I suggested these things in my blog post review of pMetrics, but I thought I'd add them into the forums in case anyone else wanted to chime in:
For one, while it’s fantastic seeing all the individual user experiences, there’s no reason to leave out the “bot experience.” Those of us using Site Maps would really like to know exactly how the bots are moving through our sites, and even if you aren’t using Site Maps, knowing where the bots are going and how they’re indexing may give you clues as to where the site needs to be improved for indexing.
Another suggestion would be to develop a kind of “heat map” technology that allows us to see our site color coded to display where the majority of people are clicking. Where they click is where they look, and that’s probably where you want your most important content. You can sort of get this from context in the “Visitors” section, but a more intuitive UI would be hugely helpful.
As far as I know, it's not
As far as I know, it's not possible to track search engine activity with a hosted solution like pMetrics. Search engines ignore javascript, ignore the contents if 'noscript' tags (where our backup image based tracking system resides), and even if they didn't ignore noscript, they probably only download remote images once and then call it good, even though I'm sending headers to not cache that image. The only way to track engines is to use a log analyzer like AWStats, Analog, Webalyzer, etc. Now, I haven't looked deep into the issue, so there may be a way, and if anyone has ideas I'm all ears. But I'm pretty sure we're SOL.
Heat maps are great tools, but I'm hesitant to add this functionality. They're not really "stats" but more about usability analysis and all that. As well there are already some great tools that provide this, such as CrazyEgg. I'm not saying it won't happen but I'm not considering it a priority. Although, I'll admit it would be pretty sweet to view a user session on pMetrics to see everything they did, and then be able to see the same thing as a heatmap across several pages, just for that user. That's almost scary though, isn't it?
Hehehe. . .
Yeah, scary awesome!
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