Amatomu’s new tracking tools

I’ve been meaning to publish this post for about a week now. There have been some pretty exciting developments on Amatomu in the last week or two. Vincent and Matthew have really added some visually appealing graphics to help users get a better idea of how their blog is doing and what is going on in the local blogosphere, as tracked by Amatomu.

For starters, when you arrive on the front page you are greeted with a snazzy graph that looks like it snaps into position. That graphs shows users traffic across the sites Amatomu is tracking over the last week or so. The figures number in the hundreds of thousands so that gives you a pretty good idea how much traffic there is in the local blogosphere. If you take a look at a more detailed view, you are taken to the Amatomu trends page which shows you a couple interesting things about South African blogs. For starters you can see which days saw more blog posts published than others:

You can also see, graphically, which blogs are the more popular blogs and if you mouseover the blog titles you can see each blog’s share of total visitors:

When it comes to individual sets of statistics, you can find out how your blog is doing on the blog’s stats page (you need to be logged in). Here you can find out quite a bit of information about your blog and how it is doing. The first thing you will see is a simple set of numbers:

You can see which posts are the more popular posts over the last 24 hours and the last 7 days:

These statistics go back 30 days and are represented with a handy bar graph together with a legend showing which posts are which:

I had a discussion with Vincent about the accuracy of these statistics and it seems that those of you who use Google Analytics will find that these statistics are pretty consistent with what you will find on Analytics. There is one more thing I’d like to mention before I give you my take on all of this and that is the search function on the site. Not only can you search for terms on the site but you can now see a graph depicting mentions of that search term over the last 30 days:

Very handy for tracking specific trends.

I am really impressed with these features. Sure they are largely eye candy but they make it so much easier for people to get a good sense of what is going on with their own blogs and with blogs in South Africa generally. There are a couple added features too. Try right clicking over the pie charts and you will see options to enable rotation of the graph or enable slicing (you can separate out individual components of the graph) as well as switching between 2D and 3D graphs. These are great little things that enhance the overall experience and make blog stats a little less about all the dreary numbers and a little more entertaining.

Vincent and Matt have done a great job with Amatomu and I look forward to the new features I am sure they will be rolling out soon!

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amatomu, graphs, blog stats