Statistics on your site!
Just about 2 weeks ago we launched our at-a-glance statistics in every Clover website’s Greenhouse. We’ve been working on this feature for some time now, and we are stoked to give it to you.
We love Google Analytics (which you can still have in conjunction with these stats) for the incredible in-depth information it provides about your visitors. You can know what browser they visited you with, where they are located, which pages they visited and for how long, and what their favorite food is. Well, maybe not that last one, but I’m sure Google will figure it out one day. This info is great for marketing and analysis purposes, but can be pretty complicated if you’re just looking for quick, easy to understand information.
Our new stats feature gives you clear, digestible info on how many visitors are hitting your site at any given time/day/month, as well as what kind of media player/podcasting traffic you are getting.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what you can do through our new stats feature:
1. View Your Website’s Traffic
- View the past 3 months of traffic (by day)
- View highest and lowest trafficked days for the past 3 months (at-a-glance)
- See the top 5 trafficked days in the past 30 days (at-a-glance)
- See the top 5 trafficked days in the past 7 days (at-a-glance)
- See an hourly breakdown of todays visits (at-a-glance)
2. Track Every “Play” in Your Media Player (which includes your Media Player online, Mobile, and Podcast)
- View how many “plays” you’ve received in the past 3 months (by day)
- View highest and lowest amount of plays for the past 3 months (at-a-glance)
- See the top 5 played media items for the past 30 days (at-a-glance)
- See the top 5 played media items for the past 7 days (at-a-glance)
- See an hourly breakdown of media items played today (at-a-glance)
One quick thing to highlight with the media player stat tracking… As far as we know, there is nothing else available on the web that combines every single play of a given media item across all platforms (ex: having a media item on your media player, mobile version, and podcast). Typically you would have to have analytics set up for each of these platforms and combine them yourself to get a number. Our stats combine all of these outlets into one number so you can really track your media’s exposure. We’re pretty proud of that, and hopefully it gives you a much better idea of the type of reach your media items have.
Enjoy!
Posted on September 29th, 2010 under Company News by Jim with 16 comments.
16 Comments
looks great jim. this is a great addition to your product!
on a sidenote, saw you at story but wasn’t able to connect. hope all is well!
Thanks for the props, John. Yeah- I saw you there too. Deep in conversation… Didn’t want to interrupt. Hope all is well in Alpharetta.
Does this allow us to remove the Google Analytics code from our site, or does this feature still rely on that code? In other words, can I abandon Google Analytics completely, or is it still necessary for the functionality of this feature? Thanks!
Hey Josh-
Great question! This is completely separate from Google Analytics. But don’t feel like you have to ditch Google Analytics altogether… Like I mentioned above, Google Analytics is great for really in-depth stats- which might come in handy someday. We created these simple stats for more of the everyday/weekly use. It’ll allow you to simply see what kind of traffic you’re getting really quickly.
My advice is to not abandon Google Analytics. You never know if you’ll want that info, plus it’s free.
One quick note that we didn’t think to mention until just now… If you haven’t taken your site live yet, you won’t see the stats. We do start tracking them the moment you purchase your site (even when it’s on nowsprouting.com), but the launch process box covers the stats until you’re live.
While I haven’t been using Google Analytics, I like this new feature. I do have a question though. Are the numbers reported simply the number of hits or are they unique from each individual computer? In other words, if I open up a window and go to the site, close it, and do it again does it record that as one or two hits?
Hey Amanda –
That’s a great question. I was trying to answer it in this comment, but I just realized that my explanation wasn’t clear at all. We’re putting together a help article that will explain exactly what a “visit” means. As soon as it’s up, I’ll post a link here.
Jim/Ben,
When you say podcast stats, does it mean it’s the actual number when a listener on itunes plays it?
Also how can I check how many people have downloaded the content on itunes?
We haven’t used Google Analitics but are excited about this addition to our site. Other than the site hits and the podcasts visit, could we count how many hits our newsletter is getting? Thanks!
Haha, figures the guy with the radio show is the first to ask about iTunes. For podcasting, we count a “view” every time someone downloads an item in iTunes. Unfortunately we can’t differentiate between downloads and plays, so it basically counts one view when someone downloads an item, whether they listen to it zero times or ten times. That’s the best anyone can do because iTunes doesn’t give any more control than that.
About the newsletter question from Ann, are you talking about an email newsletter? If so, there should be a way through your email service to track views and opens. We use mailchimp.com for our emails and it works great for stats like that.
This is great, thank you for this feature! Any word on Staff Pages and Photo Albums?
Yea, Staff Pages coming next! No exact release date just yet, but very soon! Photo Albums will be the fourth release (after Forms) and a bit down the road. We’ll keep things coming though!
Thanks, Ben – I might check on that route, but right now we have our newsletter posted on our site in pdf format. When you pull up the “newsletter” page, you can click on the Current issue or the last several weeks editions. Could we count the number of times the Current issue is opened?
Gotcha, now I get what you’re asking. In the new at-a-glance statistics feature we just launched, we don’t keep track of any specific pages or documents that are viewed, but we do actually track all of that if you put Google Analytics on your site.
With Google Analytics, not only can you see how many times a specific document is viewed, you can even see how those visitors got to your site, how long they stayed, how often they return to your site, and much more.
If you haven’t set up analytics, check out our help article here: http://www.cloversites.com/other/help/setting-up-google-analytics/
We just posted a big help article explaining the statistics feature in more detail. If you’re interested, check it out here:
http://www.cloversites.com/help/at-a-glance-statistics/
This is a great feature no extra steps to view website traffic keep up the good work.
Thanks jp