SiteMeter and MyBlogLog Comparison - Part II
Continued from Part I
So what does SiteMeter offer in comparison to MyBlogLog?
Sitemeter has a lot more reporting options than those offered by MyBlogLog. It's supported through the advertising shown on it's stats pages whereas mybloglog seems to rely more on people paying for the "pro" version.
Sitemeter is a pretty ugly thing to look at, especially compared to mybloglog, but when it's the information that's important the looks can be forgiven.
5. SiteMeter: Usage Summary
The SiteMeter summary page is more useful than the MyBlogLog summary. You see readers and page views just like MyBlogLog, but in addition you also see how long people were on the site on average, and a weekly view of what's been going on.
The only thing not on the summary is the number of exit clicks, though that information is available elsewhere.
6. SiteMeter: Usage Details
This is where sitemeter really takes off. There are a plethora of options to provide different ways of seeing the details of what's been going on for your site. You can see where people came from, what they clicked on to leave, what pages they entered the site on and what pages were the last they viewed, and who is currently on the site.
The out clicks details is a little different to mybloglogs and probably not quite as useful. Instead of just seeing the outclicks, you also see information on those who either closed their browser window or went to a different site by changing the URL in a different manner (i.e. bookmarks, manually entering it, etc).
The blanks are really quite annoying and make this information hard to trawl through, and there' s no summary of this information.
7: SiteMeter: Data Over Time
SiteMeter does really well in this area. it's got charting for one thing!
The charts are available for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly aggregation and show your web site trending and usage patterns. The spikes you can see in my charts relate to when other (more popular) blogs have linked to posts on this one.
But it's not just page hits that you can chart - your can also do navigation charting to show visit depth, daily durations, etc. You can see geographically where hits are coming from, what languages, operating systems, monitor settings, etc are being used. All of which are useful pieces of information and all things which mybloglog lacks.
Summary
MyBlogLog meets it's goals of tracking the thing most other logging mechanisms miss - the out clicks on your site and does it in a much nicer way than sitemeter does. Plus it looks a whole lot nicer than SiteMeter as well.
Unfortunately, most people use blog stats for a whole lot more than just tracking why people leave. If they confine themselves to just the niche of tracking outgoing links, they'll probably disappear. I for one want a blog stats service that offers it all - a one stop shop. Why should I have two different pieces of JavaScript on my page to track stats. Especially when sitemeter does a pretty good job at it now.
MyBlogLog has a lot of potential, but wether they have the appetite to meet that potential is yet to be seen. There's a whole bunch of things they could add that would be really cool - like day-to-day comparisons, any kind of charting at all (top referrers, weekly usage, etc), browser stats or location information, time zone, common navigation paths, and so on.
MyBlogLog is no doubt capturing the data required - they just need to think about ways to turn the data into information that is valuable to their users - then they might really have something. But for now, mybloglog operates in a niche and one that is likely to get filled by other services that offer so much more than they do.
SiteMeter will remain as my main source of stats tracking, and while I'll keep mybloglog tracking going for now because the outlink tracking is interesting, it probably won't last.