I confess, I am a statistics junkie and I know that many of my readers are too!! We want to know what is going on behind the scenes of our blogs down to the minute. We are nosy. We want to know what are readers are interested in. We want to know where they are coming from. And there is nothing more exhilarating for a stats junkie than to watch a wave of traffic sparked by a Stumble, a great Digg or a link from a high profile site happen REAL TIME! Yes, real time.In my webmaster toolbox, I keep a handful of stats packages - basically, because they all serve a different purpose. I like the big picture traffic information I get from Awstats that comes with my web hosting package. Google Analytics gives me pretty detailed stats, too, and its free.

However, Performancing Metrics (pMetrics) does it all - and it does it all REAL TIME. pMetrics makes it so easy to capture a great amount of information about your site’s visitors quickly and in logical groups.

Let’s take a look at what pMetrics has to offer!

The Dashboard

When you log into your pMetrics dashboard you can quickly get a sense of the traffic, visitor actions, and what is popular at a glance. pMetrics uses tabbed navigation so you can get to different types of data quickly. Data is also presented numerically, using a bar graph, and by percentage increase or decrease from the previous time period. You can grab your data by day, week, month and more through a simple drop down.

Detail Pages

The visitors detail page shows the time, IP address, country, operating system, browser, number of actions the user took, how long they were there, where they came from, and what search term they used for each and every visitor to the site. You can get aggregate information by country, city, language, browser, operating system and screen resolution as well.

Action information is available by page views, searches, incoming links, outbound links and downloads. You can get detailed information at every turn.

Get content details displayed in multiple formats. If you prefer to see aggregate data as a bar graph, its available. Prefer a cloud display? You can get that, too. You can even export data to Excel for more analysis.

Using the pMetrics Spy tab, you can watch visitors interact with your site as it happens.

Stay informed without logging in! You can subscribe to feeds of your traffic summary, visitors, searches, and incoming links.

Save yourself a step. You can even monitor your feed statistics, subscribers, item views and click throughs directly from your pMetrics dashboard.

Get the most information on your visitors! Another cool feature is that readers who have left comments on your blog no longer show up as IP addresses, they show up as the name they use when leaving a comment.

Conclusion

pMetrics has it all. You can get more information on your site traffic, visitors and source from pMetrics than you can from any other stats package. The pMetrics developers have managed to deliver all of that information in a logical, easy to read, and meaningful way.

pMetrics is a must have for bloggers, but even more so if you manage more than one blog. You can access all of your sites from one main page. With the basic free version of pMetrics you can monitor up to 3 sites at once. If you are like me and manage more, I recommend upgrading to the Pro version for $2.99 per month. With Pro you can monitor up to 10 sites at a time and you get access to all of the pMetrics features. When you register, you get 21 days of Pro for FREE anyhow, so give it a whirl!

If you use pMetrics or decide to try it, let me know what you think!

My Essential Tools series returns today with the tools that are being used by a professional, full-time blogger. Meet David. David is a professional blogger, and has been living full time off his online earnings. Currently, he is working on eXtra for Every Publisher, a blog created with hopes of helping others make money thanks to the blogosphere. David has written two posts that I think are essential reads (there are more, but these two are really good):

• The Five P’s of Improving Your About Page
• What is the Google Sandbox?

And, now on to David’s Essential Tools in his own words

WordPress - Not only is this my blogging software of choice, but I write blog posts about the software. If it hadn’t been created, I doubt I everwould have gotten to where I am. I have been using it since 0.72 and have eagerly anticipated each subsequent release. It just keeps getting better and better. The best thing about it is that with a little PHP know-how, WordPress can be changed to run just about any type of site - from CSS Galleries to ecommerce stores.

Crimson Editor - You need a good syntax highlighting text editor for coding, and Crimson Editor is by far the best I have ever used. I use it for bending WordPress to my will. It is free, lightweight and is the only text editor I use on my Windows machine.

Irfanview - When I am on a Windows computer and I have an image I need to resize or crop, I don’t want to open some bloated tool like Photoshop, and so Irfanview to the rescue. With its plugin pack it also makes a half decent media player for music, movies and flash videos. Another free tool for Windows users.

Adium- Networking is the key to my day, and nothing does it better than Adium on my Mac. I can talk to people on just about any instant messaging client. For the first time in my life I am connecting with people that only use AIM.

StumbleUpon -You want traffic for your site? Use StumbleUpon. For one of my projects, Xfep.com, it has given me six times more traffic than any other source thus far. There is no better feeling than seeing that people are interested in the content you produce.

Samson Q1U USB Microphone - If you want to record audio, create podcasts, or even just be a guest on a podcast, you have to have a great microphone, and I am very happy with my $50 Samson Q1U USB microphone. It feels solid, heavy, and durable. It looks professional, and sounds great.

An Amazing Host - HostGator -I have gone through many hosts, and the one that is just amazing me right now is HostGator (me, too says Char). Lots of space, great support, and stable. I couldn’t be happier. If you want to really make it in the blogging world, having little downtime and fast loading pages is a must.

Thanks, David! I now have some new tools to go check out! How about you? What are your essential tools for online success?

Today’s Essential Tools come from Vivien at Inspiration Bit, where she writes about Web design and development, art and photography, and tutorials.  Vivien is a former college professor who now does freelance work from home. She has also collected some of the best lists of resources for web professions including:

• 16 Best Loved Font Bits in Web Design
• 8 Remarkable Word Press Themes
• Web Design Dissected into 8 Bits
• And most recently,  8 Finest Bits of Stock Photo Sites

Vivien’s essential tools for success are:

• Firebug - Firefox add-on: Vivien can’t imagine designing web sites and working with CSS without this tool. It’s a very helpful tool for sneaking behind the scenes on the blog and site designs that she finds fascinating.
• Any good HTML/CSS/PHP editor: Viven likes to work with Dreamweaver, Eclipse and Komodo IDE.
• Thunderbird: She can’t live without her emails and catching up with the RSS feeds when offline. She also uses it for saving drafts of her blog posts. (Great idea, Vivien - I had never thought of that!)
• Of course, Photoshop and Illustrator :  These are two of the best and most powerful tools for optimizing photos and creating graphics for web and print.
• Her Mac’s Dashboard:  Viviene has got several handy widgets there such as various colour palettes, thesaurus, calculator, Google Dashalytics and sticky notes.
• And finally Wordpress: which almost goes without saying!

Thanks to Vivien and all the Essential Tools guests! It is always helpful and educational to find out what tools other successful professionals are using!