Google recently indicated that they are taking blogs and measuring blog statistics very seriously with their acquisition of Measure Map. Measure Map had not yet made it into the hands of most bloggers and had been in a private beta at the time of acquisition. A new blog analytics tool that is similar in functionality to Measure Map is BlogBeat. The different with BlogBeat is that it is available to everyone now.
A few days ago I installed BlogBeat on my own blog – the installation procedure involved copying a snippet of HTML into the footer template of my Wordpress install (it will work with any blogging application where you can edit and access the template). The process of signing up and installing took no longer than a minute, and I was able to instantly see who was accessing my site along with all the other statistics the service provides. BlogBeat will read information about your blog, as well as derive post statistics, from the RSS feed URL that you need to specify.
The front page of BlogBeat displays to the user an overview of their traffic stats and highlites trends. You will need to have the code running for a few days to get meaningful data from this front page – for example the monthly summary does not mean much unless you have been running the package for a month (perhaps something that should be hidden until then). The interface to BlogBeat is very simple and clean, not as attractive as the interface for MeasureMap but at the same time very practical.
BlogBeat being blog-specific can tell you statistics such as which posts are the most popular, which categories are popular and also tracks comments to tell you which posts are most commented and what the most recent comments are. With post statistics it also displays trends, though with most statistic packages shows you that the fastest growing posts or pages are the most recent (since they didn’t exist yesterday the ‘growth’ is always 600%+) – something else that should be accounted for if the intention is to make clear older posts that may have become popular again for whatever reason (something that is common on my own blog).
Further there are areas that describe where your visitors are coming in from, how they have found your blog or a specific post and what keywords have been used to find your site via search engines. The last section describes which outbound links are the most popular and from which points users are leaving your page. One simple feature that BlogBeat doesn’t show me that others do is what browsers my visitors are using, though this isn’t the most useful stat it is good to know. I am sure that we will see this feature shortly. They are also working hard on FeedBurner integration (its there already, see my update at the end of this post) and have cool features like being able to subscribe to your stats (BlogBeat will also have an API).
I found overall that BlogBeat is a much better way of tracking my sites visitors (though I am not surprisingly a stats-obsessed blogger, I know a lot who are) over Google Analytics (overkill). The concerns I have with the javascript include method of tracking stats is that first it can slow down page loading if the tracking app is experiencing heavy load (something that visitors to blogs which are being tracked by Measure Map have probably experiences) and second that using Javascript may not be a true representation of all visitors since some browsers wont execute it and others may not be able to (the developers still need to make sure the tracking code works on all browsers such as Safari etc.) . The alternative is to use a statistics package that can access server logs directly, but with that you sacrifice ease of installation and not all bloggers have such access to their servers.
BlogBeat is free for the first 30 days and thereafter it is $6 per month (limit to 500,000 page views per month, not sure what happens if you exceed). They currently have around 400 users and the performance is good, only time will tell if that will hold up. It is good to see more competition in this space and some good offerings. I will stick with BlogBeat for now and decide before the trial expires if I am getting $6 a month worth of value out of it.
Update: John from BlogBeat emailed me to say that they do have demographic and browser stats (I just didn’t see it because it was at the bottom), and Feedburner integration is there now. This is a great solution already with a lot more to come
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$6 a month will limit this to the top pro-bloggers… not because $6 is a huge amount, but relative to the $8-ish price you pay for a pro blogging platform, $6 for an add-on is out of proportion.
Yes, they ought to make it free up until a certain amount of traffic… because only sites with very high traffic can afford this– the only reason this is valuable is for those who are already profiting from their blogs, which is not true of the vast majority. A scaled-down version for those under, say, 100k pageviews per month would give them a lot of mindshare.
Or if not free, a buck a month woould bring in the Typepad / Blogware..etc crowd, who are already paying for the platform.. not the blogspot crowd though.
I agree with Ted that having it free up to 200,000 pageviews or so is a good model. BlogBeat is a solid threat to MeasureMap if they do that..
