Lee Odden

Reader Poll: Best Blog Analytics Software

Lee Odden     Blogging Strategy, Online Marketing, Reader Polls

There are more companies blogging now than ever. How do you measure results? Measuring the social web is a different thing than what most web analytics packages offer. It can be easy to start a blog, but making it successful requires an excellent feedback mechanism. Blog analytics is one of those sources of feedback to know what’s working and what’s not.

We’ve listed interesting blog analytics tools of various types before, but now’s your chance to vote for (up to two) of the best software focused on measuring what happens on blogs.

What are your 2 favorite blog analytics software tools?

  • Google Analytics (43%, 169 Votes)
  • Woopra (10%, 41 Votes)
  • Feedburner Stats (10%, 40 Votes)
  • StatCounter (9%, 37 Votes)
  • Wordpress Stats (7%, 28 Votes)
  • Crazy Egg (6%, 25 Votes)
  • Clicky (5%, 20 Votes)
  • MINT (4%, 16 Votes)
  • BLVD Status (3%, 10 Votes)
  • W3Stats (2%, 6 Votes)
  • Enquisite (1%, 3 Votes)

Total Voters: 254

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Free analytics services like Google Analytics, StatsCounter and W3Stats were included because they they offer the kinds of standard analytics information useful for blogs and any kind of web site as well as the fact they are used by a large number of bloggers.

If we’ve missed a great blog-centric analytics package in the list above, please add in the comments and we’ll include it in our next reader poll.

Here is a list of the blogs/Forums for the Blog Analytics tools in our poll:

If you’d like to learn more about blog analytics in general, check out these resources:

If you have other useful resources on blog analytics, please share in the comments. Especially videos, podcasts, presentations, articles, software reviews/comparisons, screencasts or conference session live blog posts.

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Lee Odden About Lee Odden

@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of Online Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on integrated content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely on a beach somewhere doing absolutely nothing.

Comments

  1. Greg Verdino says:
    December 1, 2008 at 8:48 am

    Thanks for including my framework in your list of resources. If anyone reading this wants to understand the thinking behind the graphic, I also blogged about it here

    G

  2. krishna says:
    December 1, 2008 at 9:03 am

    I feel GA provides some good analytical results followed by clicky, woopra. Anwayz would like to hear about others views too in this regard. I will tweet this one and would like to see the final display of results.

    Thanks,
    Krish.

  3. Lee Odden says:
    December 1, 2008 at 11:20 am

    Thanks Greg.

    Thanks Krishna – would love any assistance in getting votes.

  4. Peter Caputa says:
    December 1, 2008 at 12:26 pm

    I haven’t used a bunch of these. Google analytics is powerful, but not necessarily measuring the right things to help a blogger improve their writing.

    For biz blogs, where the purpose is growing traffic and building an audience of prospects, we’ve built some analytics tools into our HubSpot’s software that analyzes how much traffic, inbound links, social media uptake and seo value each blog article accrues.

    I wouldn’t normally leave a link in someone’s comments, but you asked for links:
    http://www.hubspot.com/products/business-blog/

    I used to login to feedburner regularly. But, HubSpot brings that data in – and includes it in the blog analytics reports it produces.

    Is there a reason you left off Mybloglog?

  5. Lee Odden Lee Odden says:
    December 1, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    Thank you to all that completed the poll and helped promote!

    Please comment on other blog-centric analytics tools that measure on-blog activity that I’ve neglected to include.

  6. David Brown says:
    December 1, 2008 at 1:23 pm

    Even though it’s not super fancy I still find useful stats in AwStats 😉 .02

    DB

  7. paisley says:
    December 1, 2008 at 1:29 pm

    Lee you missed a VERY good stats program that can be used for blogs.. i’m using it on 17 clients’ blogs.

    http://mcc.hitslink.com

  8. Jan Alvin says:
    December 1, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    aww, no sitemeter??

  9. Chris Bennett says:
    December 1, 2008 at 1:57 pm

    Lee,

    thanks for mentioning BLVD Status, we are working hard on making it a viable solution for blog metrics.

  10. Liam Delahunty says:
    December 1, 2008 at 3:12 pm

    For blogging, I would suggest having a good look at 103bees – http://103bees.com/

    It’s main use (for me) is long tail, but it has a number of interesting ways of viewing your data.

  11. Saad Kamal says:
    December 1, 2008 at 4:57 pm

    I tried out Yahoo Analytics (ex Indextools) as well. Its currently in beta, and you will need an invite to sign up. Its pretty cool and slightly advanced than the previous GAnalytics. But with the recent Update that GAnalytics made, I think both are highly competitive now.

    I like W3Counter a lot. Their reporting is pretty accurate. For Bloggers on hosted platform I’d also advice using AWStats (that comes inside Cpanel).

