MackCollier.com

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Are you tracking your blog’s stats in real-time?

A fair number of you probably use Google Analytics for your blog’s stats.  GA is great for tracking information about your blog, and the trends that emerge from users interacting with your content.

But GA doesn’t give you real-time information on your blog.  For example, let’s say your blog averages 10 visitors an hour.  But let’s also assume that in the first 15 minutes of this hour, it’s suddenly gotten 237 visitors.

Obviously, something has happened to trigger that huge spike in traffic.  But if you are only using Google Analytics to track your blog’s stats, it will at best be a few hours before you can find out what is happening NOW to trigger a traffic spike.

This is where you really need a way to track your blog’s statistics in real-time.  There are several sites that will track your blog’s stats in real-time, for free.  I use Site Meter, and it installs almost exactly like Google Analytics does, you simply sign up for a free account, and add a small bit of code to your blog’s template, and you are done.

But the BIG reason why I love Site Meter, because it shows me what sites/sources are SENDING traffic to my site.  Here’s an example:

That’s a screenshot of the last 20 visitors here.  Now I’m not getting as much traffic so far today (mainly because I haven’t posted since Monday), but I can quickly see that those circled visitors all came from the same source.  That source ended up being a link that a Twitter user shared with his followers:

Notice that Tom linked to my post here, but didn’t mention me in the tweet.  So unless I was actively checking my referral traffic via SiteMeter, I would have probably never caught this.  And what’s worse, I checked Tom’s Twitter profile and found out he was following me and I was NOT following him!  So I quickly remedied that, and left this tweet:

So this is a quick example of the importance of checking your referral traffic via SiteMeter.  Here are some of the options I use the most:


Those options can give you a ton of real-time information about your visitors.  For example, if you just wrote a post about Kodak’s social media efforts, you can click on Details and it will show you if any of your recent visitors are coming from Kodak.com.  Or if you are attending an event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, you can use Location to see how many people from Tulsa are checking out your site.  Or Outclicks is a good one to see how visitors left your site.  If you just wrote a post asking visitors to subscribe, and you see most of the recent visitors are leaving via the link to subscribe via Feedburner, that’s a good thing!

So while I think Google Analytics is invaluable in tracking your blog’s statistics, for real-time information, I use SiteMeter.  Now you don’t have to use SiteMeter, there are other similar free services such as StatCounter, that more or less give you the same information.

Any other fans of SiteMeter?  Or StatCounter?  What do you use to get real-time information on your blog’s visitors?

About Mack Collier

My name is Mack Collier and I am a digital marketing and content strategist located in Alabama. Since 2006 I've helped companies of all sizes from startups to global brands such as Adobe, Dell and Ingersoll-Rand, create customer-centric programs, content and experiences. A long-time internet geek, I've been online since 1988 and began using social networking sites in 1991 when I joined Prodigy. Today, I help companies understand how new technologies like web3, crypto and artificial intelligence can integrate with existing marketing strategies to lead to exceptional customer experiences.

Comments

    • Mack Collier says

      Hey Lindsay! SiteMeter is really pretty cool for a free utility, and if you need something past the real-time info, you can just get that from GA.

      Besides, I get obsessed about my blog’s stats, so SiteMeter is my fix 😉

  2. @JesseLuna says

    Very nice Mack! This is a powerful, especially when it allows you to followup with folks who have tweeted your links. Twitter Search allows this to some degree, but it’s much better to access real time information from all Web traffic sources.

  3. Peter Faur says

    Mack, I learned about StatCounter from you, and I’ve been using it. I’m very impressed. One thing I find, though, is that I also use StumbleUpon to shorten my URLs and track data that way, and StumbleUpon invariably gives me higher counts than StatCounter. Any idea why that might be?
    .-= Peter Faur´s last blog ..Zappos CEO sold out for love =-.

    • Mack Collier says

      Peter when you say ‘higher counts’, are you talking the number of referrals? Like say SU says it sent 100 visitors your way, and StatCounter says 75?

      One thing I’ve noticed with SiteMeter is that it it sometimes has trouble identifying the source of the referral, especially if it comes from an email link. For example, when I would write a new article for Marketing Profs, I knew that on 10 am on Tuesday when the Marketing Profs email newsletter went out linking to the article, that I’d get a surge in traffic. However, when I clicked on referrals, most of those visitors showed up as ‘unknown’ for source. But a few would show to be coming from an email. So SiteMeter was catching a few of them, but missing most.

      Not sure why that happens, anyone else have a guess?

      • Peter Faur says

        Hi, Mack. That is what’s happening, but I can’t even make a guess about why. I also run Google Analytics on my site, and it seems to be good about identifying the traffic I’m getting from SU. But so is StatCounter.

