A few days have passed now since I started using the MyBlogLog stats tracking system. Here's my impressions on it and a comparison of it to SiteMeter - the system I use normally.

Overview

Both systems rely on the inclusion of a small bit of JavaScript code in your blog template to track visitors - where they came from and where they go to. The idea being to help you figure out what people read on your site, where they were referred from and what they click on when they leave. If you look at the information you should be able to see what your readers find interesting and (if desired) focus your posts a little better to improve your blogs relevance to your reader profile.

Personally, I use it because I find it interesting to see what links you follow to get here and what sort of posts you are reading, and then to see where it is your going to. I don't adjust my posting subject matter to suit, and in fact one of the more surprising things is that a number of people have come here looking for information about the Upside Down show - a weird and crazy toddlers education show made by the witty & hilarious Umbilical Brothers.

OK. So on to what MyBlogLog offers.

MyBlogLog Logo

1. MyBlogLog: Usage Summary

MyBlogLog Summary

As you can see a small snapshot of my blog (in case for some reason I forgot what it looked like!) and I can see how many readers hit my site, how many page views there were and how many people clicked away from the site. The data is for the last day only, and the pro version is meant to do live updating of the stats.

Kinda useful, and presented nicely.

2. MyBlogLog: Usage Details

MyBlogLog Details

This shows a top 10 for each category for the day. Where people came from, what they looked at, and where they went. Obviously we can only track what the clicked on to leave the site - if someone types a new address in the browser or closes the window then that's not tracked.

This is also kind of nice - especially the side by side comparison.

For instance I most people came from an infoq post, some from Google and so forth.

3. MyBlogLog: Data over Time

Summarising data is done via reporting as shown here - either summary reports, or detailed reports.

mybloglog report

mybloglog report

While this information is OK, there's little value in it. Compared with what you can see on sitemeter it's sadly lacking. There's no charting, no comparisons, no weekly or monthly views, no trending, etc.

And while tracking the outlinks is OK, it would have been much better if I could drill down to see what posts the clicks came from. For example, I've posted about Windows Live Writer on a number of occasions - so which posts are generating the clicks and which ones are being ignored?

4. MyBlogLog: Click Tagging and WidgetsMyBlogLog Widgets

Click Tagging

This one is technically really cool and I've seen it in action on other sites. Basically you turn on click tagging and when you mouse over a link the reader can see how popular that link is in comparison to the rest of the site.

While this is a cool feature, I think most readers would find it annoying after time. After all do you really care how popular a link is on a blog you read (like this one for example). I care, but I don't need click tagging to tell me - I can check it out in the stats.

As you would expect widgets are also available. The "top 5 outgoing links" widget is OK but once again it's something that's really only useful only to the blog author, otherwise it's just a way of encouraging people to click away from your site. The "recent readers" widget is nice, but you only see people who are mybloglog users and that's not a very high percentage of the Internet population now is it?

Continue to Part II