Gabriel Harper's Blog

Those tycoons over at vBSEO released a free Google Analytics widget for vBulletin users codenamed LiveStats. This free widget displays a JavaScript widget with comprehensive Website statistics from Google Analytics. I don’t plan on publishing all my traffic statistics, but they can be kept private and LiveStats gets definite kudos for using sparklines!

The LiveStats widget from vBSEO/Crawlability, Inc. displays comprehensive page specific and global site data from Google Analytics in a sharp looking JavaScript widget. The LiveStats for Google Analytics widget (as of version beta 2) is compatible with vBulletin only, but other CMS/blog software support is planned.

Check out the screenshots below to see what LiveStats widget looks like, or just hop over to vBSEO.com to see it in action (click the little “stats” button on the left).

LiveStats Screenshots (click to enlarge)

LiveStats Page Statistics

LiveStats Global Site Statistics

As you can see above, the vBSEO LiveStats widget provides a ton of very interesting data pairing with Google Analytics.

Most commercial sites should avoid sharing this data publicly, since it contains detailed and potentially sensitive traffic data and search engine statistics. Fortunately access can be controlled in the widget admin panel for usergroups. (Thanks to a helpful response from Crawlability, Inc. founder Juan Muriente that clarified this important subject.)

Different sparklines are shown for Page Stats and Global Stats in the LiveStats Analytics widget:

• Page Stats
  • Pageviews
  • Unique Pageviews
  • Time on Page
  • Bounce Rate
  • % Exit
  • $ Index
• Global Stats
  • Visits
  • Unique Visitors
  • Pageviews
  • Average Pageviews
  • Time on Site
  • Bounce Rate
  • New Visits

In addition to the sparklines graphics and statistics data shown at the top, the widget also has several categories of extended site statistics for Page Stats and Global Stats:

• Page Stats
  • All Traffic Sources
  • Keywords
  • User Defined
  • Referring Pages
• Global Stats
  • Keywords
  • Referring Sites
  • Search Engines
  • Top Content
  • Content By Title
  • Top Landing Pages
  • Top Exit Pages
  • All Traffic Sources

LiveStats Plans and Release Status

As of the time of this post, LiveStats is on beta 2. The download is a straightforward vBulletin plugin. From the way they’re talking, vBulletin and Google Analytics are just the tip of the iceberg. Potential integration with Wordpress and mashups with social Web data like Twitter would make this tool useful for more than just vBulletin users.

It sounds like  the basic version of this tool will remain free, but a commercial pro version will eventually be seen. The name LiveStats for Google Analytics is also apparently just a temporary title until a more suitable name is found.

Improving LiveStats

I’ll be testing out the free version on a few of my sites, but due to privacy concerns I don’t use Google Analytics except for research and experimentation. For this reason I’d be especially interested in seeing other data incorporated with the widget. However, I am looking forward to seeing my competition integrate LiveStats (if they leave the data publicly available).

I can see LiveStats being a killer tool on the back-end if it integrates additional statistics data and provides an API of some kind. Then it’ll be a tool worth buying for a lot more commercial sites, and not just a freebie stuck in the realm of neat widgets for vBulletin users. This is still an early release of Crawlability’s LiveStats for Google Analytics widget, and so far it’s showing a lot of potential.

** Update: Just noticed the WP version is in progress, and support for SaaS implementations is being mentioned. TechWhack also mentions the new widget and upcoming platform support.

I can’t imagine adding support for Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.  being that far off, unless LiveStats is tightly integrated with vBulletin code. Seems a generic implementation in PHP would work for most CMS and blog scripts. Working with CMS software on sites integrating a vBulletin CMS would be shoe-in for existing vBSEO/vBulletin users.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 3:07 am and is filed under Software & Scripts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.