Social Traffic Analyzer – January 2010 Ideas
The twenty-second idea for my 365 social ideas is not really a clear-cut idea – yet. But I feel a need for a new website traffic analyzing service. Google Analytics is definitely the mostly used and best free service. But they have many shortcomings, and I definitely would like to see a new player enter this playing field. And while where add it, there are some new trends and actions, that current has a huge influence on current traffic trends, that you cannot track fully: social media traffic.
I do not know how to integrate all these things, but a good traffic analyzer should know not only who links to you but also who is sharing links to your services through which channels. It should report which channels generate the most traffic, but also who pushes the links to these channels etc. If someone e.g. tweets/diggs/reddits about your service/website a lot, it should be reflected.
About the short-comings of Google Analytics, my main concern is, that when experimenting with how you can track new things, there is a 1-4 hour delay on page tracks and up to 3 days delay on custom variables tracking (in my experience). A good provider really ought to have a development option available, that only allow limited traffic but provide almost-instant analysis of this data.
Why?
This is one of the simplest of Google’s services, and thus we really need a contender. With the availability of cheap clouds, it should be quite easy to set up, though it would require some funding to provide it to people for free. Google Analytics does not innovate that much – not in the social media tracking area at least. They are more interested in developing new things in the “how can I make people buy more crap from me” category for web shop owners.
What’s next?
Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.
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Category: January 2010 Ideas, JavaScript, Trends Comment »