A new service launched today called My µStats promises to deliver user's stats for all sorts of different ranking platforms such as Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Alexa, Feedburner and Delicious. There is no user registration required to be part of the service. Simply type in the URL into the text field and then click on the Get Widget Code button which will generate a block of code you can place into your blog as a widget.

Here is what the widget looks like using performancing.com as an example:

The values are updated weekly but upon the initial use of the widget, some amount of time is needed before the values are displayed. Overall, the widget design doesn't look half bad, although I wouldn't mind seeing a version which contained a larger font size to display the values. Also, it's nice to see such a compact widget display so much information that usually you would need to figure out by hand or use a number of different browser extensions such as SearchStatus.

Would this type of widget be of any use to you?

One cool thing I've been doing with pMetrics lately is monitoring my sites, in real time, for any natural Stumble Upon traffic. In the past few weeks, from time to time, I've caught some brief traffic trickles come in from StumbleUpon. With pMetrics, I see this happen in real time, and capitalize on it.

Here's why pMetrics helps: the StumbleUpon algorithm uses voting momentum to determine how much traffic to send to any given webpage. Instead of waiting until the next day to notice that StumbleUpon has been sending traffic to one of your pages, pMetrics let's you see it live as it's happening.

How To Magnify Your Natural Stumble Traffic

Say I'm monitoring pMetrics Spy for Performancing and notice five visitors referred by StumbleUpon to Raj's article on 41 Reasons Your Blog Probably Sucks. While having this knowledge is fun, this is where you take action to capitalize on Stumble momentum.

Step 1: Visit the page yourself and stumble it, with a review
Step 2: Find some friends to stumble the article for you as well

If all goes well, and you get a few fresh stumbles over a few hours, you should start seeing a steadier flow of traffic coming to that page.

I’ve been using Performancing Metrics for a while now, and I find it much easier to navigate around than I do Google Analytics, and it’s nicer to look at. I have started to monitor visitors by tracking on the organisations that are visiting my travel blog

Yesterday I noticed that someone from Yahoo via Digg had visited my post about Yahoo Pipes, but what has surprised me are the number of travel agencies who have visited the blog via Google for passport and visa plus many trip planning keywords.

What’s this telling me as a blogger?

Well it’s telling me these companies are regularly returning they are finding the information they want and that the blog is useful to them. If I click on an organisation I can easily see which pages they visited, and also it records previous visits by that company.

From looking at the history I could see someone from the BBC, Guardian newspaper and Fox network are visiting my blog daily and spending a lot of time reading the content. This could be an employee planning their holiday, or someone interested in the content and what I have to say.

Interesting stuff..

I use Google analytics to track my blog stats. But since I've been more involved with Performancing and I like the community here, I decided to check out Performancing Metrics (PMetrics). I installed it on one of my blogs. I've been playing around with it for the last couple of days. It's a good stats program especially if you want to see the activities of your visitors more closely.

Candy Addict shared a post about using PMetrics to find out email information. Here are 10 other cool things you can do with this interesting application.

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Performancing Metrics (aka pMetrics) Gives you an amazing amount of detail about the visitors to your site. In some cases, it's the same data you get from other packages, but it's easier to get to and understand in pMetrics. In other cases, it's the kind of data you don't get elsewhere (easily).

Here's an example of a piece of some interesting information I gleaned from pMetrics. I run a candy blog and many times when we review a product, I have a contact with the company already and I email them when we write about one of their products (you do this every time you mention or review a product on your site don't you?). Recently, we reviewed a product and I had no contact with the company so I went to their site (let's call it abc-company-xyz.com) and found a generic contact form (no actual email address), so I filled it out letting them know we had reviewed their product.

The next day, I'm looking at pMetric's Top Referers for the day and I see a link from mail.abc-company-xyz.com and when I click on the pMetrics link, it shows me the full link is
http://mail.abc-company-xyz.com/exchange/sue.smith/Inbox/Candy+Addict+review+of+our+product.EML?Cmd=open - what do I get from this? My email got routed to someone named Sue Smith (name changed) and she can more than likely be contacted at sue.smith@abc-company-xyz.com - I now have an email address for someone inside the company and I can email her directly now.

Another example of email-related info I get from pMetrics: I can see what links to my site that people are emailing. How? On the Top Referers page in pMetrics I see various links from webmail sites like by102w.bay102.mail.live.com, us.f820.mail.yahoo.com, webmail1.webmail.aol.com, etc. Click on the link and you will see the visitor's info then click on the actions link and the first action (their arrival on your site) is the link that was sent in an email to them.

To see even more, change the url in the browser on the page that says "Visitors from us.f820.mail.yahoo.com" and remove the beginning subdomains (us.f820 in this case) so the URL just has mail.yahoo.com in it and you will see all emailed links that were clicked from Yahoo mail.

You should realize that this doesn't show you every link to your site that was emailed - only the ones that were actually clicked in a webmail application.

One cool feature of EatonWeb that I've been playing with a lot lately is the Advanced Account historical trending data. While this is a "pay" feature, I can't help but love having historical trends in PageRank, Alexa, Technorati, Site Visibility, Linkage, etc. all in one place.

With EatonWeb's Advanced Stats feature, you get historical trending data for your blog starting the day your blog is entered into the directory. I've setup a sample of this feature using data from my car blog RideLust, which you can see by clicking here.

For an idea of what the historical trending graphs look like I've included a screenshot below:

The FB StandardStats Wordpress plugin makes installing FeedBurner's stats code simple. Just upload the plugin, active and add your user ID in the options page. That's it. The idea was to make it easy to use and help the user avoid editing any code.

Not only does it work with FeedBurner's StandardStats, it also installs FeedFlare from FeedBurner. A nice side effect that I didn't anticipate, but the same code works with both FeedBurner features.

If you'd like to install the plugin, you can get it at the FB StandardStats page. It has been around for a few weeks and even the folks at FeedBurner have been nice enough to test it and promote it. :)