MakeUseOf » network traffic

PRTG Monitor – A Free Bandwidth Meter For PCs In Your Home Network

Ryan Dube — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:31:29 +0000

Have you ever been in a situation where your Internet is just dragging along, while you know that you’re the only person on your network, and you’re hardly using any bandwidth?

There are plenty of tools out there that will help you with analyzing your home network and assist you with increasing your Internet speeds on that network. You could use Networx, a tool Karl covered, to measure the individual bandwidth of each PC. You could go through some of the network speed tests that Matt described. Then you could follow Tina’s tips to increase your Internet speeds.

In this article, I’m going to offer you a very cool centralized solution that you can run on a single PC (or server), which will go out and monitor your entire network for traffic and performance issues.

Monitor Your Entire Network With PRTG Monitor

If you stop and think about it, to get a true measurement about the health of your network, you really need to monitor not only the traffic going in and out of just one PC on the network. You should also be constantly monitoring each connected device for any problems. Such problems could be recognizing when the CPU goes haywire, when network bandwidth stays pegged at the max, or any other factors that indicate there could be a virus or hacking involved.

The PRTG Monitor software is a commercial tool, but there is a great freeware version available to home users that provides monitoring for up to 10 “sensors”. For most home users, this is more than sufficient.

You can run PRTG on more than one server for a “cluster” mode, but the easiest and fastest setup is to run it on one server in “standalone mode”.

The first screen you’ll see after you set up PRTG and launch the software, is the main menu where you can quickly access the major areas of the monitor software. This includes manually adding devices to monitor, reviewing status results in log files and reports, or having the software perform “network discovery” to locate any devices connected to your network.

Manually adding devices lets you configure little details that the automatic discovery won’t do, like customizing the icon for that device or giving it a name that you will recognize.

All you have to do is type in the known network IP address for that device. At the top of the Network Monitor screen is where you’ll find the quick navigation bar. This is where you can go to view the sensor statuses, view all network alarms, reports and logs.

The alarm area will show you all of the latest alarm messages for all of the devices on your network. These might include notifications that the CPU on a PC or device has gone through the roof, or the fact that the space on the C: drive is dangerously low. The system is looking for the sort of symptoms that indicate an unhealthy or infected system.

Of course, if you scroll over to the right when you view the device status, you’ll see the last measured network bandwidth for that device as well – an important indicator that there may be a problem, or that you have someone on your network that’s stealing all of your bandwidth!

The “Live Data” graphs off to the right of the main display screen are my favorite part of the software. Here you can keep an eye on the CPU load, memory use and overall health of all of the devices on your home network. And if you don’t want to sit there monitoring everything all day, the software will log the data and provide you with graphs for different time intervals, like the last few days or the last month.

The overview screen for each device is where you can get access to that information, as well as the log files, alarm notifications, and all of the realtime information for that device.

You also get cool notification icons that highlight when there’s an active alarm or notification for any device on your network. Each icon has a different meaning – informational, warning, or alarm. Just click on the icon to see those notifications.

If you want a closer view of the device behaviors, just click on any of the graphs and it’ll switch into full-screen mode. If you are the type of person that likes to have realtime statistics up on your screen (especially if you use an extended monitor) – go ahead and connect to the server remotely, and just display these graphs right on your screen (plus it looks really cool when people walk by…)

The logs will provide you with a huge volume of system state changes, alarm notifications and just status reports about what’s going on throughout your network and from each device. I’ve never seen freeware that is quite this effective and useful when it comes to getting really valuable information about a network, or remotely monitoring device like this. I’m really impressed with this software.

Try installing it on one of your more powerful home PCs and give it a try, or set up a dedicated server for monitoring your network health, and just let it run and log data. You may be surprised at what the software discovers, and what it tells you about where you may be losing bandwidth to runaway processes or infected computers.

Give it a shot and let us know how well it worked for your network. Did you learn anything new? Share your experiences with it in the comments section below.

