real estate blog lab

A couple of Observation about Tracking Traffic

How many different traffic tracking systems does one blog need?  It seems like everyone wants to track my traffic and report on it.

• Feedburner
• MyBlogLog
• Google Analytics
• Hittail
• Woopra

These are a few that come to mind without even thinking about it.

I take a look in my footer.php and find I’ve got java scripts for tracking systems up the wazzo (sp)  and with every system that is added it seems the load time for my blogs gets slower and slower and slower.

I have a simple HTML static website that loads like a rifle shot. (only hittail on that site)  Every page, click BANG, click BANG, the page is loaded.  But the blogs.  I look down in the lower left hand corner of the browser and it can take 30 seconds or longer as I read a laundry list of URL’s passing before my eyes and most of those are tracking.

Starting today, I’m going to eliminate some of these and see if I can improve the load time on the lab and the business blogs.

Goodbye Woopra

Last in First Out. Woopra is cool, I’ll give it that.  Both times I’ve bothered to open it there was a wealth of information there to look at and digest.  It is a data junkies dream come true.  But DO I REALLY NEED ALL THIS DATA? I don’t think so.  Maybe in the beginning it was good to know how things were progressing and to look at from different points of view.

Woopra is slow enough I see it all the time in the bottom of the blogs doing it’s thing before the site can load.  It is now gone.  A couple of times a year I might miss it.

I wish there was a way to turn off tracking with Feedburner and MyBlogLog as well.  I never look at those stats.  As far as that goes I never look at Google Analytics either.  I’ve never been able to figure it out or how to set it up.  I’m not much on charts or graphs.  I do have it running on three of the blogs, but have only logged in twice this year and still couldn’t make sense of any of it.  It could easily be the next to go as well.

Hittail is the one I use daily, almost minute by minute some days.  Do I need it?  Yes, it is quick and fast and gives me the snapshot of moment by moment traffic to the various sites.

I like mybloglog visitor widget to see who has been dropping by for a quick read, but honestly I don’t NEED it on site.  I never look at the stats and finally while researching for this article found I had 61 contacts waiting for approval.  I didn’t even know I had to approve them.  Since Yahoo bought them out I think I’ve been to my account a total of Once counting today.

Diabetic Example:

Diabetics are supposed to test their blood several times a day to see how they are doing and serve as a reason not to eat chocoalte or anything which contains sugar.  A good rule of thumb, my rule of thumb, as been “If it tastes like it was pre processed by a horse it is safe to eat.”  Is it important to meter, yes it is.  But what if I had five different meters so I could see how I was doing on each and maybe find one that produced lower reading, or I just decided to take the lowest reading as “The Good One”.  I would be sticking and drawing blood 20 times a day to get essentially the same results.  It would cost me for test strips, batteries, time and Oh yeah, blood.

One metric is enough to get the job done.  There isn’t any reason for us to make our blogs load slower just so we can have one more metric of our traffic.

Time to Check the Footer

Take a look in your footer.php or where ever you put your tracking codes and ask yourself if you need all these tracking metric or are you just bleeding bandwidth from your site and making your readers wait.

BTW, they also slow down posting and editing and anything else you do on your blog as an author.  When you hit the save or save and continue button, just look in the lower left corner of your browser and see if you don’t see some of those flashing by.