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Google Analytics vs Performancing Metrics

04.03.06 - 09:04pm

If you are anything like me, you like to get your hands on massive amounts of data, no matter how relevant it may be to your current project or task. If you could get me the entire floor plan of Taipei 101 or an exploded view of an engine then I would happily spend hours on end looking over the diagrams and thinking on how to make them better. Well, why not spend all this time on something useful, like looking at data about people that read what you write? I have found two utilities that let you do this for free and found a third that does it even better. Let�s start with the freebies.

Performancing

When you load up Performancing’s website, you immediately see a bunch of stuff to click, but in the dead center is a button to “Sign Up Now”. Once you have an actual account with Performancing, in order to add a block, go to the login screen and click the “My Metrics” button in the center of the screen.

After clicking the button, fill out all the corresponding files correctly and then you will be given some code to copy into your blog. This code, which happens to be a JavaScript, is what tracks people for you. You will want to place this code somewhere that is loaded on every page but only once, my suggestion would be a header or footer, I’ve got mine stashed in the header. I’ll show wordpress specific examples at the bottom of this comparison if you need more help. Once you have the java script in your website, give it a few hours for some traffic to run through your website and then log back into Performancing’s website and click on My Metrics again. Under My Metrics, you’ll see all the blogs that you have, which for me is only this site. Click on the metrics hyperlink and you’ll be taken to your websites statistics.

Here you’ll see three different columns that contain various statistics pertinent to 3 different groups, Visitors, Repeat Visitors, and Search Engines. All of your data presented by Performancing will come in the form of bar graphs, which gives you a very clean way to pick up large amounts of data quickly. The amount of data available to you is astounding, you can view traffic by day, week, previous day, previous week, and previous month, along specifics about your traffic such as operating system, screen resolution, browser, language, and location. I am really sorry for those ~30% of you that read my site in Safari, I need a Mac to work on the terrible rendering. See, if I didn’t have Performancing, I couldn’t make a specific apology like that. That about covers what Performancing has to offer, lots of data, clean bar graphs, free sign up, and easy to navigate menus.

Google Analytics

Analytics is another take on the same principle of analyzing your websites traffic which is part of the monstrosity that we call Google. Google Analytics is currently a free service but you must apply for an invitation, which took about a week for me to finally receive my serial number. Google Analytics requires that you have an account with Google, which is worth the free GMail and other goodies that Google has out right now. Once you are logged in you’ll be presented with a screen that shows your websites and has the function to add more websites to your roster. Once you have added a website to your roster, Google will begin collecting data and make it available to you.

Once you have everything up and running and you enter your websites report page, Google immediately throws information at you. The various graphs give you a lot of information very quickly and they are easy to read. This is the general story about the Google Analytics page. I’m not going to delve too deeply into what Google has to offer, but trust me, it comes close to being information overload. You can get to know your readers on a very personal level with the inclusion of resolution, language, Java and Flash capabilities, average time viewing, browser and platform combinations, and best of all, connection speed. You guys on dialup, I am sorry for the pictures, and you guys on corporate connections, shouldn’t you be working?

While it seems like I’m giving Google the shaft by not describing everything that is not the case at all. Google simply has so much data that I’d end up posting a ton of pictures and have nothing to write about it. Of the two utilities, I highly suggest getting an account with Google and getting Google Analytics on your site. I personally will be running both utilities in an attempt to see if there is a difference in how they track traffic.

Mint

Mint is something that I recently came across through my friend Paul Stamatiou. Mint does what Performancing and Analytics do, except it does it much better and much faster. While I don’t have any personal experience with Mint, however I have seen it in action and it looks good, really good. I don’t have any screenshots, but there is a Flickr group dedicated to traffic shots that can be found here. These screenshots just touch onto what Mint has to offer. Mint can show you everything and anything you want to know about your site, and it’ll tell you within the minute. Mint also has a large community of modders that create something called peppers that act like plug-ins, making an even more powerful application to play with. The program looks great and when I finally get the money for it, I’ll be reviewing it here. Now I’ll show a quick example of how I got both Performancing and Analytics working on my site.

Code Example

My website is currently hosted by MediaTemple and I have full access to my php files, which was necessary for my application of these utilities. My blog is running the K2 theme for Wordpress so my experience is limited to this small sector of the blogging community, however the idea will work for anyone. When Performancing and Google give you the JavaScript to enter onto your site, copy the entire segment of code and find either your header or footer php files. Inside these files, look for a place that is outside of any large statements and paste the code in there, saving the file when you close it. Here is an example on how my code looks, just notice how the code is outside of the chunks of code above and below where it is placed. That about covers everything, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop a comment or contact me.

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