        What’s interested me most lately is, now that I’ve been blogging for over a year, people are finding things I wrote quite a while ago. The long-tail effect, right?
        .-= Peter Faur´s last blog ..Zappos CEO sold out for love =-.

        • Mack Collier says

          Yes and I bet those archives are well-seed in search results too. I see the same thing, and as the blog growth, it pulls the older entries up in search results!

  4. Ricardo Bueno says

    Mack: great points!

    I don’t use site meter. I use Google Analytics and Visistat.com (a premium service). I like visistat for several reasons but mainly because their real time analytics and their very detailed descriptions of incoming site sources, time spent on-site, etc. They run about $29/month but they’re well worth the investment (if you’re making good use of the data of course).
    .-= Ricardo Bueno´s last blog ..Repetitive Awareness Marketing =-.

    • Mack Collier says

      Ricardo have you ever used SiteMeter? I’m wondering what exactly you’d get extra for that $29 a month.

      • Ricardo Bueno says

        No. Just installed it tonight to compare. Visitstat was recommended a while ago by a friend of mine. To be fair, they’ve been wonderful by offering a few subscriptions to give away to my audience and a few months for me to test drive (so I guess you can say I’m a bit biased).

        In any case, as I said, I’ve just installed SiteMeter after reading your walk-through to compare and test out it’s features.
        .-= Ricardo Bueno´s last blog ..Repetitive Awareness Marketing =-.

    • Mack Collier says

      Tamar thanks for the reminder about Mint. I remember Karl Long was evangelizing Mint to me a couple of years ago.

    • Mack Collier says

      Riyaz I think I have that same plugin. That’s an improvement over GA in terms of real-time info, but I like SiteMeter better. Then again, I think it’s quicker and easier to see trending info like views with WP Stats than it is with GA.

      I think the bottom line is that I can’t find an all-in-one solution for my blog’s stats.

  7. Kelsi Guidry says

    Looks like another great tool here! I love the example of where the tool will specifically be useful. Although i’m not AS crazy about my stats as you say you are… haha I just may have to become like that after the this example.
    I’ll do my own researching and testing and see how it works out for my site.
    Thanks MacK!
    .-= Kelsi Guidry´s last blog ..iPhone 4 Will Change Social Media =-.

  8. Peter Faur says

    Mack, one more question. There must be a service that will tell you exactly how many RSS subscribers and e-mail subscribers you have (and maybe even who they are?). Can you tell me which ones do that? I can’t do it with Google Analytics, but I’m wondering if maybe that’s because it’s been slimmed down a bit by GoDaddy, which I use to host my blog. Thanks.
    .-= Peter Faur´s last blog ..Zappos CEO sold out for love =-.

    • Mack Collier says

      Peter, Feedburner will tell you exactly how many email subscribers you have (If you use their email form), but it won’t tell you exactly how many feed subscribers you have. It will tell you how many unique IP addresses accessed your feed during the previous day, but it won’t tell you exactly how many people are subbed to the feed.

      • Danny Brown says

        Hi Mack,

        Feedburner does actually tell you how many RSS subscribers you have (it even separates them into what RSS service they use).

        When you’re in your Feedburner dashboard, go to Analyze, Feedstats and then Subscribers, and you have all the info you need there. 🙂
        .-= Danny Brown´s last blog ..The Indecision of Being a Blogger =-.

        • Mack Collier says

          Hey Danny. Actually that number is the times during the previous 24 hours that your feed was accessed, and number of times via each delivery method. It’s not the actual number of subscribers you have.

          For example, if you follow the Analyze – Feedstats – Subscribers path you mentioned, you’ll have the option to See More About Your Subscribers. If you scroll down, you’ll see Feedburner Email Subscriptions, and the # of subscribers. For this blog, it currently lists the # of subscribers as 122.

          But when I click on the Feedburner Email Subscriptions link, it opens up a new option, Manage Your Email Subscriber List. When I click on THAT….it gives me the email addresses for all my email subscribers, and tells me that I actually have 144 subscribers.

          That’s why you can get an accurate # of email subscribers, but not an accurate # of total feed subscribers.

  9. Frank Battiston says

    I saw a presentation from Tim Ferriss (author of the “4-Hour Work Week”) where he mentioned a uniquely impressive analytics tool available from CrazyEgg.com, It provides great info using visualizations (“heatmaps” and “confetti”) on exactly where people click when they’re on your site. A potentially useful tool to give you some insight on your blog design/layout to see what works and what doesn’t, along with providing the standard stats on referrers, clicks etc. There’s a demo available on the crazyegg.com site if you’re interested. Wish I came up with the idea! Curious about what others think.

    • Udegbunam Chukwudi says

      I’m with Ari on this one. The short URL doesn’t say anything @ all. It doesn’t show exactly where the traffic came from and if you hadn’t memorized the URL that was shared by @triveraguy there’s no way that you would have known that the traffic came from Twitter.