March 16th, 2006
Performancing Metrics: First Impressions
I’ll not waste time and go straight to the point. Performancing Metrics hasn’t performed at the level I’ve expected it to, but it’s perhaps too early to say anything as it is still in public beta after all. You could point to coding issues, server issues or even the relatively large number of blogs tracked at so early a stage.
Firstly, there’s a wide discrepancy between the Adsense statistics that Metrics shows and the ones that Google provides. When I say wide, I’m talking about a 50% difference. It’s only been two or three days, but I think that’s enough time to say something about this. Metrics shows at most half the number of clicks that I actually get on both my Movable Type and WordPress blogs - no exception here. In fact, some of my blogs still register as having 0 Adsense clicks with Metrics, even though there’s actually been activity on that front. So, I’m inclined to think that Performancing Metrics cannot track Firefox clicks, just like a large number of free PHP Adsense tracking scripts out there.
Secondly, even standard page views and uniques tracking seem to be pretty out-of-sync. According to Statcounter, Metrics is more than 50% short, while according to Google Analytics, it’s around 35-40% short.
UI-wise, I’m not in love with the current aggregate view. Only 10 blogs are listed at a time, so you’ll have to click into another page for the rest of your blogs. Imagine if you registered something like 30+ blogs into Metrics (I’ve put 12 on Metrics at the moment). That’d be difficult to manage. Moreover, there has yet to be an aggregate view of your blogs, where each blog is listed with its total page views or uniques for the day. I’m thinking of something like Statcounter’s implementation here. But given that a whole new feature set for aggregate stats management will be coming up soon, this is unlikely to stay a problem for long.
So far, it undoubtedly seems like I’m bashing Performancing Metrics without any respect for its Beta status (and the fact that it has only been a few days since its launch). But the only reason I’m going so far into its limitations is the confidence I have that the Performancing crew will make Metrics better and better, just like how they have made Performancing Firefox a highly useful blogging tool. Once Metrics truly surpasses its alternatives, I’ll start using it on the rest of my blogs (where I really, really depend on visitor statistics).
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3 Comments
March 16th, 2006 at 3:31 am
Hi,
Many of the things you report probably stem from the fact that the tracking code for PMetrics is not on every page.
It works very differently to statcounter, that is on every page.
You can of course put it on every page, and there are several topics in our forums that detail how to do that, so i hope that helps.
March 16th, 2006 at 4:54 am
Sorry, but I have to admit that I don’t really understand what you mean by “the tracking code for PMetrics is not on every page.”
Isn’t it placed in the footer of every page on the blog, especially in the case of WordPress - just like how Statcounter and Sitemeter are used?
Thanks for the quick reply, and I’ve checked a couple of threads over at the forums as well.
March 16th, 2006 at 5:03 am
Ah, I think I see what you mean by “the code may not be on every page”. But in my case, the tracking code is being placed on all pages on this blog, e.g. categories, archives, etc.
I have no additional (non-WP, for example) static pages on this blog or the rest either.
So, I don’t think the problems are coming from the placement of the tracking code.
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