Google+ Referral Traffic Possible to Track, Unlike Buzz

What is this string? And what could it mean?

Last year's launch of Google Buzz was followed by some blogger navel gazing around how referral traffic from the social network within Gmail was sending negligible traffic. The rub, of course, was that Gmail is served under SSL, and would not be sending back session headers to downstream sites, regardless of click-through volume. So guessing whether Buzz was driving a high or low percentage of traffic relative to other sites was pretty much a guess. In contrast, it is possible to divine traffic from Google+, launched last week, but it's not directly designated, falling under the general Google.com domain.

For Google Analytics users, Google+ is not called out as a dedicated site, making its use practically invisible, adding onto the "Google/Referral" statistic, as opposed to "Google/Organic", separating the company's Web apps from native search.

For those viewing raw logs, or using third party tools (like Sitemeter, which I use in addition to Google Analytics, Quantcast and Icerocket, just to overload myself with data), you can see Google+ referrals having the following string:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=z

If you can track how many times visitors come your way with that particular string in their referral, then you can know just how much an impact Google+ is giving you downstream. For me, despite reports from others, I've never gotten much traffic at all from Facebook, and Twitter tends to like a specific type of story, inconsistently. FriendFeed, once my 2nd highest referrer, is practically gone. You get what you give in the social networking space, so no doubt if you participate in G+ (as the cool kids are calling it these days) or you make it part of your flow, you can see it bringing visitors your way.

So watch for that string if you care about this stuff. There's no Gmail excuse this time to obscure transparency.

SiteMeter's Attempted Challenge to Google Analytics Falls Flat

SiteMeter, one of the most widely-used Web log statistics trackers, has seen itself fall well behind the long, dark, shadow of Google Analytics. And while I've been a happy SiteMeter user for almost three years, its statistical data has at times seemed fairly pedestrian compared to Google's advances, lacking the ability to segment the results by selected dates, to build advanced charts, or even to export the records to Excel or a comma separated value file. This weekend, after months of developing a new version of their product in beta, they finally took a leap forward to better compete, but the roll-out has, so far, been a big disappointment. In fact, on the same day they went live, they had to roll back the launch.

SiteMeter, to date, has featured a free version of its product, and a paid version, to premium subscribers, who, for $89 a year, get expanded insight into referral statistics, user behavior, and their Web browsing setup. Premium users get access to data covering the most recent 4,000 visitors, as well as aggregate data comparing the most recent month's traffic to that of prior months - as far back as you started using the service.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, shows you data from all visitors of your site ever tracked. And instead of being restricted to only one set of users (the last 4,000), you can show visit data from the last day, multiple days, or any date segment. The service also lets you carve up your visitors' history with multiple graph options.

SiteMeter must have been feeling the heat, because their newest version hit the major benefits of Google Analytics. It let you segment results from a date range. It let you export any graph's underlying data. And it definitely expanded the range of graphs available.


The New SiteMeter Tried to Pretty Up Its Visitor Graphs


User Visit Data In the New Site Meter: Basically Raw Code


The New SiteMeter Pulldown Menus: Form or Function?

But what SiteMeter didn't do with their new version was make the data look useful for humans. Instead of a friendly UI, its newest offering felt very raw, with unpolished typefaces, and gaps that showed not all the data was being tracked. It's the same type of feeling most Mac users get when entering Linux for the first time.

Meanwhile, old shortcuts that were familiar to existing users, like recent referrals, popular pages, and summary data, no longer worked, and clickable links were instead replaced with a series of pull-down menus. Essentially, form was chosen over function, and the form wasn't really all that good.


Coming Soon: A SiteMeter Scoreboard?
Should they get more comfortable with their new look and feel at any point in the near future, it's clear SiteMeter is also not only going after Google Analytics, but there was a new feature called "Sitemeter Scoreboard" that showed your site's ranking in terms of total visitors or page views, relative to the service's nearly 1 million installations. Maybe the idea is that we would start showing our SiteMeter ranking on our blogs as many do for Technorati or other services. But it looks like we're not going to know for a while. Today's botched roll-out is another black eye for a company that most recently gained headlines for blocking access to Web sites via Internet Explorer, and has had the occasional outage or two without company comment.

If this is the best SiteMeter had to offer against Google Analytics, Google's really in no trouble at all.

SiteMeter Stats Sputter to a Stop, With No Reason Given

It seems that outages are the new black.

After a weekend filled with stories on Amazon downtime, a brief Disqus blip, continued Twitter troubles, and many sites straining to take on increased crowds swelling to catch the latest from WWDC, I was surprised to see my blog statistics engine, SiteMeter, get in on the act. Since 11 this morning Pacific time, data has been almost completely stalled, not logging visits, and the company's blog doesn't give any reason for the slowness.

I'd like to blame Scoble, or blame Steve Jobs, but I don't think they're the cause.


SiteMeter is one of the most widely used statistics trackers in the blogosphere. And while I could put up with occasional outages from a free product (See: Mark Evans: The Wonderful World of Web 2.0 Whining), I'm one of those who wanted to support the site's developers, paying $89 a year to gain a premium version of the service last year, which gave me expanded access to a wider array of reports.

I'd like to say I don't check with SiteMeter throughout the day out of curiosity, but I'd be lying to you for sure. I love stats. I even made a dashboard widget for Mac OS X that shows me the day's activity, letting me just drag my mouse to the bottom right corner to get caught up. Except, today, I was surprised to see I was extremely unpopular. Not only was the total visit count much lower than I had anticipated, but it said absolutely nobody had checked in in the last hour. And since this morning, I've seen no updates at all.

SiteMeter's seen issues like this in the past. They operate not from one mega-database, but instead, each of its individual servers runs on its own database. When one has a hiccup, only those users on that single server show issues. I expect that's likely what's going on here, and just maybe, with luck, the total statistics will catch up overnight.

Now, we'll see just how much my going dark for about 36 hours over the weekend will have hurt me. With the company's blog not giving any hints as to what's happening, hope is all I have. Maybe it's time to check in with my FTP server and download my logs.