The Varying Virtues of Site Performance Metrics

Pageviews, bounce rates and goals

Measuring site performance is somewhat of a black art - from the dubious numbers lauded by some sites to the notoriously skewed and untrustworthy figures from Alexa, Compete, and other metric & analytics folk - there simply isn't any single great method of gauging a site's performance. [read more...]

New Google Analytics Rocks the Proverbial Socks

Statisticians rejoice!

Talk about a quiet rollout – the Google Analytics team must have been working a lot of late nights recently, as this evening they’ve released a completely overhauled interface for their analytics. Quite the surprise! (In fact, as I write this the announcement has just popped up on Bloglines) [read more...]

Google Reader has a Posse

...and a surprisingly large lead in the RSS reader stakes

I was moderately shocked today to see a jump of over 1,000 subscribers in my FeedBurner stats this morning – then I realised this was the first data push since Google started broadcasting their subscriber figures. Whilst I’m guessing these numbers don’t differentiate between the different Google RSS features, such as the personalised homepage and Google Reader, one thing is clear: Bloglines no longer leads the way in terms of RSS aggregation. [read more...]

Alexa Rolls Out New Stats

If you're a compulsive statistics sort like I am, and are familiar with the statistics available at alexa.com, then you may want to take a look at this. Looks like they've rolled out a few new features in the last couple of hours, and there's some interesting new metrics. [read more...]

How many Diggs do you need to make the homepage?

..and when's the best weekday and time to submit that hot new story?

Recently, I set up a script that logged the average number of 'Diggs' a story on the frontpage of Digg.com has - purely out of curiosity, and to discover any trends in digging activity. [read more...]