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New moms love a few things – receiving food they can stock in the freezer for easy reheats when they are too tired because baby kept them up all night, or busy all day and guest posters so they can continue providing their readers with valuable content. Or at least this new mom loves both these things equally.

Here’s a fabulous post about real-time stats programs from Sue Clark. Sue is the author of Lighthouse News, a fun and educational (for me) blog keeping up with lighthouse news and information across the world; she’s also pretty darn talented in my personal opinion when it comes to technical aspects of blogging, including stats. Enjoy!

Using Real Time Stats Helps Leverage Traffic

If you’ve followed Rebecca’s excellent advice (Blog owner’s note: Thanks for the compliment Sue!), you’ve already learned how to use the free and excellent Google Analytics to your advantage. But one of its limitations is that it’s not real time, and you can be missing some important traffic. You don’t get your statistics until the next day. For this, I recommend you install, alongside Google’s tool, a real time traffic monitor.

Some reasons you might want to leverage real time traffic (and some not so obvious ones) include:
*You see traffic coming in on particular search term to a specific page and might want to update information that may be out of date.
*Someone accidentally stumbled the wrong page (yes, that happens quite often) and you may want to put a link to the correct page.
*You’re running a specific campaign and want immediate feedback on its success.
There are many more reasons, including just plain curiousity about how many people are online at the moment. But those are the most common.

One example of when it was useful for me was when I noticed a large amount of traffic coming in from Google on the search term, “Scotland’s tallest lighthouse.” Now, I have no post referring to Scotland and its tallest lighthouse (Skerryvore, in case you’re wondering), but I do have a slightly humorous post about the World’s Tallest Lighthouse. And that was apparently showing up in the Search Engine Result Pages right near the top. But it really wasn’t about the world’s tallest lighthouse.

However, with all of that traffic coming in, I edited the post to add the actual tallest lighthouse, just so I wouldn’t annoy the readers when they found out it wasn’t what they expected. And although I don’t sell anything, or promote anything except saving lighthouses, I don’t want to annoy anyone. They might come back and visit again, or better yet, subscribe to my feed or newsletter.

If you’re wondering, there is no issue in running another stats collector program alongside of Google Analytics. There are numerous real time stats packages available, both free and paid. The list is by no means complete, but should give you a start.

*Stat Counter (free)
>Feature rich, looks good. Demo available. No ads on your site.

*HiStats (free)
>I personally use this one. I like the visitor tracking in the “last 20,000 visitors” section.

*Woopra (free)
>Sometimes slows down sites, but great features. Has a WordPress plugin.

*Sitemeter (Free and Paid)
>Even the free version is good.

*Feedjit (Paid)
>Has a ten day free trial, and some widgets to use on your site.

For more, here is a quick search from (who else?) Google. Check them out, try them on for size, it’s easy. And the benefits to your campaign are instantaneous. In most cases it’s simply adding some code to your footer, or a widget to your sidebar.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Web analytics, analysis, analytics tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.