Online marketing company KISSMetrics, has published a series of posts entitled “The Science of Social Timing“. The first part was about “Social Networks“, the second was about “Timing & Email Marketing” and for the third and final part of the series – “Timing and Blogging” they talk about the effect of timing on blog readership.

The infographic provides a lot of useful information. However, data and statistics vary between blogs and time zones. The main idea here is learning how to use your blog’s stats and analytics and correlating them to get the best results. The best thing you can do as a blogger is to experiment and use whatever works best for you.

NOTE: All of the data presented in the infographic are presented in Eastern Time (EST) unless otherwise noted.

What do you think of the data and information presented in this infographic? In your own experience or observation, what is the best time to blog or publish a blog post? Please share your thoughts.

Here’s the official announcement from the Google Analytics blog:

At Google, we are passionate about speed and making the web faster, and we are glad to see that many website owners share the same idea. A faster web is better for both users and businesses. A slow loading landing page not only impacts your conversion rate, but can also impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search.

To improve the performance of your pages, you first need to measure and diagnose the speed of a page, which can be a difficult task. Furthermore, even with page speed measurements, it’s critical to look at page speed in context of other web analytics data.

Therefore, we are thrilled to announce the availability of the Site Speed report in the new Google Analytics platform. With the Site Speed report you can measure the page load time across your site.

Screenshot:

Uses for the Site Speed Report

• Content: Which landing pages are slowest?
• Traffic sources: Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
• Visitor: How does page load time vary across geographies?
• Technology: Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers?

The Site Speed tracking feature is available only to the new Google Analytics under Content > Site Speed. This new feature is disabled by default so won’t see any results on the Site Speed section on your Google Analytics account, until it is enabled. To enable it, all you need to do is add/insert a single line of code to the asynchronous code:

[php]_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);[/php]

What I did was to add it below my existing Analytics code:

[php]<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>[/php]

It takes about 24 hours before you can see results and view the load time of your website/blog. I just recently added the Site Speed tracking feature to my Google Analytics account to track load times for JaypeeOnline. I tried comparing the results on Google Analytics Site Speed vs. Pingdom Tools and load times were a few seconds lower on Google Analytics. Although I’m not sure which one is more accurate, I’m happy that the load times are lower on Google Analytics because it means that I’m closer to the standard used by Google.

Anybody else using or tried the Google Analytics Site Speed tracking feature? What do you like/dislike about this new feature? What other features would you like to see added to Google Analytics? Please share your thoughts.

Yesterday during the Google Analytics User Conference in San Francisco, attendees got a preview of the new version of Google Analytics. This new, upcoming version – Google Analytics Version 5 is designed to make it easier and faster for users to access the data they want. Many of the improvements done to the new version were a result of user feedback like – users will be able to view multiple advanced segments without having to use “All Visits” and other requested features like multiple dashboards.

New Features for Google Analytics Version 5:

• New Home Section
• New Dashboard
• Widgets
• Updated Custom Reporting Tool
• New Admin Section
• World Cloud Visualization
• Goals as Events

Here’s a video by one of the beta testers who had early access to Google Analytics V5.

For now, only a small group of Analytics users participating in the private testing have access to Google Analytics V5. This new version will eventually be gradually rolled out to everyone in the coming months.

If you want to join the beta testing program, you can visit the beta sign-up page. If you’re already part of the program, you can go to the new version by clicking on the link on your Google Analytics account. Using the new version of Google Analytics won’t affect your website traffic reports and you can use the current version while testing out the new version.

What do you think of the new, upcoming Google Analytics Version 5? Anyone here who’s tried it already? How do you like the new features? Please share your thoughts.

via AJ Batac

I’ve tried alot of third-party web analytic tools in the past – Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Clicky, Site Meter, 103Bees including WordPress plugins like FireStats and Cystats. Each of these tools and services do a good job in providing information regarding web traffic, statistics and analytics and they are FREE. However, in my experience the ones that work best and the most reliable are Google Analytics and Reinvigorate.

If you’re looking for a new free web analytics tool use on your blog/website or aren’t satisfied with the one you have now and want to replace it, here’s one alternative that you might want to checkout – Open Web Analytics.

