Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

I have been using Google Analytics for a long time and it gives me great information and history, but there is something really awesome about live stats. Without it if you really want to know how a post or a tweet affects your traffic, you have to keep really good track of what you are doing and when. Then take the time to analyze that data. Live stats let you track your impact right away.

Move out Google Analytics, move in Woopra.

Woopra is another analytics service but they offer a slightly more detailed look at your stats. Live view is one of the most impressive things that I have seen for web stats and with a little work and tweaking I managed to up my page views by 1000% yesterday.

This service is not free across the board however. It is based on page views and if you are over 30,000 then you have to pay for the service. Most people are under that and that means that it’s a viable solution for the little guy. I truly believe that you can gather enough money from Adsence to pay for this if you have that many hits.

They also have a client program that you can download which is even better then their web interface. You can remain logged in which allows you to view your current status or any history when you like. AWESOME!

One thing that I have noticed that screwed me up a little was my time zone setting. By default it is set to UTC so if you are somewhere else you really want to change that. The problem I had was that it didn’t take affect when I set up my URL the first time. Then my reports reset at 7pm which was annoying, especially yesterday!

I still like to have my Google Analytics setup and the code remains in my html for now. Google is pretty much a standard when it comes to this information so I like it to be there. I am not sure if Woopra will be around forever so I like to have my information in more than one place. It’s almost like a backup copy of my stats, like they say “Data doesn’t exist until it exists in 2 places”.

Have fun with it, if you have 100 hits a day then it starts to get a little addictive ;)

Geek on!

I have now started to think about website stats and tracking. Mostly because I am getting more serious about thesleepygeek and need to know what kind of traffic I am generating. After some homework I have found a number of websites that track site statistics and each of them seem to have their own strengths. I often am looking for the option that “just works”. I am a firm believer that 10 features that work flawlessly is better than 20 that are only ok.

Google Analytics is the product that I chose in the end for just those reasons. It has the most popular type of information you need to know about your site and it’s traffic. Where people are accessing it from, what kind of browser they are using, what site they came from, what page they looked at, etc, etc. The site is very nicely laid out as well; a very clean looking summary of all your stats and then it offers the option of digging down to see more specific information. It has the option of sending you daily or weekly reports with all the same information you would find on the main dashboard page. To install it on my different sites was absolutely simple. I opened a single account and was able to track stats from more than one URL. This site, was the easiest because someone has made a plugin for WordPress. I have another site that runs on Gallery2 which hosts my family pictures. It was a simple google search away and instructions with clear steps to enter the generated code on the correct line. DONE!

I have also used in the past statcounter.com. They have a great service with about the same feature set. It seems to be a little more robust but it also is more confusing to find the information you want when you need to dig. I would recommend them if Google Analytics is not your cup of tea.

I did a search for “free web stats comparison” on google was amazed at how many options there are. So now I am going to turn it around. What do you use for web stats? Email me at marcus@hamaker.net.