Image Credit : Shutterstock

Become Really Paranoid By Monitoring Your Network’s Comings & Goings With WallWatcher & DD-WRT

James Bruce — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 17:31:43 +0000

If you have access to your router, and it’s able to log activity, it’s relatively easy to watch everything that’s going on to try to find any untoward activity. Today I’d like to show you how to set that up on your DD-WRT router and some Windows-only software called WallWatcher (OSX users – you can still use this network traffic monitor software in a Parallels virtual machine just fine)

Requirements

MSVBM50.exe available from Microsoft.
The WallWatcher library files.
The WallWatcher app.
A router with DD-WRT or similar that allows remote logging.

Installing & Configuring

Download and install the VB runtime files from Microsoft first. If you can’t find the download link, check out the following screenshot of the download page.

Next, create a new folder called WallWatcher and extract the contents of both of the zip files you downloaded into the root of that folder. Run setup.exe when you’re done. If the coloured boxes on the right at the bottom of the page are all blue, click install to continue. If some have errors, make sure you check the box that says install and register library files (OCX). Windows 7 users should have no issues though.

You now should now find an icon on your desktop.

Next up, log in to your router to configure that side of things. On the security tab, find the section labelled Log Management, and enable it at a high level. Under the options section, enable each setting too. Save and apply the settings.

Then, under the Services menu, scroll down to System Log and click to Enable. In the box labelled Remote Server, enter the IP address of your Windows machine.

If you don’t know your IP address, the easiest way to find out is to open a command prompt, and type ipconfig. With default DD-WRT addressing, you should see 192.168.1.??? (not 1). Copy and paste that number, then hit Apply.

Back to WallWatcher. Open it up and check the box for auto-select. It should be able to figure out what your router is automatically. If you want to enter the details manually, IP Tables is the setting for a generic DD-WRT flashed router, and the LAN address will be your router (192.168.1.1 by default), with 514 as the port number.

Next, click over to the Logging tab and ensure the Convert IP Addrs to URL’s is enabled, along with OK to use NetBios 137. This will ensure you can at least see some meaningful URLs in the log instead of the actual IP address of the website.

Click OK and you’ll be taken to the log. You should see a bunch of messages coming onscreen right now showing your entire traffic breakdown on the network. Since it can be a bit overwhelming, I found it better to go back to the Options->Logging screen and disabling everything except outbound traffic.

I had problems fully identifying URLs from the IP because I’m running DD-WRT as a sub-router in my network. If you’re having issues too, make sure that port 137 is open and forwarding correctly on your main router, as this is used to look up the URLs.

Conclusion

Using this method to watch everything going on on your network is guaranteed to make you quite paranoid. The fact that so many packets go whizzing in and out from all over the place might seem alarming, but the truth is that by loading just one website you are likely making many requests to many different IPs in order to pull in external resources such as images, javascripts, and advertising banners. It’s a good way to see if someone else is on the network as it shows originating IP too.

But now what? Do you want to get your own back and figure out who they actually are? Stay tuned – in a few weeks time I’ll be looking at some downright dirty tools that can show you exactly what they’re looking at, and even grab some website logins they might be using. We also covered great portable network analysis tools last year.

In the meantime, if you’ve seen something that worries you or a strange originating IP address you didn’t know was active on your network, why not ask for help in the MakeUseOf support community right here?

4 Quick Solutions To Windows Network Connection Problems

Mike Fagan — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:31:54 +0000

Networks are finicky at best. Wireless or Ethernet, almost everyone has had their share of network connection problems. It could be anything from not being to access the Internet despite being connected to the network, to not being able to connect to the network at all.

Unfortunately, network connection problems are sometimes hard to diagnose. A few articles here on MakeUseOf give some help. Guy McDowell’s about weak wireless signals, and Karl Gechlik’s about some simple diagnosis steps are both great resources.

Here I will lay out four easy solutions you can try to get your Internet access back. I will give instructions for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

Check Your Hosts File

Windows can use the hosts file to set IP addresses to particular domains. This means though that it can be used to redirect or effectively cut off your Internet access.

When I need to troubleshoot an Internet connection, this is usually the first place I look.

To view the file in Windows XP, just open up Notepad and go to File->Open. Then, navigate to your C drive, then to the “Windows” Folder, then “System32” folder, then “drivers” folder, then “etc” folder and finally, open the file named “hosts“.

You may have to change where it says “Text Documents” to “All Files” to see the hosts file.

