Last week, I thankfully got an invite to use Measure Map. I have been using it non-stop, making tests, jotting down my likes and my suggestions, etc., and emailed Measure Map asking for permission to write about it. So, for those of you that have not received a copy, hopefully this look at Measure Map will clear a few things up for you. There has been quite some hype about Measure Map and I feel that there definitely should. It is very organized, writes out statistics in readable sentences rather just numbers in a table, integrates Flash and Ajax very well and uses both technologies to compliment each other for certain actions, and a whole lot more. Ok, lets get started. We’ll start at the beginning, installing Measure Map.

I was very curious as to how Measure Map’s setup and installation process was going to be like. This is because it has features such as viewing stats on your site itself, posts, comments of each individual post, and a way to track clicks going out of your site. The process was actually quite simple and seeing how to do it and what they needed explained how they manage to grab the specific blog stats. When you get your invite and go to the installation page, it will ask for your site name, site address, and time zone, and importantly what blogging software you use. They give you a choice between five different software and you can also choose other. Why does it ask for your software? Because when you install Measure Map, it will provide you with the exact code that you need to place into your software (note: you can get it for any software later on as well). For example, WordPress has different code to place in your site then TypePad. WordPress has three steps and that is to include a line of JavaScript in the Footer Template, some code in the Post Template, and lastly code in the Comments Template. For each step, Measure Map provides easy to follow instructions and even screenshots of the blog software so you can very easily set it up. Now, remember, that not all software is the same for installation. TypePad had two steps, Blogger had one step, and Other is fairly similar to WordPress’s installation. Once you include the code on your site, visit it just to make sure everything is running smoothly and then log into Measure Map and everything should be ready to go.

Note: Clicking on the screenshots will open a larger image

When you first login, you will see the overview page of your blogs statistics. The interface for Measure Map uses an excellent blend of colors, great typography that is easy to read, and graphics/icons that show exactly what you are looking it, not to mention it all is Web Standard too and looks great in text-only format as well. On the top of the overview page, you will see four boxes: Visitors, Links, Comments, and Posts. Below the icons in the boxes are the figures for each box, such as how many visitors came to your site today or how many comments were made today. What I also like is that they give a little description under each box saying something like, “came to your blog. That’s 100 fewer than an average day,” which compares the statistics for the day to your overall statistics. Now, looking below the boxes are two columns. The first column gives an overview of popular posts for the day. It shows how many visits you have received to your posts. This is great because now I can still see what posts people are viewing easily, for example, I see that my Photoblog Webware Roundup and Visualizing Del.icio.us posts are still attracting visitors. On the right column is a soon to be feature, “What’s Happening on your Blog.” I have been told that they are still working hard on this to get it complete. This is still in alpha release, so I am not expecting everything to be perfect nor complete. But looking at this screenshot from Jeffrey Veen, it shows the column with information, such as traffic being lower, possible comment spam, etc.. I also see that there are RSS feeds on both columns, while on the alpha release there are not. I am not sure if these features will be in the final release or not, but they sure do look great.

One feature that you must be aware of is the really neat date range selection at the top of every Measure Map statistics page. At the top right, you will see a gray box with the date and an icon of a calendar. Click on this and you will see a graph drop down. It is a bar graph of visitors for every day since you started using Measure Map. When you hover over a bar, you can see how many visitors you have received that day. You can click on a days bar and it will then bring up those results for that specific day throughout Measure Map. I feel this is a very simple and great way to view past statistics. Now, what if you want a bigger range, for example, viewing last weeks stats. Measure Map has covered this as well. You will see two gray arrows on the left and right of the selected bar. Click and drag one and you will see that it starts to select other days. Let go and the Flash graph will then get Ajax to kick in and update the statistics below with that date range. That is not all that this top date selection does. It also allows you to see all the posts that you have made. On the bottom of the graph, you will see icons that look like paper. Putting your mouse over one will show you the name of the post and the date the post was made. When you click on it, it will bring you to the posts detail page.

Measure Map puts your statistics in a very understandable format. Instead of just numbers, it explains your statistics to you with sentences. For example, viewing the visitors page, you will see:

849 visitors came to your blog
That’s 220 more than an average day.

15% of those visitors had been to your blog before
That’s 127 visitors, 43 more than an average day.

