6 entries found with tag statistics.

Real time website statistics

Want to see your website's visitors the moment they arrive? Interested in where they came from and how they navigate around your pages? Well, you can with Live Web Stats, which is now out of beta and available for webmasters with PHP and MySQL on their servers to purchase and install.

A demo page is here.

Tags: statistics, webmaster, php, mysql, seo

Discount shopping made even easier

A live feed of the new products found by Price Cut Review is now up and running. There is a UK version too although it should be noted that the US one has many more items and is therefore updated more frequently.

This feature is quite similar to Live Web Stats, which is offered here at Nimisis.com, in that it uses Ajax and allows you to see what's going on in real time. Currently the live product feed only works in Firefox.

Related: statistics, half price

Live Web Stats

With a bit of javascript voodoo, MySQL magic and php trickery, you can find out, in real time, who's visiting your website, where they came from and where they're going. Here's a demo page of what I'm talking about.

This is still in beta, but if you're interested in installing Live Web Stats on your website, find out more here.

How accurate is Alexa?

Alexa.com, the "web information company" is designed to provide statistics on the popularity of websites on the internet - I just wonder how accurate it is at doing so.

Alexa gathers its statistics using the Alexa Toolbar which is an add-on to Internet Explorer. There's the first problem - there's no official Firefox version. (I say official because there is this Firefox extension, but I'm not convinced that it sends home browsing statistics). I think most would agree that the more savvy web user will tend to use Firefox in preference to IE... and they'll sift through more of the web than the average surfer. But, being affiliated to Amazon.com, you'd think it would have enough users to provide statistical reliability anyway. I guess the more popular you website is, the more reliable the figures are. (Other problems include extra browsing lag and occasional crashes.)

So what percentage of internet users are estimated to have the Alexa Toolbar installed? Alexa doesn't say. On the basis of Nimisis.com's numbers in the last few months, I would guess that it's about one in 600. Not a lot. Still, this will no doubt vary according to the country, among other variables. Below are some graphs for Nimisis.com and you can see there is some correlation.

Alexa stats showing "Daily Reach" in percent.

Google Analytics stats (accurate) showing unique visitors per day

In the end I think Alexa stats can be useful and do have their place. Nowadays it can be difficult to gauge whether a professional looking website actually is one that draws a significant crowd and has any authority. Sure, there are groups that artifically ramp up their rankings by more or less randomly traversing through each other's sites - so don't trust the stats completely. For a second and third opinion, try Quantcast.com and Compete.com, but these are smaller than Alexa. I just think Google, with their huge Google Toolbar user base would gather much more accurate stats. Come on Google!

Tags: statistics, webmaster, Alexa

Demographics prediction

From Microsoft adCenter labs is a potentially quite powerful tool that predicts the demographics for a particular search term.

"You can use adCenter technology to predict a customer's age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior-that is, from search queries and webpage views. General Distribution is the breakdown by age of MSN Search users-based on a one-month MSN Search log-regardless of search query used. Predicted Distribution is the predicted breakdown by age of MSN Search users for a single search query, based on the adLabs predictive model."

High IQ Child = Vegetarian Adult

Apparently children with high IQs tend to become vegetarians. Actually I can swallow this, being non-vegetarian. Besides, if you're trading meat for quorn then you really deserve a break.

Correlations like this are quite interesting. Freakonomics is an excellent book I read recently about seemingly unlikely links and trends. (It's not economics really, Freakstatistics probably just didn't sound as good.)

See also: vegetarian, IQ, statistics, Freakonomics