Beautiful Web Analytics with Observer

For a webmaster, traffic analytics is a matter of ultimate concern. But for people who run blogs, forums or work in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) among other things, web traffic analysis is basically their bread and butter. Staying on top of traffic data can help you fine tune the content, target ads and to optimize the content for better SEO.

Sure, almost everyone uses Google Analytics. It is free and is pretty comprehensive with the data it shows us. At times, such a level comprehensiveness might be considered creepy and a lot us might feel overwhelmed with its too many features. One among the non Google Analytics app which is competent enough and has as many features is Observer. After the break, we have a detailed walkthrough of the web app’s features.

Overview

Observer is an easy to set up web analytics app with a great set of features, minimal design and quick to start tracking the traffic. If you have ever used Google Analytics, you might have noticed that it takes quite some time to get the traffic stats after you paste the code to the web page. But in the case of Observer the stats started showing up almost instantaneously.

Observer is currently in public beta, open to everyone free of charge. Signing up is relatively simple and you can start tracking the traffic within a few minutes.

Dashboard

A Welcome page with the tracking code to embed in your web page is displayed. All you have to do is paste the code below the body tag of the web page and you are done. In my experience, the traffic data started to appear within a minute of pasting the code.

The dashboard shows a bird’s eye view of the traffic stats of your web page. While there are no brightly colored pie charts and maps on the page , they are available in their respective sections. On the top, key traffic data – number of visits (both unique and overall) today, this week and this month are displayed across all pages. this way you do not have to comeback to the dashboard to view the vital traffic data.

If you hover over the graph, it will display the number of visits at that displayed hour and day. You can toggle the controls above the graph to see the visual representation of traffic data for the day, week and month.

In the traffic overview section, the number of hits are shown for every of the day with the unique and total clicks side by side. Past week, month and year’s traffic data is also available in the overview section for you to compare and analyze. The light shaded bars depicting the number of clicks as the background is a nice touch from the development team. It is subtle and informative.

Pageviews

The number of pages viewed on your web page is shown in numbers and graph in this section. The graph shows the comprehensive page view information and lists the popular pages on the number of hits received. While popular pages list shows what your users like in the site from the beginning, you can track the current trends from the Recent pages section.

Referrers

You can identify which sites are driving traffic your way from the Referrers section of Observer. Like in the case of Pageviews section, there is a graph that shows the number of referring sites per day and a list of popular and recent referrers along with a time stamp.

Searches

Searches section shows how well your site is optimized to the keywords from popular search engines. In this section, the traffic information is graphically visualized with two different types of graphs. Number of search results per day is shown in the normal graph at the top. A pie chart represents the share of search engines that send the traffic to your site. A list of keywords that resulted in the user landing at your site is also displayed. Based on these keywords, you can optimize the content to be more search engine friendly.

Location

Traffic by Location can be tracked from the Locations section. A color coded world map shows the countries from where your visitors come from. If the countries are white, there have been no traffic from that particular region. This geographical data can be used to fine tune content based on location and to serve targeted ads. Just hover over the countries with colors to see the percentage share of traffic from there.

Final Thoughts

If you are hosting a blog or CMS with a news feed powered by Feedburner, you can track the subscription stats right from Observer. No more need to switch back and forth between two different apps. Also, Observer allows you to keep track of multiple websites from the same account which is a welcome feature for those with bunch of sites.

One thing that is missing from Observer is the lack of comprehensive real-time traffic data. While this is a feature that even Google does not support at the moment, rivals like Clicky and Reinvigorate are nailing it with an unbelievable set of features. Yes, Observer is pretty fast to capture traffic data, is very responsive and gives the traffic information that we can put to use. However, I really doubt these would be major selling points, if they were to add premium plans. That said, Observer is a top notch web Analytics app and people who are worried about privacy should embrace it with both hands.