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!
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16 Comments»
Maki
23. September 2007 | 12:37 hGreat review, Char!
Performancing is pretty alright but I don’t fancy the idea of paying a monthly fee. They do have a lot of features but I’ve realized that I don’t use the most of them.
I’m using Mint, which is equally excellent. Performancing’s comparison chart on their website is inaccurate; Mint does have some of the features that Performancing has as well.
Mint just requires a one-time fee and you’ll get to host it on your server.. which means you ain’t letting anyone own, manage or see your valuable statistics.
Char
23. September 2007 | 12:54 hMaki - thanks for the info on Mint. I checked it out and $30 per site is reasonable. The interface and features also look good.
However, with 7 sites that I want to monitor, the $50 per year fee for pMetrics works out to be a better deal for now.
Ponn Sabra
23. September 2007 | 13:18 hGreat review Char!
I love pMetrics too! I too use AwStats daily, but once I got hooked on pMetrics in June, I barely use GA anymore (even though they a better at the “big-picture” view while pMetrics is the itzy-bitzy stuff…which I love).
Maki
One of the cheapest yet most important investment internet-biz tool I use.
I *hate* recurring bills as well, and when you buy in bulk you usually get a discount too. Instead of $2.99/month you can elect to pay upfront a whopping $19.99/year, which I happily paid for
They have a break when you purchase the Premium $5.99/month upfront too.
Love the screen shots & highlights Char!
Char
23. September 2007 | 13:42 hPonn - I am sooooo happy to see you out and about in the blogosphere again. How are you feeling?
Gayla McCord
24. September 2007 | 14:49 hApparently I’d signed up for Performancing some time ago and forgot. I just listed three of my blogs today. I’ll see how it goes and will likely go full throttle with my other blogs later this week.
Thanks for bringing this topic to the front for me again
Jean Browman--Cheerful Monk
24. September 2007 | 16:54 hDo programs like this slow down the performance of your site?
Char
24. September 2007 | 21:59 hGayla - I know you will like pMetrics!
Jean - I haven’t noticed any change in the speed of my site since installing pMetrics.
Jean Browman--Cheerful Monk
24. September 2007 | 23:02 hI’m lost. I downloaded it and assumed I was supposed to use it as a WordPress plugin. WordPress knows about it, but it doesn’t show up as a widget. Am I on the wrong track?
Thanks for any help you can give me.
Ken Xu
25. September 2007 | 07:52 hThis is a nice review, Char. I haven’t care much about statistic tool since Google Analytics is enough for me for my current level. But, I’m agree that 10 site to monitor for 50 bucks a year is not expensive.
Since it have so many feature to track our blog/site, I will consider it for my future use. Thanks for the information.
Chris Garrett
26. September 2007 | 06:45 hI need to take another look at pmetrics, I haven’t used it since the first announcement by David back when Performancing was bought. So far I have been using feedburner and google analytics but neither are perfect.
Jimson Lee
7. October 2007 | 14:53 hMy pet peeve with google analytics is that their basic dashboard results cannot be easily sent as a CSV file to compare past results. Their PDF version is great, but all I would like to see (in CSV) is:
- new visitors
- returning visitors
- (total visits can be calculated)
- visitors from search engines
- total pageviews (the result is given in page/visit, which you can calculate)
With google analytics, you need to extract 3 separate CSV reports to get this simple report in a non-PDF version. Then you can create a macro to consolidate it.
Thoughts?
ram
14. October 2007 | 16:00 hThis is a great review Char, i do maintain a couple of sites. I will try it once and if i like i will go by paying, its not expensive.
Autism News Beat
20. October 2007 | 19:18 hI installed pMetrics on my WordPress site, and activated it in the dashboard. But I have no idea how to logon to the pMetrics dashboard. I know it’s an amateur question, but do I access the pMetrics data through my WP site, or do I have to log on to the Performancing site? Nobody’s reading the forums and answering questions at Performancing.com.
Char
20. October 2007 | 19:40 hYou have to login to the Performancing site to view your stats. Does that help?
Autism News Beat
22. October 2007 | 22:13 hThat takes me a step closer than I was yesterday!
I logged into the Performancing site, but I don’t see a link to “dashboard”. I do see my user name, though, in the right sidebar, and there’s some menu items underneath my user name, but none of them say dashboard. I’m using Mac Firefox. Is that the problem?
Jimson Lee
29. October 2007 | 14:48 hCan you tell me if it tracks outgoing clicks, especially the Google Ads? Google Analytics does not provide that info, but MyBlogLog does (only the top 10 for the freebie, you’ll have to pay for the premium service).