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[Review]: GoSquared’s LiveStats & Trends

This has been a product that I have been watching for a while now, well since it first came out in fact. GoSquared were one of the first people I ever started following on Twitter, and I’m damn glad I did now! (If any of you are interested they are @GoSquared on Twitter!)

GoSquared have created an amazing web application called LiveStats and since it’s release they have also added Trends to this amazing application. In short LiveStats is an analytics web app. Now many of you will think, “Oh. Well I have Google Analytics for that!”. Well you can be forgiven for first of all dismissing the idea because Google Analytics is good, and I do still use it. But that isn’t what LiveStats is truly about! Continue after the break to find out more!

To help illustrate my point I’m going to pose a question to you:
“Do you know how long it takes for Google Analytics to update the tracking information gathered?”

A simple question really. And the answer is one that shocked and annoyed me in a day and age where everything is trying to be instant. - It can take as long as 4 hours! That is the average time that it takes Google Analytics to update your account, and by default it only looks at everything up to the day before unless you manually change the date to look at. Now this is all and well but it means you don’t know how many people are on your site at any one time. Again I hear you cry that there are counters that you can put on your page which will allow you to know this information.

Well be prepared to be amazed because I don’t think your counter can do this:

I didn’t think so. LiveStats is a new breed of analytics which shows you all of the vital information about the visitors on your site in real time. And that is literal REAL time. Someone goes on your site and on average they appear in LiveStats in about 2.5 seconds. If you ask me that is damned fast!

OK I know there are other companies out there that are doing this now, and I don’t pretend to know who started it off but I just can’t get over the beautiful implementation the guys at GoSquared have come up with. So now onto a little more about LiveStats and trends itself and then maybe some about it’s future, both my views and what they have hinted at

I think that first of all we need to talk about their signup process. These guys really know how to keep it short, sweet and simple! All you need to do is head here and choose your plan that suits your site best. Each plan comes with a 30 day free trial and there is even a free plan which is supported by well targeted ads and has a limit of 10,000 pageviews. (I’m on the free plan and it is perfect for what I need )

I don’t need to describe the rest of the signup process as they have created a wonderful video showing just how quick it is:

So once you are signed up and have put the account code at the end of your webpages (just before the </body> tag) LiveStats will start showing your visitors and Trends will start to gather pageviews and referral information. As simple as that!

Now onto the true power of LiveStats... You can see an overview of all of the visitors on your site and from there you can expand one or all visitors to see the breadcrumb trail of where they have been on your site and how long they spent on each page. From there you can see further details about their browser and resolution which is great to see what your audience actually use.

The next place to get useful information is the map view. This shows you the geographical locations of all of your visitors on one global map. It even includes an amazing feature which allows you to see where it is daytime and where it is night time which is useful to see where most people are likely to be visiting from.

Finally we get to Trends. This is where you can see maps and tables and graphs of data ranging from pageviews to visitor counts and traffic sources to browser used. This is all useful data which, for me anyway, is starting to replace Google Analytics. There is such a wealth of information that you have access to and best of all it looks beautiful!

Oh! Did I mention that there isn’t an ounce of flash anywhere?! This means that accessing on your iPhone or other iOS and mobile devices looks just as great as a native app! You can’t ask for more than that can you?

Well actually you can. For some people adding code to webpages is something they pay other people to do, and why would you want to have to do that if you run a CMS system such as Joomla, Drupal or a WordPress blog (such as this one) where you are used to just installing a plugin and away you go. Well the great news is that you can! Well at least with WordPress for now but soon with Joomla! and Drupal. But I think I should save that for another blog post seeing as that is what I happen to be working on right now. *Hint Hint* shhhh!

Anyway, even if you stay using Google Analytics at the end of it, at least give GoSquared’s LiveStats a try, it is free after all!

Oh and don’t forget, the signup page is here, you can follow them @GoSquared and @GoSquaredStatus on Twitter and their GetSatisfaction page is here!