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Oct 13 2010

Posterous' Analytics is Broken

I was going through the Posterous management dashboard to review some of available functionality (which is, in fact, was not there, but that's a different story) and I got shocked by a number of pageviews of one of my posts.

Posterous1
My post was viewed 40K times.  40 thousand pageviews.  I was, like... I knew I can come up with a couple of interesting things, but... am I that popular?!

Not so fast.  The first time I got upset was when I saw that somehow and suddenly I became 10 times less popular.  See 4,044 vs 42,010.  Oh, this hurts and you are starting to nervously think whom did you call a douche bag or an asshole...

The second time was when I saw my Google Analytics stats.

Ga2
It was a complete disaster. 2 pageviews versus 42,010.   This is a quite a difference.

Now back to the real world.  Of course I would never believe that I could have 40K eyeballs on that post.  So seeing so many pageviews has pretty much the only one explanation - these are internal or automatic pings or whatever you call them, could be probably done by a caching server or any internal process that I don't even have an idea about.  There are only two things about that: bad and bad.  The bad thing is that a post, that generates 2 real pageviews, probably should be never accessed 40 thousand times by any number of internal processes.  And the bad thing is that such statistics can piss me off, if I'd at any second believe it is real.  

Hopefully the guys at Posterous will fix that as soon as possible.

 

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Jun 16 2010

Mixpanel v. KISSmetrics v. Google Analytics

I didn’t see a clear winner after poking around with the three tools so I decided to try all of them together. I’m really glad I did because this is the comparison table (based on my experiences from above):

Mixpanel KISSmetrics Google Analytics
Tracking Events Great Poor Poor
Measuring Funnels Poor Great Average
Analyzing Traffic Poor Poor Great
Real-time Yes No No
Setup Difficult Moderate Easy

They’re all great at different things! And since what you need to learn will change over time, you really need more than one tool in the long term.

Arthur Klepchukov has posted a nice comparison between Mixpanel, KISSmetrics and GA. While I believe that GA can be quite good in everything, with a little bit of Mixpanel sauce, it's still a decent pros/cons table to consider.

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Jun 3 2010

Google Analytics can be more than just counter

Google Analytics comes with two very useful tools that aren’t enabled by default: Site Search and Event Tracking. When used, these tools can help give more meaningful statistics about users on your site.

Mike Takahashi briefly describes Site Search and Event Tracking features available in Google Analytics. It's also a good thing to take a look at Ian Harris' intro in extending Google Analytics with jQuery (http://www.carronmedia.com/extend-google-analytics-with-jquery/).>

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About Olexandr Prokhorenko

My name is Olexandr Prokhorenko. I am passionate about building products that users *love*.

My LinkedIn profile is www.linkedin.com/in/white.


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