Performancing Metrics
Since we have tested so many counters and trackers already, is there anything new to discover? Well, this time the answer is affirmative, because Performance Metrics is certainly different from the rest. This visitor statistics services is primarily targeted towards bloggers using one of the supported weblog tools: Wordpress, Drupal, Typepad, Blogger or Movable Type. But Performance Metrics can be used with other websites as well. On an initial glance at the options that Performance Metrics is offering, one may say that there are limitations. We are missing items as total number of visitors since inception, no "top day" reporting, no hourly and weekly overviews, and no visitor IP or host name information. But that is more than compensated with additional reports on Adsense clicks and outbound links tracking, and separate statistics for postings and comments.We like the style of the stats pages. These are very web 2.0, both in appearance (lots of white space, the actual information gets all the attention) and in the use of sliders to zoom in on the data. The graphs and tables are clear, and it is easy to select different reporting time periods. You can even compare two days to each other, but I do not know how useful this is.
It is possible to publish your stats. This is not clearly explained how to do it, so I give a shot at it here. First you have to enable this feature in step 2 when editing the settings for your blog counter. There you can choose to publish RSS and public stats. As soon as you have done this, and you visit your dashboard (the first page in your metric section), you will see a button for your RSS 2.0 feed. Check the link of the button, this is obviously the link to the feed; in the feed you will find the link to your public stats, something like the link to the public stats for our test account. By the way, by adding the RSS feed to your feedreader you have an ideal way to check your stats on a daily basis.
Performance is targeting professional bloggers, people who make money by publishing articles on their weblog. They offer two other products beside the Metrics service, namely an Ad network and a weblog editor for Firefox. Support is available by means of a forum. The Performance Metrics service is still under beta (this is so web 2.0!), but it works without a flaw, and I can certainly recommend this tracker. Especially if you run one of the supported weblog tools, you should definitely give it a try.
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