While Google Analytics is a great product, one of the most frustrating aspects of it is the lack of any data about what’s happening right now with your site’s traffic.
In these days of the real-time web, shouldn’t we have real-time web stats too? That’s where Footprint comes in.
Using a chunk of Javascript code on the pages you want to track, this service from a Netherlands-based team allows you to see information about what pages users are looking at in real-time. All the usual data that you would expect about their ISPs, operating systems and browsers is available for each user, as well as individual users’ paths through your content.
As a free product this is definitely worth a look, although it’s worth noting that Clicky offers a real-time tracking service as part of its paid-for full-featured analytics package. If you’re using Google, or another free stats service though, Footprint could be the perfect companion for when you’re feeling nosey about just what your visitors are doing.
Oh, but it’s so ugly! I am just going to stick to Clicky.
Don’t wish to shamelessly self plug here, but we build a product called LiveStats that does everything that Footprint does, but with a lot more finesse. And it’s also currently free:
http://www.gosquared.com/livestats/
Judge for yourself ;-)
Yup, we’d pretty much say that’s a shameless self-plug
I reccomend Clicktale as the best usability tool. Its heatmaps, real time videos and aggregate behaviours and analytics are second to none!
We’ve all got our favorite realtime web stats, don’t we?
I like http://www.chartbeat.com — any other users?
I am definately bookmarking this page.
Clicky is outstanding and very affordably priced.
I’m using statcounter, is it worth switching/adding something else?
http://healthjournalclub.blogspot.com/
Just a note. When you try to install the Javascript in Blogger you get the following error:
“Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.
XML error message: The reference to entity “site” must end with the ‘;’ delimiter.”
Footprint Live Analytics says that if you modify the code in any way it won’t work, but also says it will work with “content management systems” like Joomla, Drupal and Blogger. So… how?
Hi Brad, sounds like something worth getting in touch with the developers about. Maybe they can help?
Hello Brad, Martin, Thanks for the Feedback.
We’ve reproduced the issue, which was caused by a missing “/” backslash. The missing backslash was the end slash of the image in the javascript. Using an XML validator we have resolved the issue.
The problem has been corrected for all accounts created from January 5 onwards.
If your account was created before 5 January, please write and we will send you the correct version.
Our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Team Footprint
interesting. Our site http://sency.com uses GA but other tools would be interesting to look at – especially as traffic grows in 2010