You’re welcome! Thanks for reading and taking the time to leave a very helpful response. It’s great to see your enthusiasm for the widget, and your corrections are vital ones. A few lines of the post have been revised to reflect your clarifications on privacy and hopefully avoid any confusion.

>> Personally, I’ll test out the free version on a few of my
>> sites, but never extensively and certainly never on a
>> commercial site. However, I am looking forward to seeing
>> my competition integrate LiveStats.
>
> May I ask why?

Since you pointed out that stats can be restricted to authorized users only, you are absolutely right that it adds no additional privacy concerns for commercial sites.

Unfortunately, agreeing to the Google Analytics TOS gives Google access to and freedom to use your data. I avoid Analytics for this reason. I imagine many other companies feel the same way. Which is why I’d love to see this widget concept work with other data sources.

The beta is already looking great, and the roadmap looks sweet too. There seems to be a lot of potential for ramping up the scope, but you’re probably already asking yourself which can of worms is worth opening.

Web analytics is a subject near to my heart, and I’m already thinking of a dozen ideas for LiveStats. Once I use the widget a little more I’ll have plenty of feedback for your though.

Do note that in Beta 2 we’ve added the ability to create custom reports. So users are not limited to the default report set. Of course, the functionality is still a little crude (requires xml to be entered directly in the source code), but it is there, so anyone wanting to include reports that are meaningful to them, but not yet on the widget, can do so.

“Personally, I’ll test out the free version on a few of my sites, but never extensively and certainly never on a commercial site. However, I am looking forward to seeing my competition integrate LiveStats. ;)”
May I ask why?

*You* decide who has access to the widget via the usergroups management selector in the admin control panel. Additionally, the data is pulled *directly* from your site to google analytics (without going through us, or any other third party). So this data is viewable *to you only* and IMO there’s no reason why it couldn’t be used in a commercial website just as it can be used in a non-commercial one.

I’m also very excited about the WordPress version which is coming out very soon, with the current feature set, plus the enhancements we’ve already added in Beta3 (to be released shortly)

You are right in regards to the great potential of additional (useful) info/mashups within the widget. - We already have a few solid features in mind for the pro version. However, we are still seeking feedback from the community in this regard. Up till now, the feedback/recommendations on possible (again, useful) features, has been a little scarce.

Hopefully more ideas and feedback will start rolling in as we introduce newer builds, or as we hint the community on directions these new features can be taken.

Again, thanks for the review, and certainly, feelf free to post suggestions or feedback on things that can be improved, or better yet, stuff that can enhance your “analytics experience” via the widget.

Cheers,
Juan