Seeing statistics written out like this makes it much easier to give yourself a visual on how your sites performance is. I can easily see if my site is having a good day and how many regular visitors have come back for a visit. The visitors page doesn’t show much else except a bar graph on the bottom showing the last thirty days and how many visitors you received each day. But how about we go look at a the Links page (screenshot above). I find links page very helpful for tracking my sites statistics and view this more often then any other page. I can easily see how many links are referring to my site, how many are new referrals that my site hasn’t received traffic from before, and what I love is that you can even see statistics for links out of your site, meaning links that your visitors leave your site with. When you enter the page, it will write out your stats again in clear sentences saying how many new links (referrals) you have received for that day and how many visitors they have attracted and compare the stats to past statistics to give you an average. You can also see how many links in total you have received. I really like how Measure Map decided to split new links and total links. It helps gives a better visual on the performance of your site and how active it is. On the links page, you don’t only see statistics for incoming links, but outgoing links as well. For example, when I publish this post, I will be able to see how many times my visitors have clicked on links going to Measure Map and what links they were. This helps me see my visitors interests. This is not as extensive as MyBlogLog.com, but it gets the job done rather well and is enough to please me.

On the Links page that I have talked about above, you will also see a link that says something around, “102 search terms used.” Clicking this will bring you to the search engine overview page. This page definitely opened my eyes about the power of search engines because I seriously did not realize how many refers I get from search engines a day. I was very easily able to see how many visitors came from Google and I was also able to see how much MSN and Yahoo dislike my site. You can also view each individual term that the search engines are sending you. Clicking on a search engine will make a table of each term and how many times it was used to get to your site (right now, “Fruitcast” is the top search term). Thanks for opening my eyes Measure Map. I know that other statistic software that I use shows information like this as well, but Measure Map has shown it a bit clearer and just made myself more aware of it by showing me results for individual days and posts. One thing that I am wondering though is what search engines are included, does it just show the major search engines?

As I said above, Measure Map uses a great blend of Flash and Ajax throughout the application. The countries section uses Flash to show a map and statistics for each country and shows the advantage of using Macromedia Flash for applications. It shows the map of the world with the countries being different shades of red, depending on the amount of visitors, giving a heat map type effect. I can see that I received a good portion of visitors from United States and Spain because they are the brightest shade of red. Not only that, but when placing my cursor over a country, it tells me a percentage of visitors from the overall map and how many visitors I had from the country. You can also see a small table on the bottom left of the map that shows the top five countries. On the top left you can also see a method to zoom in and out of the map to focus on small areas and you can also click and drag on the map to move around.

Something that I found eye catching was the browser statistics page. It presents the statistics again using Flash and in an easy to read bar graph. Instead of using simple bars, they went ahead and used Browser logos instead. Even though that is a very small adjustment to the normal bar graph, it actually makes it easier to take in. I just look at the graph and don’t have to look at any text to understand what I am seeing.

I have gone over some of what Measure Map can accomplish with you, now let me go over some issues that I came across and some of my opinions/suggestions about Measure Map. Believe me, there aren’t many issues that I have come across. The team has really done an excellent job. The first thing is minor compatibility issues in Firefox/Flock. When viewing statistics on pages such as countries where Flash is in use and then clicking on the top date selection to bring down the Flash bar graph, it overlaps ontop of the other Flash document, in this case the world map. However, I noticed that it does as it should in Safari, which is shifting the map down so the bar graph that you open has its own space. Next! I noticed that when viewing the Links page and seeing links to some referrals and outgoing links that if they are long, they are not shortened or word wrapped, but instead continue going through the column warping the table a bit. I would be happy with word wrapping these long links or maybe just cutting them short with a “…” at the end of them to show they are long addresses. Now, in the same links page, when viewing incoming links, I got annoyed with one small thing, but may not be the case with everyone. It deals with Bloglines. I get quite a bit of referrals from Bloglines from my readers. This is great that it picks this up, but what I am seeing is that every incoming link from Bloglines is different because of the unique user IDs and whatnot in their addresses. So, when viewing my referrals, I saw a whole page of only Bloglines. What I am thinking is some kind of way to group links from services such as this. Search for part of the URL from Bloglines and group them all together as if it is one link and that would make it a lot cleaner and easier to see how many visitors came from Bloglines. That’s all I’ve got! I didn’t really see any other issues with the service yet.

Overall, I feel that Measure Map is excellent and definitely deserves the hype that it has been receiving. If you have received an invitation for Measure Map and have any suggestions, send an email over to the Measure Map team. They seem to be very open to what their users have to say. I have suggested some sort of RSS feed tracking or even FeedBurner implementation. They have replied saying that they are actually working on their first iteration of RSS tracking and should be out shortly and said they have also had given FeedBurner some thought and may be included at some point. Great work to the team of Measure Map. I absolutely love it and cannot wait for its official release and sure others are excited as well.

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