If you run a site of any size — from a successful eCommerce business to a small blog that your friends read — you likely want to know how many people visit your site. Call it an ego boost or business intelligence, but it’s fun and potentially rewarding to check out your site’s stats. You can see what’s popular, how people find your site, and know if what you’re doing is working to bring people in.
And for most of us, there’s only one analytics service we’d even think of using Google Analytics. It’s powerful, free, and simple to use. It’s not so simple to get info out of, though, since its web interface is rather complex and slow.
Handsome Stats is a new simple web app from folks at Baked Goods that simplifies Google Analytics while making it more stylish. It’ll help you get your ego boost — err, business intelligence — in a nicer yet more data-filled interface.
Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.
Nice, no?
Now, a quick disclaimer: Handsome Stats isn’t full-featured yet. Its landing page mentions custom reports, date controls, custom logo and colors, and options to add extra users. Don’t get your hopes up: none of that is ready yet. They’re features planned for the app, ones that the Baked Goods team is using internally with their clients, but the rest of us can’t get them yet.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check out Handsome Stats. Quite the opposite, actually: it’s the nicest way to use Google Analytics that you’ve never tried. You can check out a demo to see exactly what you’ll see, but it’s free, so you might as well try it with your site. You’ll be glad you did.
Siphoning Your Data Pipe
First, though, you’ll need signup for a free Handsome Stats account, and authenticate it with your Google Analytics account. You’ll then be able to choose which of your sites’ analytics you want to view. And if you happen to want to use Handsome Stats with all of your sites, don’t worry: you can switch between sites on the same Google Analytics account easily.
Pick the site you want for now, but you can always switch
Choose the site’s stats you want to see, and a page load later you’ll have the nicest view of your Google Analytics you’ve ever had. Right from the top graph, you’ll be able to easily see how many visits (rounded to make it more readable) your site has had over the past year, along with the visits-to-date this month and an estimate of this month’s total traffic.
It’s less clutter and more data
Scroll down, and you’ll find info about how your traffic is changing, targeted at what matters in today’s world. You’ll see if people view more pages and stay on your site longer today than they did last year, but also if your mobile traffic is growing versus last year (hint: it should be growing if you’re reaching a decent audience these days). Go down further, and you’ll find more info for the modern site: your top five pages and traffic sources, as well as the top mobile operating systems. Someone got the Mobile First memo over here.
The stats you need to make decisions in today’s web
One very nice touch throughout the app: anywhere there’s a percentage, hover over it to see exactly how many pageviews that percentage represents.
Don’t Leave Yet, There’s More
Everything on the first page is comparing last year to this year, summarized by month. That’s great for the bird’s eye view, but sometimes it’s better to see what’s going on right now. That’s what the second page is for: it shows you detailed info on the last 28 days of traffic at your site.
Here, you can click the points on the graph to see info about the top pages and traffic sources on that date. Scroll down, and you’ll find the same extra topics covered — your mobile traffic percentage, top pages, browsers, and more — but this time, the data’s just from the past 28 days. That’ll help you see if what you’re doing right now is paying off traffic-wise, without having to dig deep through Google Analytics.
The here-and-now, here and now.
And That’s It.
Really, that’s all there is to Handsome Stats, but hey, that’s plenty for most of us. It’s a quick way to see what’s going on with your site and its current trends without having to wade through tons of data on Google Analytics. If you really do need to dig deeper and see, say, more info on click stats on links in a particular page, or want to see real-time data, you can still go to Google Analytics’ site and see everything. But I bet Handsome Stats will end up being your first port of call for your site’s analytics.
It’s the simplicity of the built-in stats you’d see in apps like WordPress.com, with the power of Google Analytics’ advanced data behind it. And there’s more to come. We can’t wait.