What is Open Web Analytics?

Open Web Analytics (OWA) is open source web analytics software that you can use to track and analyze how people use your web sites and applications. OWA is licensed under GPL and provides web site owners and developers with easy ways to add web analytics to their sites using simple Javascript, PHP, or REST based APIs. OWA also comes with built-in support for tracking web sites made with popular content management frameworks such as WordPress and MediaWiki.

Screenshots:
Dashboard

Heatmap

Details

Geolocation

Clickstream

Actions

Feeds

SEO

Requirements:

• Server Operating System: OWA only runs under UNIX operating systems at this time. Windows operating systems are not currently supported.
• PHP: OWA requires PHP 5.2.x or later.
• Database: OWA requires MySQL 4.1 or later.
• Required php.ini Directives: Certain PHP configuration settings create problems for OWA installations. The following is a list of INI settings that should be avoided: * safe mode directive must be set to “off’.
• Required PHP Extensions: * The PCNTL extension is required only if you plan to utilize OWA’s background processing daemon (optional). Since PCNTL comes with the PHP distribution you just have to compile your PHP with the –enable-pcntl directive. See http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcntl.installation.php for more info on how to install the PCNTL extension.
• Web Browsers: OWA supports all major versions of most web browsers including Opera, Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Certain OWA visualizations require Firefox 3.5 or later.

I haven’t tried Open Web Analytics yet but will do soon as I’m considering of replacing Reinvigorate because it’s no longer free. Open Web Analytics or OWA in short, has all the necessary features and options that I need/look for in a web analytics tool and much more. It’s a first-party tool so I can install it on my server and be able to have full control over it. It also has a built-in and extensive instrumentation for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

NOTE: OWA is only applicable to self-hosted blogs/websites that run on UNIX servers. Make sure that your server matches the OWA requirements. If you’re not sure, you can ask your hosting provider. Also make sure to read the Installation guide first before installing OWA. Click here to view the required permissions for Open Web Analytics files and directories.

Installing Open Web Analytics on WordPress

To install OWA on a self-hosted WordPress blog, all you need to do is:

1. Download the latest OWA distribution or check it out of SVN.
2. Extract/unzip the downloaded file and move the entire “owa” folder into your wp-content/plugins folder. The folder must be named “owa” (Without the quotes) to work.
3. Activate the OWA via the Plugins section.

That’s it. Once activated, OWA will create all the required database tables (OWA tables have the owa_ prefix by default) and will immediately start tracking all WordPress generated posts, pages and feeds. Additional settings can be configured via the OWA options page found under the main Options tab in the dashboard.

To download or learn more about Open Web Analytics and how it works, visit the official website. You can also try out the demo, if you want to take it for a spin first.

What free or premium web analytics tool do you use on your blog or website? What do you think of Open Web Analytics? Anyone here tried or plan to try it? Please share your thoughts.

Here’s an excerpt of the official announcement from the Adsense for Feeds and Feedburner blog:

Good news! Today, we will be rolling out a new, experimental interface for Google FeedBurner. The real story is what’s new under the hood, however: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens.

Additionally, if you use the FeedBurner Socialize service, and your platform uses PubSubHubbub or you ping us when you post, you can for the first time get stats on how much traffic your feed items are receiving from Twitter, as well as feed reading platforms like Google Reader in one place. Again, all within seconds of posting your content. Ping? Pong! Yep. That fast.

Screenshots:

The new Feedburner interface focuses on real-time stats and feed management. Feed stats, feed issues and messages are posted on the top-level dashboard so users can quickly and conveniently access it. This helps users to check feed stats and at the same time keep track of their blog feeds and diagnose any issues to make sure that their feeds are delivered in real time. The new interface is still in beta, so expect some bugs and some changes (features, options, design, layout) done to it.

To access the new Feedburner interface, just go to http://feedburner.google.com/gfb/ or login to feedburner.google.com and click “Try out the NEW (beta) version!” on the top part of the page.

Anyone tried the new, experimental Feedburner interface? Do you like it or prefer the old interface? What features or options would you like to see added to the new interface? Please share your thoughts.