I have been working along with my brother Patrick (who is an insane web designer) and a kick butt programmer named Charles Berube for the past seven months on an analytics tool. I am happy to say that it is finally ready for anyone and everyone to test out. We have had it in private beta for about two months and it is stable enough now that we want you to give it a try.

It is called BLVD Status it is a killer tool with a lot of features that no other analytics tool offers, it is also extremely easy to set up and get running. To put it simply it is has the live stats like you are used to with products like Have a Mint, but with conversions and in depth info. There is a dashboard that has live instant stat info somewhat similar to Mint but with a conversion section that shows you the latest conversions. It also has a killer Keyword section showing the latest hits from keywords as well as what search engine and what your rank is for that term both live and on average.

Here is a Screen Shot of the the Top Row of the Dashboard:

Features
RSS Conversions:

You heard me right, we have it set up to track your referrals to subscribing to your RSS feed. Until now you had to set up complex Google outbound click reporting, or set up your own special java script or guess as to whether StumbleUpon, Digg or a blog link brought you the new subscribers.

Digg This Conversions:
If you love social media like I do you have to have live stats as you don’t want to wait til the next day to find out you are on digg with only an hour left of voting time. You want to know the second you are on Digg, so you can send that url around or watch your comments etc.This way you can best welcome and utilize that influx of traffic. But we took it a step further, in the dasboard you can set up Digg This buttons that have our analytics tied to it so you can treat it like a conversion and see which referrals bring you the most Diggs. If you are on Reddit, Stumble, Sphinn and Digg at once which one of the other communities brings you extra votes. If you see that Reddit will bring you more Diggs and help you reach the front page easier you should start tweaking your strategy accordingly. Right now this is only available for Digg but soon it will be most if not all Social Buttons. We have done a lot of studies in this area and will be releasing some sweet data on the BLVD Status blog talking about conversion rates to the Digg This button.

Live Keyword Tracking:

This is a favorite amongst most people that have tested it, there is a dashboard in side BLVD Status dedicated to Keyword referrals. It will show you the most recent referrals, all time referrals, what engine they came from and what your live or current rank is. It also has a filter so you can just view Google Referrals, Google Blogsearch, Live, Yahoo and pretty much all the main engines. It uses Googles API when getting the ranking so for now it will only let you go to number 32. So anything that ranks further back than 32 will show up as >32.

We will be adding a ranking reporting tool that will let you see what your rankings are, how many hits, conversions etc. you got for that term as well.

Traffic Allotments for Beta:
Right now we have now limits as to your levels we want to get as many people using it as possible and not limit your stats. As we grow if our servers start to take a beating at it could effect the reliability of the product we will announce a new traffic level structure.

Feedback:
We want your feedback we want to make this the analytics product that offers all the tricks and trinkets you could ever want. When we look at feedback and decide whether or not to do anything about it we will always lean towards the side of the feature helping someone better understand and ultimately improve their web site.

For now please send any and all feedback to - chris@blvdstatus.com or leave comments at the BLVD Status blog it will be live this week.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter or follow Matt Siltala on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which Now Includes Twitter.

I just got an email today from the Google Analytics team about a new interface and upgrades that they have added to the analytics reporting. Here is an excerpt from the email,

“What is new?
In the new version, your reports have been redesigned for clarity, greater visibility of important metrics, and ease of use. Here are just a few of the features you’ll notice:

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
  
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

The new interface has everything the previous interface had and more. In addition, links within reports make it easier to navigate related information and explore your data.”

I went and logged in and it hadn’t changed yet, so I will keep an eye out on it. I’m excited about customizing the dashboard and some of the other tools to make the spots I go on a regular basis more accessible.

I wonder if they are going to ever launch a paid version and try to compete with other web analytic companies?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter or follow Matt Siltala on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which Now Includes Twitter.

I wanted to post about a topic that has been on my mind so much lately, especially because (lately) I have been working on gaining even higher conversion rates on mine (and my clients websites). I am talking about web analytics and what they can do for you and your business. On 97th Floor there was a recent post about a new analytics company that gives a detailed report of step by step browsing through your website to show you exactly what visitors are doing, and I have talked before about analytics companies like Crazy Egg and Tape Failure which lets you record sessions of exactly what paths (viewing the mouse moving on your site) visitors are taking, as well as analytical statistics, and tracking too.

I have used programs out there that are free like Google Analytics (and still do), but have found accuracy problems with them, and really with they had more features that were useful, and tools that worked 100% of the time. The only web analytics software I have used that has been flawless, and perfect in every way is from Omniture. It is a paid analytics software, but by far the most superior.

When you can find out things like the exact paths that your website visitors are taking, you can figure out what is being viewed the most, what is working and what is not. You can find out what products people are viewing the most, but not buying and then adjust to try and increase the conversion rate (maybe your prices are to high and need adjusting). How important do you think it would be to find out the pages that people leave from the most? (so you could change it, and try to keep them longer) What could you do with information like, what are the hot spots on your site, where are people clicking the most, behavioral targeting, and are they clicking anywhere near where you really want them to be clicking?  You can really improve your search engine marketing 100 fold with proper web analytics.

When you find out information like this it could help you improve your navigation which we all know will help us with our Google rankings, increase conversion rates, more sales which leads to more money in your pocket. Taking the time to understand website analytics could mean the difference between success and failure.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter or follow Matt Siltala on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which Now Includes Twitter.

Has anyone been playing around with Robot Replay? It is a analytics program created by an AJAX developing company that tracks the mouse of your visitors. About two months ago I was talking to my brother about playing with some programming to create something like this as it could be very helpful to actually watch exactly what your visitors are doing. It records each session and then lets you play it back through their back end and it shows you the session of that visitor. When they scroll down, how much text do they read, what they click on and when they click it.

It is pretty cool I haven’t tested it on enough sites yet, but I have used it to make some tweaks to some content placement and ads on a few sites. I’m running some tests on some affiliate and adsense type pages to see if it will help with placement to enhance click throughs and conversions.

It is definitely not supposed to take over your current web site analytics carrier but it is a cool addition just like crazy egg.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter or follow Matt Siltala on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which Now Includes Twitter.

I have been using the heat map and tracking software from Crazy Egg for a few months now, so I wanted to share a few things that I have learned over the course of those months. (more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter or follow Matt Siltala on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which Now Includes Twitter.