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Posted on Sep 07, 2007 - 12:46am by John P. in The Man's Videos, Web Links, Wordpress
Several people have been asking me lately what I use to measure traffic statistics here on One Man’s Blog. Well, in addition to occasionally downloading my server logs and running some software on them to see the official stats, I use Performancing P-Metrics whenever I want to get a quick glance.
Frankly P-Metrics has the most comprehensive feature set around and will allow you to learn more about a site’s visitors than any other package that I am aware of. This includes everything from stats by page, referrer, search words, and even a wickedly cool real time monitor! So I whipped up a demo video to give you a glimpse behind the scenes here at OMB.
pMetrics offers free service for up to 3 web sites and 1,000 page views per day, per site. This will serve the needs of the vast majority of Web sites. They also have two levels of premium service which get you more sites, more features, and higher traffic levels – starting at less than $2/month.
When you first register, you automatically receive 21 days of premium service for FREE! This gives you a chance to try it out and fall in love with some of the features that you won’t find anywhere else.
I’ve also attached a partial chart that shows how P-Metrics stacks up against the competition. It’s pretty impressive.
Finally, here is a video I whipped up of a screen capture of the stats from One Man’s Blog. Its a 10 minute walk through all of the detailed reports that come with the service. You’ve got nothing to lose, so give it a try.
Also, don’t miss my video of What Happens When You Hit the Digg Homepage. It’s a peek at the spy function during a Digging.
Sounds interesting, but I have two questions based on the comparison chart: (1) how does the Wordpres plugin work (I’m on Wordpress and love my plugins :) and (2) how does it integrate with FeedBurner? One of my biggest complaints about FeedBurner is that the stats seem pretty minimal.
Good questions. As far as the plugin is concerned, I don’t use it – and it is brand new – but as I understand it, it will integrate the stats into your WordPress dashboard so you don’t have to go to the PMetrics site to see them.
I just have PMetrics bookmarked, so I use that. Seems the same to me to pull it up vs. pulling up the dashboard.
As far as integration with FeedBurner is concerned, you have the option to allow public access to your stats somehow via Feedburner. I haven’t tried it, but the option is there. I think it basically creates an RSS stats feed or something. Let me know what it actually does if you end up testing it. :-)
John
The ability to see stats from the dashboard would be awesome. I’ve never understood why that came as part of the free WordPress blogs (which are useless to me as someone who wants to host on his own) but didn’t come as part of the downloaded versions. As for the FeedBurner part: sounds interesting for sure, if you do try it out let me know ;)
Hm thanks for that information. I currently use StatCounter, but I’m always open to checking out other ways to see some stats! I have also noticed that FeedBurner (while good) does not exactly always provide the optimal amount of information that I would like.
P-Metrics is based off of http://www.getclicky.com . I’ve been trying to private label their metrics as well.
Great, I’ve been looking for a new way to analyze traffic. Google Analytics just doesn’t do what I need anymore.
Thank you so much for doing the walk-through video! That spy feature is great! I have actually been looking for a new way to look at my statistics lately, and now I think you’ve just made up my mind for me! As usual, great information for us! Thanks, John!
Seems like this is a lot better than Analytics as Luke pointed out.. thanks John – I’m going to try this out :)
nice, I’m signing up right now
I’m really interested in that spy feature.. Does it take time to setup ? Like analytics, it seems you have to wait a day to see stats.
Is it just for blogs ? I don’t see how to add my forum :(
[...] Just yesterday I posted a video about how I use the Performancing P-Metrics service, and then shortly thereafter when another one of my articles hit the Digg Homepage it occurred to me that I should take a video of the PMetrics “Spy” function to demonstrate what actually happens when 5,000 people per hour are visiting a Web site. [...]
I also have Mint, and it is nice, but it is not quite as feature rich, and it puts load on your server as opposed to running as an outsourced service. Mint also annoys me because it has to be continually upgraded and there is no smooth process for doing that.
Either one also requires a javascript to implement. And since they cost about the same, why not use an outsourced provide so you don’t have to worry about all the hassles and put the strain on your own server and database?
John
Hi John,
Have you compred numbers from the P-Metrics package and compared them to the numbers your server logs give, and again compared to google analytics? (Apologies if this is covered in the video, I’m at work and cannot stream it down til I get home).
Reason for asking is I’ve found that analytics and my server logs differ wildly across all metrics,so i never know which is the one to trust when referencing data to advertisers etc. I’ve a feeling the truth lies somewhere in between, so if this package comes somewhere in the middle, I’ll be very interested in taking a more indepth look. The fact that it comes with a free 21 day upgrade will also tempt me to give it a try.
Cheers
Dave
Dave,
I have compared P-Metrics to my server logs as well as Google Analytics, MyBlogLog, Spotplex, and a few others. I find Google’s numbers to often be off by as much as 50%. It is amazing how innacurate they are, considering that they are Google!
Spotplex is also way off because they only count page views on the posts you have published since installing their code. I’ve addressed this with them on multiple occasions and they have not remedied this flaw.
MBL and P-Metrics are both fairly accurate as compared to server logs (off by 10-20%), though MBLs stats do not show nearly the information that PM shows. They also both have the same cost, so I would spend it on PM instead.
Remember that all of these stat packages require visitors to execute a javascript, and many people turn that off in their browsers. Your server log files capture every visitor regardless of javascript, so they always win by default. But if you are selling ads that require javascript to load, like Google’s AdWords, then your advertisers will only care about those stats.
Hope that helps!
John
Many thanks John, thats just what I wanted to hear!
John, thanks so much for linking this to me. I went with the 30 day trial and then at the end I had 2 articles brought to the front page of digg.com and reddit.com (within 1-2 days of each other) and the only way to accurately track it was with Pmetrics. You’ll likely have a referral credit from my premium setup.
Reddit doesn’t cause huge traffic spikes, but digg.. wow.. The Spy feature was AWESOME for those :)
Hehehe. Yeah, I’m glad you like it! You know unlike other bloggers who sell out I’ll ONLY EVER tell you guys about things I actually like or use. The fact that I might get a little referral credit just means more money that will go into the monthly prizes! :-)
Take care,
John