Dont forget the reason why these guys do have a model is because Six Apart messed up getting stats right in Typepad (I still don’t get why after years they can’t just ‘do it’)
What’s equally disparaging to me is the high-end pricing. Their pricing scheme starts at $6, but quickly moves to $19, $39, and $79 a month. Franklin I’m kind of dumbfounded, because it seems to me that once one reaches the point where he or she is going to have to pay serious amounts of money for this service he or she will simply move to Google Analytics. It has to be hard to provide a non-niche product in this market anymore. May I have a Mint?
I signed up for BlogBeat a little while ago and have been satisfied with everything. I figured I’d check it out till the 30 days runs out but don’t really plan on paying for anything. I guess I’m just not that desperate for stats. Especially when it costs money.
I think this’ll be a tough sell. There are too many free applications for analyzing web traffic. Plus, if you have access to your raw web server logs, you can write your own or use some open source code to track certain aspects of your traffic. For example, I’ve found many people obsessing about their Technorati traffic, so I made this tool open source:
http://www.apogee-web-consulti.....acker.html
It’s an ugly, web 0.9.2 unix shell script but gets the job done if you’re on an Apache server.
I think the comments so far show that BlogBeat might not be for everyone. If you’re blogging for money and you’re serious about it, then I don’t see how six bucks a month can be considered expensive. If you can’t cover six bucks for something that is going to help you optimize and target your blog content and earn even more money, then maybe pro blogging isn’t your calling.
Also, if you host your own blog on a linux/php/mySQL setup, then maybe Mint is a good choice. But for most folks that host with someone else, Mint isn’t really an option.
I’ve been using Blogbeat for months and I really like it. I’ve tried some of the other freebies - StatCounter, Google Analytics, and SiteMeter - and I don’t think they’re anywhere near as easy to use or as helpful for blogs as Blogbeat. I’m happy to pay for the service, and I’m not even doing this for money.
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
Excellent!! But Statcounter shows you all that too plus more but unfortunately it shows only the latest logs.
I cannot understand how you promote this services …
Have you ever listen about [url=http://www.haveamint.com/]Mint [/url]?
If not [and i think you dont] you have to take a look.
Hey Karagos I am listening - we are doing a comparison of all the blog statistic pages right now. I did know about Mint before I did this post and I don’t see how that changes anything - BlogBeat is a good service.
Its been pretty good to me so far, my 30-day trial is up in a few days and I’ve gotta say I’m pretty happy with the stats so far!
It may not be all that blogbeat is, but I’ve been using statcounter.com as my stats engine and it works fairly well.
We used to get a lot of requests for stats packages on WordPress.com, usually Google, Sitemeter, or Measure Map. However since we added stats built-in the requests have dropped to almost zero, despite our stats being pretty basic.
Personally $6/mth does not phase me at all… however based on the comments here, I figure it is a bad move on their behalf. It appears a lot of bloggers will not be happy to pay the fee.
They should do some market research (here!), drop the fee immediately and take advantage of being live whilst Measure Map is “invite only”.
Any company that has a graphic on their site that says “Now with more cowbell” is automatically cool in my book. Get it. Funny. How many others wonder what they are talking about with that one?
My trial of Blogbeat runs out in a day or two. I’m still not sure if I’ll buy it or not. $6/month doesn’t bother me really but I haven’t done any significant analysis of other statistic tools.
I definitely like the simple interface of Blogbeat, I don’t need anything much more complex, nor do I really need anymore statistical analysis.
I probably will plop down the $6 for now, and see how it goes, until something else comes along that’s better for less.
I do find it odd that Blogger hasn’t incorporated any stats - Google hasn’t done anything with Blogger in ages (I used it to get the blog up quick), and it seems with the addition of MeasureMap, they could incorporate everything together into a very useful/comprehensive tool.
I use sitemeter to track stats on my blog and I can tell you that as marketing guy w/o any CS skills it was very easy for me to integrate into Blogger. Furthermore, Sitemeter does provide the browswer data that you liked in Blogbeat. In fact, all of the functionality that you mentioned is freely available in Sitemeter except the outbound link and comment tracking.
no more blogbeat?
My stats suddenly stopped working (and actually made my site keep trying to load the code) this evening. Ive tried to get to their site with no luck. Any idea whats up?
cheers…. loving techCrunch
fdb
They have a ’special offer’ (who knows how long it will last) where you can get a year of BlogBeat for $24. Seems they’ve been listening to the feedback!
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