I’ll admit it. I’m an absolute stat fiend when it comes to my website. I just love pouring over traffic data. I would say this goes back well longer then administering websites, as I used to do this when I was a kid with baseball statistics. I still do this when playing fantasy sports online as well. As much as I loathed mathematics, I always loved statistics. Anyhow, recently I’ve discovered a couple services that I’ve found to be quite handy for keeping track of traffic stats for my blog.

IceRocket
IceRocket recently launched a new service through their site called BlogTracker. Just like any Web 2.0 company the product is of course a Beta. BlogTracker is yet another traffic tracking package. I installed it recently to replace Google Analytics, which I rarely used and found rather cryptic to get any valuable info out of. IceRocket seems like a mash-up between services like Technorati and your standard stat tracking apps. The stats are displayed in a nice clean layout with charts to show you traffic trends. Each tab of info is customizable, allowing you to narrow or broaden the scope of the charted info. It’s pretty slick. The part I found most interesting was the last visits tab, which gives you a nice summary of what the person accessed, what link brought them there, their country, OS, browser, screen resolution and IP address. This sounds like pretty run in the mill stuff, but most of the packages I’ve used for stat tracking break this info up into different categories that make it harder to decipher. Another great feature allows you to see a list of linking sites and detailed info on each. In reading another blog on the topic it mentions that IceRocket updates its info in near real time, so if you like your stats fresh, here’s your site.

MyBlogLog
This isn’t a new service and I’ve been using it for quite awhile, but only in the last while has it started to really appeal to me. The site started out as a link tracking service that told you what sites your visitors came from, what page they accessed and what outgoing links they clicked while on you page. It also offered handy widgets that would allow you to display this info to your users. While handy, I wouldn’t have deemed it must have per say. That changed a couple of months ago when they gave the site a makeover and rolled out a bunch of new features. The site now keeps track of other MyBlogLog users that have visited your site and gives you a new way of interacting with your visitors and gives more of a face to the faceless mass of visitors your site might experience. They have also introduced a community feature, which automatically adds you to the community associated with a given site. It seems recently that the userbase has really picked up as the service has grown in popularity.

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