10 Cool Things You Can Do With Performancing Metrics

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.

1. Track the actions of individual visitors.

One of the things that I liked about Performancing Metrics over Google Analytics is the real time individual tracking of PMetrics. This feature is called Spy. Check it out at work for Performancing.

You can follow someone by their IP address as they click through your site. This is great if you’ve made navigation changes. For example, if you just changed your blog home page to a static page, you can see right away how people are navigating your new home page.

Not only does PMetrics track the actions of individual visitors in real time, it keeps an archive of the their actions based on their IP address. You can see which people come to your site on a regular basis, which ones come just one time, and which ones come sporadically. I like to look at the people that come on a regular basis and see which pages they are visiting.

2. Track traffic for specific outbound links.

Many people track the traffic from incoming links, but sometimes it’s helpful to track the traffic you send out through your outbound links. PMetrics does this well. This might helpful to show advertisers that you are able to send traffic to them.

3. Track downloads.

Have an audio product in mp3 format or an ebook in pdf format? What about a WordPress theme in a zip file? PMetrics can keep track of the number of downloads your file gets.

4. Export your stats to Excel.

PMetrics allows you to take your data and export it in a format Excel can read. This helps if you want to keep a hardcopy report of your stats. If you’re giving a presentation about your site, you can hand out the Excel reports to the people seeing your presentation.

5. Keep up with your stats through your feedreader.

If you use your feedreader a lot, you can use PMetrics to deliver your stats through RSS. PMetrics has four feeds you can use. There are feeds that report general traffic numbers, individual visitor information, search term referrals, and incoming links.

6. Track your Feedburner stats.

If you’re anything like me, you watch your RSS subscriber numbers like a hawk. PMetrics is integrated with feedburner, so you can check your feedburner stats on PMetrics. You don’t have to go to FeedBurner.com anymore. Also, PMetrics keeps track of the views and clickthroughs of your RSS subscribers.

7. Find out how visitors searching with different keywords interact with your site.

On the searches tab, click on the keywords. For each keyword, you’ll get a list of visitors that used that keyword to find your site. Different keywords send different types of traffic. For example, you can see which keywords lead to more page views. PMetrics shows the number of actions each visitor does on your site. These actions are oftentimes different page views. Also, PMetrics shows how much time each visitor spent on your site.

8. Compare visitor activity from different referring domains.

When you click the actions tab, you’ll come to a page with a filter button on the right. The button looks like a small magnifying glass. You can use this button to filter different criteria like country, language, and web browser. Also, you can filter based on referring domain.

This filter is great for comparing traffic between domains. For example, if you get a link from a popular site, you can see how the visitors from that site navigate through your blog. Different sites have different audiences. You can compare the audiences through PMetrics. For example, try comparing the traffic sent by different social voting sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. Find out which social voting site sends more pageviews per visitor. Find out which site sends a good percentage of traffic that become subscribers.

9. Check your rankings for the search terms sending you traffic.

This uses the filter I talked about in the previous point. Filter all the traffic that comes from Google.com (or another search engine). You’ll get a list of visitors and the keywords they used to find your site. Click the arrow icon for the keywords that seem like they would be searched often. This will take you to the search engine results page (SERP) for that keyword. On the SERP, you can check to see if your ranking page actually fits the keyword. Also, if you’re not ranked #1, you can do a couple things to make your page rank better.

10. Show off your stats. 🙂

Whether you want to brag or you want a friend to help you interpret your stats, it’s as easy as setting your PMetrics to be public instead of private and then giving your friend the link to your PMetrics account. He’ll be able to see your stats. Also, the public setting is perfect if you’re selling advertising or if you’re selling your blog. For example, if you selling your blog on Performancing’s Blogs For Sale page, leave a link to your PMetrics account so prospective buyers check out your stats.

Bonus: Track custom data.

This takes some technical knowledge, but you can add a piece of code to your site to track specific data. You can track data like cookies and ad campaigns. Also, you can give a name for a particular IP address and easily identify that person without having to remember their IP address number.

Conclusion

Thank you to Ryan and Char for giving me ideas for this article. What cool things have you done with PMetrics?

Check out PMetrics for free for 21 days. Also, try the demo out.