getclicky

I am happy to announce the release of version 2 of the pMetrics API.

It has a unique URL from the old version to ensure that existing applications continue to function as expected. There are a few changes that are not backwards compatible, although these changes are very minor and should not take more than a few minutes to implement within existing applications. Juicy details are available in the API documentation, but here’s a brief run down of what’s new:

* new “actions-list” data type, includes ability to filter by session_id
* relative date formats (“5 days ago”, “last 10 days”, “last month”, etc)
* a limit of “all” for every data type
* shorter cache times
* more consistent naming schemes for both data types and data values
* null values excluded by default (saves memory and bandwidth, can be disabled)
* new “total time” data type
* some new parameters: session_id, null_values, app
* CSV output (this was supported before, but undocumented)
* and more…

The API is now officially out of “beta” status. When it was first released many months ago, it was stated that there would be some restrictions for non-Pro users at a later date. (Pro is our upper tier premium package). These restrictions have changed to be much more relaxed, but please note that the following restrictions are now in effect for all non-Pro users:

* Limited to 100 results per request
* Limited to “today” and “yesterday”
* 30 minute cache times

An important note to developers: The “Base API URL” is no longer provided or supported. This is to ensure that you are always in control of which version of the API is being used with your application, since the API version is encoded within the URL. More information about this is in the docs.

The new pMetrics Dashboard is designed to quickly and efficiently show you the traffic data that you care about. It is full of live refresh fun (many thanks to the jQuery JavaScript library), and includes the ability to drag and drop the modules to wherever you want on the screen. They’ll stay there forever until you move them again.

The screenshot above shows a number of modules from the Dashboard. Take the ‘Links’ one for example. It shows your top 5 incoming links by default, but also allows you to view outgoing links and top incoming domains simply by clicking the appropriate link. Only that module is updated when you click items, making the dashboard very fast and efficient at getting the data you want.

Trend data from the previous period is shown on the right for each item, in green if your trend is good, or red if it’s bad. If you are viewing a single day, the previous period is the day before. If you are viewing a date range, for example the last 14 days, then the previous period is the 14 days before that.

You can hover your mouse over the trend to see a tooltip that defines the previous period for you and gives you the value. Clicking on the trend is where things get a lot more interesting, though. The module will instantly refresh and show you trend data for just that one item, either from the last 14 days if you are viewing single days, or the last 10 periods if you are viewing a date range. Screenshot

In development is the ability to pick and choose only the modules you want, and choose how much data is shown within each individual module. We’ll also be adding a Google Maps module. However, these features will be for premium accounts only! Detailed trend data (when you click the trend link) will also become premium only, but is available to everyone right now.

Overall, it’s a lot of fun, especially the trend data. Ideas from the new Dashboard will be implemented into the rest of the site over the coming weeks, so the whole site will work like this rather than just the dashboard.

Please help us spread the word by blogging about this! We think the new interface is really cool and we want everyone to know about it. 🙂

Have fun!

pMetrics just got a few new features. To your left is the new cloud view, which is available for every “popular items” page (links, content, downloads, searches, search engines, etc). Any time you see those three little icons in the top right corner (click the shot to see them), that means you can view the current data as a cloud and/or export it to CSV, in addition to the old boring bar graph. Yes, you read that right! We now have data export as well.

If you are unfamiliar with clouds, they are very handy. You can fit more data in less space, and the size and color of words cues you to their importance, or weight. It also puts the “long tail” more up front and in your face, since it is ordered randomly when you first load that view. Don’t underestimate the importance of the long tail. Our clouds also show you the “raw” numbers (hits and percent of total) if you hover your mouse over any of the items, so they don’t just look pretty – you can extract real data from them too.

Whatever site, content, and date range you are viewing…. clicking between those icons will give you the exact same data, in three different formats. The bar graph shows your top 50, as it always has. Clouds show your top 100. And data export gives you your top 500. Clouds and export even work with FeedBurner items and clickthroughs! The only areas that don’t have these new features yet are the dashboard, visitors, and actions. Actions would make no sense, visitors might work to show you who has been most active on your site recently, but I’m not sure we’ll do that. Data from the dashboard will be available eventually.

Clouds are available to everyone. Data export is also available to everyone for a few weeks, but it will eventually become a Pro only feature, as has been stated here and on the upgrade page for a while now.

Enjoy!

IP tagging is here and is available to all premium users. You can add a name to any IP address and those visitors will be identified by that name instead of their IP address when you are viewing your visitor and session log. If you click their name, it will show more details (including their IP) and all visits from that visitor, as it has before. Here is a screenshot. – notice the ‘username’ at the top!

Currently, it is still grouping this data by the current IP instead of their “user name”. The plan is to test out grouping it by that user’s name instead, but the performance may be poor. I’ll keep you updated.

To start using this feature, click the new ‘IPs’ link from your user homepage. This has replaced the old ‘IP Ignore’ link, and instead those two features have been combined. Meaning, when you add an IP to your site, there is a checkbox indicating whether or not you want to ignore the IP address or just name it.

A related but much more important announcement is you can now track an unlimited amount of CUSTOM data on a per session basis. User names, cookie values, session ids, shopping cart ids, ad campaigns… you get the idea. Anything you want associated with a visitor, can now be logged to pMetrics. This data will be shown to you when you view the details of a session (as indicated in the screenshot from above, which is actually just a simplified version of this more advanced full data tracking). We have been testing this on pMetrics since earlier today, you can see the results here.

There is a lot more information here, including how it works and code examples.

We are open to your suggestions on how to improve it. We considered doing this on a per ACTION level as well, in fact it is already designed to be flexible enough to add that in easily, but there is definitely some concern with data storage if we were tracking that much additional data on your visitors. If there is a demand for such a feature, we may decide to implement it.

Note that full custom data tracking is PRO only. (Our upper end premium package). Interested in upgrading? You can do so here!