From:solutionwatch.com

Blogbeat is a new blog statistic tracking service that has just recently opened its doors to the public and seems quiet promising. I have been beta testing Blogbeat for a few weeks now and have been monitoring the many revisions the developers have been making to the service and everytime it gets better and better. Blogbeat is not your normal statistic tracking service, such as Google Analytics, but leans more toward blog statistics with simplistic monitoring, as does MeasureMap (Review), which is still in private beta. Blogbeat provides all of the basic statistics including visitors, referrers, search engines, browsers, etc.., but also has great post detail stats, RSS statistics (for Feedburner), comment tracking, outgoing links, and more. It is not usual that I write about commercial services, here at Solution Watch, but I feel Blogbeat is well worth the money and is also worth a look by anyone interested because of its painless 30 day free trial.

Throughout my beta testing of Blogbeat, I have seen three different interfaces, all great. But the final interface for their release is the best yet and makes viewing statistics very simple for the user. Lets take a few steps back and start fresh with setting up Blogbeat. Blogbeat is remotely hosted, meaning that you do not need to install anything on your server to get it running. All you need to do is place a small snippet of Javascript in the footer of your blog and start to watch the data flow in. I setup Blogbeat on Solution Watch and it really only took a matter of seconds to get data coming in. In my account settings, I selected WordPress as my blogging platform and filled in my RSS feed, which also ties into your statistics. Blogbeat then automatically determines how to parse your blog correctly depending on the blogging platform you selected. Very simple and that is really all there is to it.

Once you get Blogbeat’s snippet inserted into your blog, log into Blogbeat and lets take a look at your interface. The first page you will see is the Blog Summary page that gives a basic overview of your statistics for the day. As you can see, everything is very nicely layed out, easy going colors, big typeface for easy reading, graphs, and percentages. First thing to take note of is the top bar. You will see your website name and description (taken from the RSS feed you provided, I am assuming) along with some overall totals. The overall totals provided includes monthly visitors, monthly pageviews, feed subscribers (via Feedburner - More on this later.), and average views per visitor. This bar is global throughout every page of Blogbeat making it easy for you to get an idea of totals from any page. The next feature I want to mention is the date selection. The date selection allows you to set a date range for the statistics shown throughout Blogbeat. If you are interested in today, yesterday, or maybe last months statistics, you can still narrow down on that data. It is not as indepth as MeasureMap when it comes to date selection, but definitely gets the job done. The main page of Blogbeat will also include a list of recent visitors and a graph on the right for a visual of your blogs traffic

I mentioned that Blogbeat is not your average statistics tracking service. One feature that differentiates Blogbeat from the crowd is how it can drill down into every last drop of information, starting from the beginning. For example, on the main page you will see the list of recent visitors. Each recent visitor block includes a link to the post they viewed from your blog, where they came from, and even a permanent link to the visitor themselves (more on this later). Here is where the drilling down comes in. When you click on the blog post they viewed, it wont direct you to the actual post but rather details for that individual post (which you can see in the above screenshot). Each post has its own individual statistics page including a graph, overview of totals, recent activity (visits), top referrers, and top search terms. Not only that but it also tracks how many comments have been made to that post, which I am told is possible because of “magic,” according to the creator (haha). This is very neat and very helpful because I love being able to track activity on individual posts from my site. Helps me see what my visitors have interest in so I can hopefully write about services more in favor of my visitors. One last feature that I want to mention that you may find useful is the way that referrers are presented. Not only is the address presented, but also the paragraph that your link was in from the referring site. This is great because if I get a referrer, I can see what the site was talking about and why it linked to me without even having to view it. Small features such as that make big differences. Now looking at a bigger scope, you can also drill down into statistics for visitors, outgoing links, referrers, search engines, and even individual keywords themselves!