In early August I signed-up with Adcenter Analytics, a free service that can provide information about visitors to my blog. Its also a direct compete with Google Analytics. I’d completely forgotten about it until yesterday when I was reminded about the service when filling in my annual MVP evaluation and so I went to check out how my blog has been faring in terms of visitor activity over the past few months.
Here’s my dashboard – a customisable front page for all information about my blog:
I was most impressed with the calendar view, here it is in all its full-size finery:
This is what BI is all about – presenting information in an easily understandable way. Straightaway I can tell that:
- I don’t get much traffic on weekends
- September has been my busiest month so far (with 54686 visits)
- I get more traffic near the end of the month than at the start of it (see how the number of visits drops off in the first week of September and October)
Instant visualisation – I love it. What I find especially compelling is that they have found a way of displaying visits per month, week and day all on the same graph; I’ve never seen that done before and I think its a fantastic innovation.
Want some more? Here I see that the blog posts that I published in 2005 are the most popular (or perhaps that’s because there’s more of them):
Want to know what my most popular post in October is? According to the size of tiles on the treemap (I REALLY like this one) its SSIS: Checking if a row exists and if it does, has it changed?:
Where do most of my blog visitors come from? North America it seems (thanks y’all):
in Europe its the UK (not a great surprise):
There’s a plethora of other information available so if you want to have a go head to https://adcenter.microsoft.com/ and sign-up (its free!!). All you need to do is place a small piece of Javascript into your home page and you’re done (we use Community Server as our blog engine by the way). I’m really impressed with this, I’ve never used Google Analytics so I’d be interested in seeing how the two compare. Has anyone used both?
-Jamie