After you have the file open, it should look something like this:

It should only have the heading stuff and maybe the line designating the localhost. Anything else should be deleted.

The instructions are the same for Vista and Windows 7, only instead of just opening Notepad, you have to right click the Notepad icon and choose to “Run as administrator” to edit the file.

Check Your TCP/IP Settings

Another issue may be that your TCP/IP settings were altered in some way.

For XP, got to Control Panel and then Network Connections.

In Windows Vista/7, go to the Control Panel and then the Network and Sharing Center. In 7, click on “change adapter settings.” In Vista, click on “manage network connections“.

In all versions of Windows, after you get to the places designated above, right click the device giving you trouble, either the Wireless card or Ethernet card. Then select “Properties.”

Something looking like the following window should pop up.

Click on Internet Protocol Version 6 and then hit “Properties“. You should see something like the following.

If either the IP or DNS server address are not set to automatic, set them to be automatic.

Repeat this for Internet Protocol Version 4.

Reset Your TCP/IP Manually

Sometimes, you may just need to reset your TCP/IP. This can easily be done at the command line in Windows.

For Windows XP, go to Start->Run. Type “cmd” and press enter. A command window should pop up. Then type “netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt” and press enter. You will then have to restart your computer.

For Windows Vista/7, you have to run the Command Prompt as an administrator. To do that, just type “cmd” in your start menu’s search bar. Right click the “cmd” icon that should come up and select “Run as administrator.” Then type the same as indicated above, press enter, and restart.

Reset Your Winsock Manually

Winsock, short for Windows Socket API, is how Windows handles network services. A reset of this may fix a network problem.

Resetting your Winsock is similar to resetting TCP/IP. Open a Command Prompt as laid out above for your version of Windows and type “netsh winsock reset“. Then press enter and restart your computer.

Sometimes even these steps will not fix a faulty connection. If that’s the case, you can try googling the exact problem or contacting someone with network experience.

If you know any other quick solutions to fixing network connection problems, please lets us know in the comments below.

Clicky – A Great Alternative To Google Analytics

David Pierce — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:00:41 +0000

One of the most important thing to know, for anyone with a blog or website, is who’s visiting. We all love tracking our stats ““ how many visitors today?

Who’s coming, who’s going, who’s subscribing? It’s a fun boost when there’s a spike in traffic, and lets you know when you’re doing something right.

But that’s just the fun part. Tracking your visitors can also be hugely useful ““ the more you understand who your visitors are, the better prepared you’ll be to give them the content they want, and keep them coming back for more.

For the most part, the standard application for all of this is Google Analytics ““ and with good reason. It’s a great, simple, and free program that provides you with a lot of useful information. But if you’re looking more real-time, detailed information about who’s coming to your site and what they’re doing, give Clicky a look.

Clicky is an alternative to Google Analytics and a real-time traffic analytics tool that couldn’t be easier to set up ““ just insert a bit of script into the header of your website, and you’re set to go! Clicky then tracks, down to the crazy and useful minutiae, what’s happening on your site.

Clicky tracks all the basics, right on the homepage for your site. The number of visitors, the pages they’re coming from, the pages they’re looking at, and how much time they’re spending on your site. I like, in particular, the “Actions” category, as it shows how many people are clicking around within the site, rather than just coming and going. One action means they come, they read, they leave ““ higher numbers mean more activity within the site.

On the “Visitors” tab of the (beautifully designed) site, it gets into the nitty-gritty. You can see the IP addresses of your visitors, what they searched for or clicked on to find you, and where in the world they are. Who’s coming and leaving? Who’s spending hours on your site? How are people finding you? The visitors page answers all of that.

There are too many other ways to analyze traffic to name them all, so I’ll just name six: By country. By the page they view. By the page they view after leaving your site. By what they click or download within your site. By type of traffic (direct, social media, etc.). By Web browser (my own blog gets mostly Firefox users, interestingly enough).

Knowing your audience, what they like and don’t, and even what else they read and how they find you, is a critical tool in building your site. You can promote yourself in the right places and ways just by knowing where people might look for you, and even tailor content based on, say, what Web browser people use to view your site.

