On The Trail

I’m back! I’m attending a WebTrends conference today (worth it if you’re into WebTrends), and conferences get me in the posting mood.

Today Ian Thomas points out Live 3d Stats which IMO suffers from a very bad name, but might actually be worth the money. One problem with working with web analytics is that it is really easy to lose context. At an eMetrics conference a few years ago someone suggested that you should “grep your log files” occasionally. By that they meant look at the log files as they are created in real time. This allows you to see visitors using your site in real time which really kind of brings to life the whole web analytics thing.

 Of course grepping log files isn’t for everyone, but Live 3d stats may be. I like the idea of having this displayed on a screen in a public place in the company just to bring home the idea that people are coming into the site from everywhere at all hours from all sorts of zany keywords. Of course, in reality the display would fade into the background after a few days. Sadly, no-one would “see” it after they got used to it….

Even so, realtime is cool in limited doses so this might be worth looking into.