January 04, 2007
A 360 Degree View of Audience Engagement
Update: Welcome, Performancing Metrics Users! If you arrived here by way of Nick Wilson's post recommending that current Metrics stats package users give FeedBurner's site statistics a try, we're quite happy to see you.
As promised, site statistics are now live. Our architecture conversion work after the BlogBeat acquisition is complete, and our free StandardStats service now enables any of our publishers to track both feed and site audience, all from the comfort of your FeedBurner account. There is a lot to discuss, so this post will cover how to get started, what you get when you activate site statistics, what's coming next, and our vision for how the pieces all fit together.
Getting Started
If you have already enabled FeedFlare for your site, good news: FeedBurner uses the same JavaScript for both FeedFlare and site stats tracking. All you need to do is go to the Analyze tab and check the "Track metrics for my site" checkbox on your StandardStats service (or TotalStats, our premium paid offering). Voila! You are now tracking site statistics and you should start seeing numbers coming into your site statistics dashboard in the next hour or so.
If you are not yet running FeedFlare on your site, no worries. We'll walk you through the setup process. From the Analyze tab, select the "track metrics for my site" checkbox in StandardStats or TotalStats (under "Services" in the menu on the left) and then save the service. You will then be prompted to select your blogging platform so we can give you the appropriate JavaScript code to drop into your site templates. Once the code is in place, you'll start seeing your site tracking statistics reported within the hour.
The updated and slightly majestic StandardStats FAQ has more information about site statistics as well.
What You Get
Lots. This initial release of site statistics includes:
- Visitor summary, detail and trends
- Page summary, detail and trends
- Referral and Search trends
- Inbound referral traffic breakdown, grouped by domain and broken out in detail
- Outbound click breakdown
- Visitor city cloud and live geographic visitor detail
- Percentage inbound traffic from search and the queries that drove the traffic
- Percentage of visitors that are new to your site today
- Browser and OS breakdown, with trend indicators
- Detailed historical traffic by page and by date
There is even more in there, but we ran out of bullets. While we put more biodiesel in the html-maker, go sign up for yourself and poke around.
Here are a few screenshots we provided a couple weeks ago in our Coming Soon post, accompanied by a note highlighting where you can get to these screens yourself within your Analyze Tab at FeedBurner.
Blog Stats Dashboard
The first screen that comes up when you click the "Dashboard" link within Site Stats
Recent Visitor Detail (with IP addresses elegantly blurred through the miracle of MS Paint)
Click on the Visitors link and then change the pulldown from summary stats to recent stats in order to see this crowd favorite.
Visitor Summary and City Cloud
Click the visitors link, change the pulldown to summary, and toggle the Top Cities from Table to Cloud
The First of Many Hacks
Filed under lightweight yet handy, here's a "bookmarklet" hack for quick stats access: drag the Page stats link to your browser's toolbar. Edit the URL to replace "YourIDhere" with your FeedBurner Feed ID (which can be found by going to "My Feeds" and clicking on your feed; your feed ID is the number at the end of the URL in your address bar). Now, whenever you browse to a page on your own site, you can click this "Page stats" bookmarklet button and dive right to the page-specific stats at FeedBurner.
What's Next and "The Vision Thing"
Our goal is to provide a 360 degree view of audience engagement for you, our publishers, detailing where visitors get at your content and how they interact with it. We'll help you track published media, syndicated media, and shared media; that's book-learnin' for your site, your feed, and the widgets/chicklets your audience uses and shares. We now provide detailed feed and site statistics, and these will become even more integrated going forward. Layer in the ability to understand how your feed-based widgets are shared, and you've got yourself a full-blown metricstravaganza, hosted by somebody famous.
Cool and refreshing, calm yet playful, today's announcement is still only version 1.0 of our site statistics — there's a lot more to do, and we're looking forward to a productive year.
Before we declare open season in the FeedBurner Forums for the site statistics service, we've got every major blog platform covered across the first couple hundred BlogBeat publishers who tested this out. Make sure you check out the detailed instructions on getting the script code set up in your blog template (next to "Get the HTML code to collect stats on your site" when you check the site tracking option) - the instructions have been updated several times over the last few weeks, and we're pretty confident in their accuracy at this point. Good luck, and let us know what you think.
Comments
Fantastic news! FeedBurner's the best $5 any blogger can spend. Looking forward to having my blog stats in one unified interface.
Apologies for going all retro! "Not worthy!"
You should really work on a better integration guide. Drop down menues and pop-up windows are confusing and hard to navigate with...
The "dashboard" and the actuall stat interface is OK though. :)
Wont this require me to put FeedFlare or some other FeedBurner feature on every page to get true stats? I have pages which do not have this information - what about those? Do you also have a javascript call I can put on those pages, so that all pages get counted?
Thanks
Hi Dustin, for any third party stats service you have to put javascript throughout your site. The site tracking service allows you to select your blog platform and then provides step by step instructions on how to get that script into your pages. In almost all cases, this is just a matter of putting some script code into a couple of site template pages. You don't have to run flare to run site stats - it's simply the case that they are all integrated into the same script, so by inserting the script for one, you can easily activate the other automatically in your FeedBurner account.
I just spent my lunch hour clicking around in my site stats and I LOVE IT. Feedburnr rocks.
Wow! Nice.
Years ago I saw a project at RTmark that was looking for someone to get legally married to a corporation (since corporations are regarded as people under the law). If I weren't already engaged to the most wonderful woman in the world, I'd propose to FeedBurner!
You guys continue to totally rock! And you're timing is perfect… I was just looking for a new stats solution to go into the new year with!
I've found that feedflare causes trouble for many feed readers. As the "flares" update the number of comments or diggs, etc it will cause the reader to think the post has been updated and list it again as unread.
Has anyone else experienced this or know a fix? It can be quite annoying. (just my 2c on using feedflare instead of code for tracking statistics)
Christer -
Two separate issues: first, in feeds, FeedFlare is rendered as a dynamically updated image (but one whose physical address never changes). This means that while the "contents" of the image will change as the number of Diggs, tags, etc. changes, the image itself will not - and aggregators will not see the item as new.
On sites, FeedFlare is rendered as one line of javascript - which doesn't have any impact on feed readers at all.
Hope that helps,
Rick
VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner
