Site statistics play a critical role in my online business. But you might be surprised by the sorts of things that I pay attention to.

Most new Internet professionals focus on a few data points such as hits, pageviews or unique visitors. While those data points are fine, they are what I refer to as "passive stats" - they don't give you much in terms of actionable steps that you can take to improve your site's success. Plus, passive stats are too easy to manipulate and artificially inflate.

Instead of focusing on passive stats, you should focus on active stats. Here's how.

1. Monitor traffic sources

You should constantly be looking at your referral logs to see which sites are driving traffic to your site. As you experiment with various marketing and promotion techniques, you can quickly learn which are working and which aren't. Which blogs are worth commenting at? Well, the ones that actually send good traffic to your site. As you learn the types of marketing actions that result in targeted traffic, you can optimize the time you spend marketing.

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Though people might be interested in using this:

<a href="http://pmetrics.performancing.com/6"><img src="http://performancing.com/images/125-125.gif" alt="blog statistics" />

Just make sure to replace the "6" with your own affiliate code.

Performancing is pleased to announce the re-release of pMetrics blog analytics. In its current state, pMetrics is a simple, clean, "chock-full-of-features" stats program, specifically targeted for blogs.

Plugins & Widgets

As more and more Performancing members adopt pMetrics we'll be unveiling some uber-cool widgets and plugins to enhance your blogging experience. Plans currently include: 1) an AdSense tracking plugin and a 2) a Performancing "top blogs" widget that links back to the top 50 or so blogs using pMetrics. Discussion about pMetrics development and plugin/widget suggestions will be taking place in our pMetrics forum: http://performancing.com/forum/578

Simple Yet Feature-rich

If you're a stats junkie like me, you're constantly looking for useful information about site visitors. Site stats give us the tools to assess the success of our current actions and make strategies for improving the quality of content, navigation, headlines, etc. on a website.

Many of us need more in a site analytics program than daily log analysis. Sometimes we need a real-time look at traffic flow. Sometimes we need a quick and dirty, one page summary of recent search queries, pages visited, and referrals. Unfortunately, if you're like me, you haven't been very satisfied with the multitude of stats programs out there, especially for blogs.

That's one reason why we've partnered with Clicky to bring you the new pMetrics. With pMetrics you get detailed information about each user without having to drill down 4-5 levels in the navigation. One of the things I personally can't stand about Google Analytics is that although it is powerful, finding the information you want has never been intuitive or easy. pMetrics solves this issue.

Real-time "Spy" Analysis

But pMetrics offers you more. Have you ever wanted to get a good sense of real-time user behavior? pMetrics has a Spy function*; a real-time stats-ticker that shows each and every user behavior at your site, as it happens in real time. This information is priceless and can provide the details you need to increase site usability. You can also monitor, in real time, the results of any marketing and promotion that you are involved in.

Doing a Reddit and Digg campaign? Want an adrenaline rush? You can track the results in real-time, and let me tell you, it's a massive thrill!

pMetrics also offers you a picture of visitor demographics and geography, breaking visitors down into countries and even cities, and then plotting this information on Google Maps.

RSS Feeds

pMetrics gives you the choice of making your stats public or private, and you can even publish a summary via RSS*. RSS gives savvy blog owners the chance to dispaly site stats in creative ways on their blogs and to view multiple stat summaries from a single RSS reader.

Referral Affiliate Program

Performancing members earn 20% of every payment made to us by any user who signs up through an affiliate link and eventually becomes a paying premium member. Additionally, there is a second tier commission of 5%, which means you will get 5% of any payment made to us by your referal's referals. More information on the affiliate program is available here.

The basic version of pMetrics is available for free, but we highly recommend upgrading to the advanced version for a modest annual fee (just a little more than $1/month). The advanced version includes Spy (real time visitor stats) and RSS feeds so that you can syndicate your stats and view them in an RSS reader, saving you time and energy.

Get started with pMetrics right away!

*Premium version only

This is the announcement before the announcement. The pMetrics site analytics package has relaunched. Get it now for your blog!

Working in coordination with Sean from Clicky, we have put a scalable server infrastructure in place to provide a stable pMetrics site analytics solution to the wider blogging community. Use and enjoy.

A more comprehensive announcement is forthcoming, along with suggestions of what you can expect to see in a pMetrics API for widget development, additional analytic plugin features (AdSense tracking anyone?), public exposure (read: linklove) for successful sites, and more.

Again, this is the announcement before the announcement, but for those of you who have been patient with us, we thought you deserved to know as soon as possible. So now's the time to get back in the game.

For those of you looking for a sweet analytics program perfect for blogs, check out what pMetrics has to offer. You'll like it:

http://pmetrics.performancing.com/