When feed analytics service FeedBurner acquired web stats service Blogbeat a few months ago, they announced that they would be integrating the two products. So, someone signed up to Feedburner is now able to see from one account how many people are subscribed to their feed and how many are visiting their website. So, the site statistics available (according to the Feedburner Blog) are:
- Visitor summary, detail and trends
- Page summary, detail and trends
- Referral and Search trends
- Inbound referral traffic breakdown, grouped by domain and broken out in detail
- Outbound click breakdown
- Visitor city cloud and live geographic visitor detail
- Percentage inbound traffic from search and the queries that drove the traffic
- Percentage of visitors that are new to your site today
- Browser and OS breakdown, with trend indicators
- Detailed historical traffic by page and by date
That’s a very comprehensive list. It doesn’t, however, offer anything which the free Google Analytics service won’t tell you. The unique selling point of the stats must therefore be usability, as Google Analytics has far more features than a blogger needs, and not all information on the above list is easy to find within Google’s product. For example, to see exact referral addresses rather than just referring domains in Analytics, you have to click on
- Marketing Optimization ->
- Visitor Segment Performance ->
- Referring Source ->
->- Cross Segment Performance ->
- Content
That is far to many steps, with far to much jargon for any but the most determined blogger to successfully find detailed stats. There is then, a gap in the market for an easy to use stats tool for bloggers (especially after the likely demise of Performancing Metrics).
At the moment I’m waiting for the stats to populate on Gizbuzz’s Feedburner Dashboard. My intention is to run both stats systems in parallel. On a day to day basis I will use Feedburner (barring any usability or accuracy problems), but I will dig into GAnalytics for more detailed analysis not available from Feedburner. It will certainly be useful to have all stats in one place, nicely displayed (see the screenshots provided by Feedburner after the jump).
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that FeedBurner will be acquired itself during 2007 - it has a product which is indispensable to bloggers, and with new people deciding to blog every week, its target market continues to boom. The question is who; Google already has Measuremap (a stats service similar to the Site seciton of Feedburner’s offering, but which is yet to be released), although no RSS metrics tool. However, I think it would make sense for them to buy Feedburner and integrate it with Blogger. That, along with the release of the new version of Blogger and now the ability to use your own domain name without paying for hosting, could make Google’s struggling product a market leader in the hosted blog sector.
Screenshots after the jump
I’m going to dispute that final point and say FeedBurner is going to acquire someone else rather than selling. I think they see that they are doing extremely well on their own - in my opinion the only advantage to being rolled up in a major tech company is that ad sales will be better. In the case of a Google purchase, merging with Blogger’s services would riddle FeedBurner with spam and likely lead to a time when FeedBurner only manages Blogger feeds (goodness no!).
I’m surprised they haven’t made an offer for Performancing (then again they might have for all we know).
Why would FeedBurner want Performancing? They have FAN and a comprehensive stats product, both better than Performancing’s efforts. Performancing also doesn’t have that much traction.
The only thing they would get would be the extension, which won’t ever generate revenue anyway, will it?
On the other hand, if Google bought feedburner they would know exactly how many people subscribe to everyone’s feed, as well as knowing how many people visit all the websites from Analytics! Maybe then they would play ball and report to FeedBurner users how many google subscribers there are to a feed, rather than hide their market share.
Because Performancing is going down the tube and they can acquire their users. Obviously FeedBurner doesn’t need the technology. It’d be nothing more than a way to increase their presence.