Firstly, one of my concerns was that I no longer had a way of viewing Pages per Visit, this was a great way of determining whether people navigated around my site having got here. For me this is important as if other people link to my posts, or are referred here through my comments to other posts/pages, they’re interested in what I have covered.
Mint has something similar to this (Total vs. Unique in it’s Pages panel), but the excellent Fresh View pepper let’s me visualise it. I can tell from the spikes (directly correlated to me making a posting (and receiving hits from referrers such as Planet Ruby on Rails and Developer Fusion) that there are more views per visit for that day, than a non-posting day. Leading me to believe that when other people find their way here (by way of Google, for instance) that they stick with the article they found. Perhaps making it easier to find related posts may encourage people to stay?
The brilliant Outclicks pepper also lets me see where people go afterwards, and the page they were on beforehand. It doesn’t really help me target posts better, but it does let me know that people are finding things useful, if not the things I directly write.
lets me know whether I'm doing relatively better, or worse, between two time periods. For me, this is weekly. I know that because I posted more times this week, I've served markedly more requests. A great encouragement to keep posting. However, what's more important is that I can see which posts are retaining popularity through being referenced elsewhere, or found by Google. If I can keep on finding interesting things to post about, perhaps people will stick around.
Overall, it’s feeling much better. I still miss a way of seeing the amount of time a user spends on a particular page. Google Analytics had a great page that could show you a breakdown of pages, based on pages people spent most time at, the average time a user spent on any given page etc. Very useful stuff. Perhaps I should look at the Pepper API and see whether I could do it. Unless someone’s seen something else to do it?
Have a good weekend!