (bonus points if their javascript autodetected this; it seems to grab quite a lot of data from the blog, so figuring out the comment on/off thing would seem to be possible). It isn't a huge deal, but it also isn't fun to keep seeing that big "0" under the comments section.
One place the alpha nature of the interface falls down a bit is in dealing with "initial" stats. When you first set the system up, it'll take awhile to start generating stats. Therefore, it might be nice to replace empty (or mostly empty) reports with "no data yet" messages. Also, they might want to consider alternative text for some of statements about "averages." On day 2 (as I write this), the averages aren't that meaningful. But, with a few weeks of data in there, this measurement becomes more useful. In fact, I really like the concept of comparing daily numbers to averages. I'm thinking of writing this feature into a stats system I've developed at work.
One of the "coming soon" features is RSS feed tracking. I'm looking forward to this (although it'll be interesting to see how they pull it off), given that I think the lion's share of my traffic comes via the RSS feed. At least, that's what the others stats tell me.
It'll be interesting to see if enough folks want a blog-specific stats package. To be sure, the more general stats systems really aren't that useful in a blogging context, so this product fills that niche nicely. But, I'm also not sure the targeted features are worth paying for. I wonder if there aren't some OEM possibilities here, too. If I was running a blogging installation (in, say, a corporate environment), I'd be *very* interested in a stats package like this.
Posted by Karl
November 3, 2005 10:01 PM