On The Edge!

Menu

Tag: Google Analytics

Analytics 3d

After reading my review of Analytics Pro, Richard from Codefrontiers sent me a promo code for trying their new app called Analytics3D. Below is a brief opinion of mine after using the app for the past week.

A very interesting app approach to view Google analytics data on you iphone or ipad. I must say the app is good. It adds a bit of spice to the monotonous apps that can just show Google Analytics data on your iDevice of choice. What I like about the app is that it has a gestures to navigate within categories. The location of visitors is my favorite feature. The bars on location view in a 3D is really cool. If you already are using an app for Google Analytics and you are interested to try something cool and a different app, this is the app for you.

As much as the app is cool, some functions/gestures aren’t obvious making it a bit confusing initially. Once you figure out it feels obvious. In all Analytics3D is a cool app, worth a try. Ideal for individuals who have blogs or personal sites and are not digging deep into their stats data, but just trying to get an overview of how their site is faring Its on the store for $2.99 and u can download from here

Analytics PRO review

Ever since I moved to the self hosted blog, I have played around with measuring traffic on the site and i get to closely observe and learn about site analytics and web metrics. It has been over 6 months since I moved to godaddy in november i have had traffic stats enabled on my site and my goto analytics solution has been google analytics. I must say I have tried a lot of analytics solutions like statcounter, clicky, Piwik. I have always retained Google Analytics, Not just because its free but more so because it has a lot of tutorials and support communites to learn from.

Ever since I have turned analytics on, I always needed an app on the phone to check the stats from Google analytics when I am completely off for a few days without my machine. There are quite a long list of apps which are free and quite handy and basic. I ve tried a few may be 3 of them, and then I just bought the Analytics pro(App Store link, look at the screenshots) app. Its on the store for 6$ and i must agree its worth every penny of it. I like this app so much that i just prefer using the app more than the google analytics site itself.I used 3 free apps for their various features and now all three have been replaced by one app “Analytics Pro”.

So whats so special about the app you ask?

The single most reason why i would suggest you to buy this is that, you wont find a feature thats missing from the google analytics site. Well you can’t do everything on the app, but i must say that is the max any app would be allowed to do using the google’s api.

The app is slick, well thought out and neatly crafted.

I am sure after months of use that the app is very secure. It uses OAuth to connect to your google account. Which i think is quite safe. Though i dont have a proof to substantiate, I can definietly acknowledge that nothing has broken with my google account since i started used the app.

It supports multiple sites if you have them linked on the same google account or with multiple google accounts.

You can do a tonne of customization and choose from past 7/14/21/28 days along with a look at today and yesterday. You can choose your own time frame as well if you need and choose to have a 7 day running average on the graphs and so on.

Content and Traffic Source drill down is phenomenal.You should just try it, Its so damn detailed, that hardly would you notice that you are on the app and not on the website.

Most importantly if you have goals set on Google Analytics site, you can track them on the app in your choice of currency from the 25 supported which is really cool. The app does display e-commerce tracking if your site has been configured for.I have no idea how the e-commerce tracking works though, since i don’t have an e-commerce site

If you are looking for a whole list of features please read them here.

While I bought the app purely based on the screen shots on the app store, I haven’t been disappointed at all. There may be a lot of apps for Google Analytics on the app store but this has been the best of the lot of what I tried.All my needs of tracking my site on the phone using Google is being taken care by Analytics pro. My Go to app for tracking. I use it daily and I would recommend it to you as well.

Google Analytics on wordpress.com -My findings

Well I am sure you a have reached here after a quite a bit of search about enabling Google Analytics on your free wordpress.com blog. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that, it is possible if you have a custom domain setup on wordpress.com.  If you don’t have, you are out of luck temporarily.[you can always buy one 🙂 ].  Since this post is NOT about how to get around setting google analytics, please head over to the last paragraph for the instructions. But before you go there let me just warn you a bit about how my efforts fared at this attempt and what I gained and what I lost.

Google analytics is just awesome, and i will miss it badly. I had it for a month and it was just great.  Yes, i undid the workaround I had done a month and a few days back. The issues that I had were of page load times. Pages with a lot of images like this one that gets the most vistiors on my blog took more than 17 second to load (yes i tested them personally,  and average page load time for the same page on Google Analytics was 14secs.) Now after undoing the work around it has considerably reduced like (8 secs).

<

p style=”text-align:left;”>
What was surprising was a few days back when I checked I had this message popping on the site, which was nothing I had done. Well a close investigation said that it was protecting the security of my site and was put up there by cloud flare guys. Well this is a bit annoying to me in the first place, I cant even imagine how bad it would be for a user who came here due to a search engine. Should be disappointing at the very least. I am not sure what triggered this, it could have been a setting change I did or it was something default of theirs, but regardless of who is to be blamed, I don’t like it and i do not want it. The page load times and the security was more than enough for me to stop this hack around. To me happy readers matter more than the stats.So i will sacrifice the in depth stats for now.

<

p style=”text-align:center;”>

<

p style=”text-align:center;”>

<

p style=”text-align:left;”>
I am not advising you to stop from trying, i am just sharing my set of thoughts and issues. If you feel its worth the hassle, please feel free to try them from here. [I wonder why two pages for it though, cheap pageview tactics] My recommendation would be, Its better to host your own blog elsewhere [Not on wordpress.com] and have tracking. Remember there are no Free Lunches 😉 if they are they are probably not great.