Blog statistics with BlogBabel at ZenaCamp in Genoa, Italy

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Expats in Italy need to stay on top of professional and daily happenings locally while still engaging in the wider world. This task is made difficult by the vast quantity and quality of resources available in English (my native language), as exemplified by the BBC. Unfortunately, their Italian equivalents, such as the ad-infested public broadcaster RAI, just can’t compete for my attention.

It doesn’t get much easier on the web marketing front. The primary search engines in Italy are the US based Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask, sometimes found in their rebranded skins: Arianna (enhanced by Google) and Virgilio (listed by Google as a customer). Inevitably, most of my web marketing reading is English language centric.

As a side note, Google commands a percentage of the market in most western markets that most politicians can only dream of. Yet the search market remains very dynamic and innovative.

The Europeans have shown greater success in analyzing and reporting on web statistics. Two of the best open source web analytics tools come from England (Analog) and France (AWStats¹). The Netherlands and Italy are represented by the commercial solutions Nedstat and ImetriX respectively.

At Saturday’s ZenaCamp, I was fortunate to have attended Ludovico Magnocavallo’s presentation of BlogBabel, a blog statistics service which attempts to identify the top Italian blogs based on a weighting of their visibility in Technorati, Google.it, Google Blog, Yahoo.it, FeedBurner and Tracklink.

While it is worth keeping in mind that BlogBabel’s ranking is just one measure of the importance of a particular blog, Ludo deserves kudos for the transparency in which BlogBabel’s rankings are calculated.

Ludo did admit that the published top searches are, alas, filtered. Web self-censorship is not new; the major search engines do this as well in their top keyword search summaries. BlogBabel also tracks the Spanish market.

If you are a blog publisher, you’d probably be interested in wide range of metrics including but not limited to:

• Feeds
  • Number of feed subscribers
  • Number of new feed subscribers over a given time interval
  • Number of feed cancellations over a given time interval
  • Number of click throughs to each post from a feed
• Posts
  • Comments per post
  • Most read
  • Most e-mailed
• Users
  • Most number of posts
  • Most number of comments
  • Most read
  • Most active recently

and the standard web analytics metrics such as visitors, pages (posts) visited, visitor geographic location, referring sites, search engine keywords, etc.

For those looking for a way to track their blog statistics, blog oriented web analytics solutions are still in what would politely be called a fluid state.

• Performancing’s Metrics ran into economic difficulties; it has reappeared as a rebranded version of Clicky.
• New accounts for the promising MeasureMap were curtailed after MeasureMap was bought by Google. Presumably Measure Map will be integrated into Google Analytics product line.
• Feedburner is definitely a service worth exploring, as is
• MyBlogLog.

Regardless of which blog statistics service you choose, look for a service which allows you to export your statistics so you can potentially use them in other programs and so all won’t be lost if the service goes bankrupt. Data should always be treated as an asset to protect.

¹ Visit our AWStats resource center for enhancements and extensions to this web analytics tool.

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• Are we still lying with statistics in the internet age?
• Web statistics for internet market research: pick a number, any number

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