  12. Diana Freedman says:
    December 1, 2008 at 6:10 pm

    I voted for Google Analytics because I’ve used it ever since it was new, but I’m not sure how accurate it is. I also use the MyBlogLog stats so that I can easily track clicks on my site (I’ve found GA to be really inaccurate with that), and referrers TO my blog never match up on the two analytic tools. So I don’t really know how my blog is doing, since I can’t really believe either of my stat trackers.

    Great article, by the way!
    ~ Diana

  13. Lee Odden says:
    December 1, 2008 at 9:08 pm

    Thank you to everyone who shared their vote, opinion and helped promote this poll.

  14. Gerald Weber says:
    December 2, 2008 at 12:05 am

    Google analytics is definitely my favorite stats program. Stats counter is not bad but the free version has ads. I never tried WordPress stats. I use feed burner but never really used the stats part of it much other than to keep track of subscribers.

    -Gerald Weber

  15. xcoder says:
    December 2, 2008 at 4:41 am

    Woopra all the way, amazing instant stats 🙂

  16. Jo says:
    December 2, 2008 at 4:44 am

    GA is good, i used to use it before.
    But now i use only Woopra.
    The services that Woopra offers cannot be compared to other analytic tools.(live chat, notifications etc…)

  17. Gerard Duke says:
    December 2, 2008 at 7:55 am

    guys, google analytics is good but woopra owns the net!
    I’m so happy to have it.

    Real time! wow…

  18. Sharon Wilson says:
    December 2, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    Great Tips, I agree with most of the comments as well, Thanks for sharing this with us, Keep up the great work!

  19. Vince Pickett says:
    December 3, 2008 at 10:28 am

    Thinking that my tool of choice STATCOUNTER might be toasting all of them if it was actually spelled correctly in the poll.

    GA fears them as noted when StatCounter’s Google Page Rank mysteriously dropped from a 10 to 9 shortly after GA was introduced.

  20. Lee Odden says:
    December 3, 2008 at 11:29 am

    Thanks for pointing that out Vince. (now corrected)

    Although, if the extra s is going to throw someone off that much I’d have to wonder how familiar they really are with the tool. StatCounter is only included in this poll because it’s a tool in use by many bloggers because it’s free. However, like W3Stats and Google Analytics, it’s not blog centric like Clicky, Woopra and BLVDStatus.

  21. Richard says:
    December 3, 2008 at 11:50 am

    I’ve used Statcounter for many years, and on many sites. Top notch support, easy to install, easy to interpret stats. I heartily recommend you try them!

  22. Brent says:
    December 3, 2008 at 6:09 pm

    Clicky keeps getting better with every update… it’s one of the few analytics packages that automatically (by default) partitions out links from social media/bookmarking sources. Not only that but just about everything in the analytics package can be pulled out via an RSS feed.

  23. Lorelle says:
    December 5, 2008 at 9:23 am

    Thank you for including Woopra in the list, and wow! We are stunned at the positive response. As a mosquito in the side of Google Analytics, this is amazing. Thanks for showcasing us and showing us that people are liking what we are doing!

  24. Hugh says:
    December 5, 2008 at 4:56 pm

    Lorelle, I was monitoring the poll results here on a daily basis. Woopra was most definitely in the bottom half of the choices for the first 2 days, then suddenly one day, it got 30 votes out of nowhere. A bit suspect, I’d say. It’s as if someone told all their friends, Quick, go vote for Woopra so it’s in the lead! Not that it was someone from Woopra necessarily, but the results are very skewed.

  25. George Aspland says:
    December 6, 2008 at 8:45 am

    ClickTracks. Because our blog is a sub web of our main site our ClickTracks analytics runs on it too. We get very useful metrics, top referrers, referrals to specific posts, top landing pages/posts, keywords searched on to reach those posts, previous and next pages both in the blog and on our main site by segment so we can make changes, add calls to action etc. and see the results. And we didn

  26. Youli says:
    December 15, 2008 at 6:13 pm

    Wow! I have never seen many blog analysis software in the internet, but I think the Google Analytics is most favorite software for webmasters to analysis their websites. The stage with maintenance your website utilizes anayltics software is the most important thing, especially blog website. Because most blog website are complex management with all visitors and you always need a better website analysis software or even more for your business.

  27. david says:
    January 10, 2009 at 10:36 am

    I tried martix stats once as was a freebie but is pretty poor and like others here use Google Analytics now which for me gives me a decent idea of what is going on. Guess Google are winning in the poll due to it being more well known and hence used rather than necessarily being the best.

  28. Jimmy Bone says:
    January 21, 2009 at 12:32 am

    Right now I’m using google analytics to monitor my traffic
    but I recently installed WordPress stats and that gives me
    instant reads when I login. I’m basically new
    to blogging and have not had a chance to use the other analytics tools.

    Great poll!!

  29. Jay @ work at home says:
    September 25, 2009 at 8:14 pm

    I really like Crazy Egg, but I would have to say Google because of the fitted results.

  30. Work at Home Make Money Online says:
    September 26, 2009 at 1:14 am

    I really like Crazy Egg, but I would have to say Google because of the fitted results.