6 free traffic analysis tools

Found an interesting blog-post on Techchrunch today. It seems that the market for free yet complex traffic analysis tools has a few new serious competitors. This probably means that we’ll see even more features from the free analysis tools in the future.
This prompted me to do a quick writeup on the different free traffic analysis tools out there:

Woopra is the latest player on the scene and in the words of Techcrunch is ‘Google Analytics or Nuconomy, but in real time…’ – sounds good to me…
(update: Woopra is currently invitation-only)

Google Analytics is probably one of the biggest players in the market. Analytics has a really nice flashy (flex?) interface, but has a 1 day delay on traffic data.

Nuconomy

is designed to consider the impact of widgets, Ajax, Flash, mobile, etc., which don’t generally show up in page view metrics. And they are also measuring everything on both a contributor level (think analytics by author in a blog) and user level (people on the site).

(Techcrunch) … also read a positive review on ReadWriteWeb

Clicky has a nice web2.0′ish interface, and data in real time. There is a basic free account with a limit of 3 sites to track and a pro account with bells and whistles.

Statcounter has a more traditionally looking interface, but data here is also real time.

GoStats has an nice and clean interface that looks like a blend of Clicky and statcounter.

Bonus info:
If you use Greasemonkey, Joost de Valk has a really nice greaseMonkey statistics detector that gives you an idea of how and when you are being tracked.

I’m on a mix of Analytics, Statcounter and Woopra.
What do you use?

Sitelinks… Me too :-)

Lars Bachmann showed off his brand new sitelinks some days ago. Yesterday I realized that this blog now also has sitelinks:

Pål Heick on Google
Go try : Pål Heick on Google

…ok so Lars has more sitelinks. But then again… he probably has more traffic, more incoming kinks, and more ‘popular pages’.

A little intra- and extrapolation then leads me to conclude that:

  1. Sitelinks are not for the chosen few
  2. …but sitelinks depend on a website where the actual query is very relevant.’
  3. The number of sitelinks are affected by popular pages

And there is lots of polations to be found here: factors to generate sitelinks.

Any further polations?

Open source goes open source

I guess 2008 is turning out to be year of the open source:

Ohloh, the prominent community site for open source developers, is making itself open source, including its full suite of tools and even the Web site itself.

The Ohloh site collates information from public open source version control systems, to create a database of the productivity of open source projects, and the developers working on them. A new “labs” section of the Ohloh site makes source code available, under the GPL version 2. This includes tools such as Ohcount, which counts lines of source code and can be used by companies to audit their software-development teams.

Read it all:
Open source community site goes open source – or go see Ohloh.

Is it just me paying more attention to open source initiatives – or is an new open source trend emerging? Google is doing it’s very best to giving open source initiatives momentum – lately by offering $10 million in awards in the Android Developer Challenge:

Cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users, built by developers like you, will be a huge part of the Android vision. To support you in your efforts, Google has launched the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million in awards — no strings attached — for great mobile apps built on the Android platform.

Read more:
Android Developer Challenge

So, what source will open up next?

Matt Says: Use Alt-text

The Google Webmaster Central Blog features videos with Matt Cutts sharing some of his points on good webmaster behaviour. I told about Matt’s walkthroug of the SERP Anatomy, where controversial meta tags got the thmubs-up from Matt.
Now the Webmaster Central has Matt in a video, where he tells us to use alt-text smartly. In the example he uses, he puts in 7 keywords in the alt-text to describe the picture.

Now, the videos are trivial in the sense that there’s nothing new under the sky here. But the fact that Matt Cutts tells us to use alt-text and meta descriptions could be a reminder to webmasters that Google hasn’t stopped paying attention to these elements (again).

Still – if one is going tooptimiz – take them from the top down from this list on SEOmoz: Google Search Engine Ranking Factors

Google + Digg = Giggle?

Several blogs have spotted that Google may be considering adding a social element to the search results. At Google experimental you can always play guinea pig with novel search technologies – and now it seems that a social approach to search results may be on the way:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

Read more here Giggle Search.
Of course this only allows for manipulating search results in your own searches – but it isn’t hard to see Google using this data to refine general search results.

Via Googlified: Google Digg-Style Experiment

Giggle

Feedburner services nu gratis

Feedburners services TotalStats og MyBrand er fra og med i går nu gratis for de mere end 450000 brugere af FeedBurner. Der er inkluderingen i den glade GoogleFamilie, der har givet FeedBurner mulighed for at tilbyde sine services til alle brugere uden at tage betalt for dem. Læs mere på FeedBurner-bloggen: FreeBurner for Everyone.

TotalStats er Feedburners trafikanalyse for feeds og MyBrand er en feature, der viser dit feed som det ville se ud på dit website og altså ikke som den tidligere gratis-udgave hvor feed-urlen fx var feeds.feedburner.com/ditmegetspændendesite.

Wohoo – vi må håbe at Google snart køber Irma, så maden også bliver gratis :-)

Google køber feedburner

Google fortsætter sin agressive indkøbsstrategi og har lige købt rss-distributions virksomheden Feedburner. Det eneste, der kan undre mig lidt, er at feedburner ikke er blevet opkøbt noget før. Som det ser ud disse dage, skal man jo bare starte en nytænkende web 2.0 virksomhed op, og så kommer Yahoo, MSN eller Google og køber den for en fantasillion.
På med tænkehatten.

– nåja – hvis du vil læse mere, så så jeg det på Techcrunch: $100 Million Payday For Feedburner – This Deal Is Confirmed