ryancaldwell

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/

In a post from last week, I made reference to the need for a momentum metric to buffer the standard strength metric that we get in PageRank. If a PR 8 site hasn’t been updated in 9 months, and is completely blank, that should be reflected in some publicly accessible data.

My question for this post is how would a momentum metric be best accomplished, taking into account the variety of sites that exist. In the comments section of that post, Phillip gave us a start:

Maybe it could be a rating that combines the separate metrics of today, i.e. this number of percentage points is given to Alexa traffic rank, this for PR, this for the number of Technorati mentions, and so on. The question of who gets the biggest weight in the rating would surely be cause of debate.

So why don’t we hack this out in the comment section of this post. Here are the questions to consider:

1. Momentum is a measurement of relative strength over time, and as such requires that we take “snapshots” – what is an ideal frequency of snapshots? One day? One week? One month?

2. To answer question 1, it would help to know the data that we’ll be considering in measuring a site’s momentum. Afterall, why take a daily snapshot if our data is only updated once a week or once every 3 months for that matter. So what data is relevant? Backlinks? Alexa? Technorati? PageRank?

3. How much weight should each of these data points be given?

If you have some ideas on how this topic, feel free to comment, but for answering these 3 specific questions, I propose the following format:

Once a week

Alexa – 25%
Technorati – 25%
PageRank – 15%
Backlinks – 30%
Delicious Votes – 5%

We’re looking for a few dedicated volunteers to help us spearhead the Open Source pMetrics project using the old code and documentation. The goal of the project will be to improve and restructure the old pMetrics code with the following desiderata:

1. Decentralize the server infrastructure
2. Collect common, anonymous data that will benefit the entire Performancing community

In other words, one of the main issues with the old pMetrics was cost of operation. If we can distribute the operating infrastructure to the community, but still collect a minimal set of common data, the community could really benefit.

Anyone want to be actively involved in this project whether at a decision making level or coding level?

For better of for worse, an economy has built around the buying and selling of links. Google doesn’t like the TLA economy very much. That’s not news. We’ve all known that for a while. It screws with their fundamental metric of a page’s value. Really, the big surprise so far has been Google’s lack of decisive action in this regard.

Up until now, they’ve taken a bunch of half-measures, like placing a delay on the Toolbar PageRank.

But it seems that things, well, they are a changing. A Spring Offensive is underway.

As many of you may know by now, Matt Cutts is calling on the webmaster world to report paid links. Cracking down on PR transferring paid links is Google’s prerogative of course. And really, there not telling us we can’t have unqualified paid links on our sites, just that we should be prepared to face the consequences.

So far, the consensus seems to be that rather than issuing penalties, Google will simply devalue any link juice from links they determine to be purchased. Whether Google’s new methods will deflate the TLA economy remains to be seen. What’s clear is that they’d like to see the TLA economy burst into a million pieces. And Google has the resources to make their wishes come true.

The sad thing about this development, as Raj Dash points out in our forums, is that for many bloggers, Text Link Ads is the only real source of monthly income. For the small scale blogger, Google AdSense brings in pennies a day. Text Link Ads has the potential of making all the time and hard work worth it. It scales down well to the little guy. Google AdSense, on the other hand, doesn’t scale nearly as well.

So what are your thoughts? Should Google be cracking down on Text Link Ads? Is doing so not much different than cracking down on alcohol consumption during the prohibition era (a minor pleasure for the average blogger)? Or is the imminent short-term pain a necessary corrective for the long-term health of the net?