Dashboards, Bells and Whistles - pMetrics Raises the Bar

pMetrics continues to impress me with the strides they’re making in the development of their service. I began using them back in March, and though it was very basic at the time, it was functional enough for what I needed. This blog was brand new and there wasn’t much activity to track. :)

In April pMetrics hit a glitch within the company and went down for a few weeks. I made a temporary switch to Clicky, but faithfully went back to pMetrics once they were running again. Why? Obvious dedication to an evolving product.

Just a few of the improvements in the service over the past few months include:

Dashboard Goodness

pMetrics has finally spiffed up the homepage to include overview modules. The information is sensibly organized, so that additional, related info can be quickly accessed. Detailed trend data, based on the date ranges you specify, is available for each module right from the dash.

More enhancements are in the works, such as

“… the ability to pick and choose only the modules you want, and choose how much data is shown within each individual module. We’ll also be adding a Google Maps module. However, these features will be for premium accounts only!”

What’s more, it sounds like the entire site will be worked over to operate the way the dashboard does now. Fine with me! Based on tinkering around with it just today, the dashboard is supremely easy to use, and the data very accessible.

Integrated Feed Data

Did you know you can check your Feedburner subscription numbers, along with your site stats, all in one place? This is available for all accounts, but an added bonus for premium members includes information about views and click-through rates. Granted, you can view both feed data and visitor stats with Feedburner Pro now that Google has taken over, but let’s face it, Feedburner’s presentation leaves a lot to be desired.

Supplemental Views

Everyone gathers and processes information differently, and every stats program I’ve used so far allows you to change the views based on what makes the most sense to you.

A distinct feature of pMetrics however, is the ability to toggle your view from a bar graph to a tag cloud. It becomes very obvious, if it wasn’t already, what your most popular content is, and hovering over any of the tags gives you a tooltip with more info. pMetrics also provides API for easy access to your stats in a variety of formats.

Live Stats

Although this isn’t exactly a new feature, it bears mentioning because it’s where pMetrics really begins to shine. There’s no other service offering a feature like this (that I know of). Spy is an overview of who’s looking at what on your site, right now, and auto-refreshes whenever there’s new activity. Are you trying make money with your blog? Performancing recently published some tips about monetizing with Spy that I had never even considered.

It doesn’t matter if you’re just getting started with stats, or a stats junkie running several programs at once, pMetrics does a good job of supplying the info you want without overloading you. I find myself logging into it more than any other program I run, and they keep making it easier every time I turn around. :) Gotta love that.

Tags: metrics | software