Analytics 2: the Analyzing

[demiurgent]

Wednesday, who is a professional, pointed Mint out to me, which she got up and running for me.

Oh, holy crap dude. This is awesome. By far the best tracking/referral/popularity thing I've ever touched. Weds is right. Weds rocks. And it's realtime, in a way that actually works.

Of course, now I'm rethinking strategies moving forward -- I'm stunned at how much traffic the archives get. Stunned with stunning. And I can watch as they spread (the Silent Garfield stuff, for example, seems to be propagating again.)

Man, this is just awesome.

Comments

[aeire.livejournal.com]

...okay next time I have $30 to toss at it, I'm getting that thing. It looks like it's got WAY more useful info than what I've been using.

[lunabird.livejournal.com]

That probably has something to do with the fact that Penny Arcade recently linked some of the silent Garfield type stuff.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Their link came after the surge started. I think it might be that they saw some of it, some of it was new or new to them, and they linked.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

The guys over at grinding.be brought up the silent Garfield thing (http://grinding.be/2008/02/25/ot-garfield-without-garfield/), too.

[ubersoft.livejournal.com]

Interesting. It looks like its main caveat is that it requires javascript be enabled on a browser in order to tag the hit as "human." This is probably not a huge problem these days what with so much of the web being web-2-ified, though I think it would exclude some of my more paranoid readers.

I think it might be worth $30 though. It's a flat $30 fee and then you install it on your website, right? Not a subscription cost per month?

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Yup. Utterly flat fee.

[wednesday]

I've been over the Javascript tracking issues with Eric. I hear what you're saying; it's not just the paranoid users I'm concerned about (seriously, they want to cloak themselves from view and/or not play with the pretties, I'm happy to let them be). It's also the ones who simply can't play, period.

But even if that chunk of users who, for whatever reason, don't have the Javascriptery on is statistically significant for our purposes? We can pull a heck of a lot of data from the reportedly monumental hordes who do.

Unfortunately, the state of analytics these days is Javascriptalicious unless you're doing everything yourself, which isn't practical for us at the moment. (Analog just wasn't cutting it -- the numbers couldn't be reconciled with anything else, for starters.)

Besides, you should see some of the companies using websidestory-cum-HBX-cum-Omniture Whatever instead of crunching on their Apache logs. (And the Javascript snippet the size of my ass that comes with. That footprint's got New Rocks on.) You gotta figure this approach works well enough as pale-grey-hat web tricks go.

Mint gives me more useful and coherent data than I've seen from HBX, too, I tell you what. Even if some of that useful data is "no, Weds, we can't have nice permalinks; the 404 would confuse people."

Don't know how scalable it is once you start looking at massive server clusters; if we get to that point, I have a hell of a lot more to worry about. ;) Someone hires me on as a full-time standardista, we'll talk about my stupid little Xserve dreams. I'd probably still run multiple Mint licenses over the alternatives I've seen lately.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

...you know, I can probably get you an XServe.

[cdave]

I'm afraid I'm one of those who only enables javascript where needed.

Then again, I read via websnark cia bloglines so wouldn't get picked up on a site counter anyway.

[bruceb.livejournal.com]

If we find you wearing a navy blue suit jacket with wide white trim, roaming the beaches and shouting "I want...information!", it will be necessary to take steps.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

He is the new Serially Numbered 2.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

I always wanted to write a Buddy Story starring Number 6 from the Prisoner and Number 5 from Short Circuit.

[booklegger.livejournal.com]

That, tha.....



I lack words.

[slarti.livejournal.com]

..........Dude.

"Need input!"

"You'll never get it!"

[gregusa.livejournal.com]

Wow. It's almost worth the $30 to be able to see referrals both by single page and condensed by domain. Everything else I've seen gives you one or the other.

Thanks to Weds for finding it, and thanks to you for passing it on.

[wednesday]

OK, if anyone's rushing out to buy themselves a copy based on this post: you really, really want to grab almost all of Shaun Inman's extra Pepper (linked from the same place you'll download Mint itself). Part of Mint's appeal is that it's crazy extensible with the Pepper.

Yes, yes, plugins, but there are separate things called plugins, so we indulge the conceit.

I haven't played much with the third-party Pepper yet. I figure we get a nice stable sense of holy fuck, dude and then I start throwing extras at it. Inman's set will do for most people.