For a few dollars a month, Clicky offers a bunch of other features, most notably Twitter tracking ““ you can see who’s talking about you on Twitter and what they’re saying. In a world in which Twitter’s becoming a hugely viable marketing tool, Clicky does a great job of keeping tabs on activity surrounding your site on Twitter, as well as providing a bunch of other analysis tools.

The free version of Clicky (which I still use) is a fantastic alternative to Google Analytics, for the casual or power user. If nothing else, its real-time reporting gives you a better sense of what’s happening that Google Analytics does. It’s easy to sign up, easy to use, and fun to see what’s happening on your site, right now.

For other ways to analyze your site’s traffic, read “Free Traffic Analytics Tools you Should Know About” and Woopra.

How do you track who’s on your site? Let us know in the comments.

Keep track of your connection speed and usage with iTraffic

Varun Kashyap — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:00:05 +0000

These days there are plenty of plans to choose from to get yourself on the Internet. Some offer various speeds, others impose a bandwidth cap, so on and so forth. Understandably, it is essential to monitor your connection to ensure you are getting the stipulated bandwidth and also keep a track of your usage statistics. This can be done easily with a simple, yet powerful tool – iTraffic.

iTraffic is a network monitoring and reporting tool. It lets you monitor your connection in real-time, providing you with plenty of information about your network connection. You can download and install iTraffic from here.

Once you install and run it, you are required to choose a network card that you would like iTraffic to keep an eye on. Once that is done, you will instantly see results in the form of a real-time graph, representing the current upload and download speeds. The monitoring and graphing options are fully customizable. You may visit settings panel via the tray icon to choose a different network card, set up graphing preferences like colors and units, etc.

iTraffic uses WinPcap for filtering network traffic so you can easily specify IP addresses to be ignored by iTraffic. Besides this, you can also tweak some general settings like starting automatically with Windows, tray icon and tooltips.

If you are looking for a precise speed rating, use the bandwidth stopwatch (right click on the graph). It allows you to measure upload and download speeds for a specific interval and shows you the results. Make sure you select a good server to upload to/download from for an accurate assessment.

A neat little trick that is worth pointing out is that you can double-click on the graph (or hit F8) and you will see the title bar and taskbar icon vanish, and boom you have got yourself a network monitoring widget. You can also right click on the graph and choose additional information that you would like to see.

iTraffic will also allow you to view past figures so that you can track what your network usage. I find it especially useful with the fairly stringent bandwidth caps here in India. You can easily keep track of your usage with the help of an overview report or you can dig deeper and analyze your weekly, monthly or yearly usages.

Screenshot Credit

One potential drawback (can’t really blame the application) is that for people like me who frequently work in different operating systems you tend to loose track of the total usage. Maybe there is a similar tool that works across operating systems? Let me know via comments if you know of one. Nevertheless, if you would like to keep an eye on your connection on a single computer, iTraffic is highly recommended.

Google Analytics Tips You Should Know About

Sandra Lawrence — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:01:07 +0000

Every blog owner has been there: you log in to check your traffic and there’s been a spike or dip of epic proportions. A piddling number of visitors (or an inexplicable throng) have been to your page and you did nothing to bring it about.

The first couple of times this happened to me I thought “˜ah well, thus is the fickle nature of online readers’ and got on with things. I was using BlogPatrol at the time (steer clear of it) and began to get suspicious when the spikes/dips got bigger and more random. The final straw came when I checked my traffic for February 08 and found that it was vastly different to what I remembered. How can your February visitor numbers change after February is over?

There is a lot of unreliable traffic tracking software out there ““ actually I’d say you shouldn’t trust most of it.

Enter Google Analytics. Who better to track your site than a big reliable name, and the very people who will be crawling your page to determine your PageRank?!

The layout of Analytics can be a little daunting but once you master it you’ll never look back.

Here are six of the best resources, with some of the handiest Google Analytics tips out there, starting from the simplest and moving on to trickier stuff.

How To Use Google Analytics For Beginners by Mahalo

The perfect, no-nonsense step-by-step guide, aimed at absolute novices. That is, you’ll get tips on actually setting up a Google account and inserting the Analytics tracking code into your page, as well as advice about navigating the Analytics dashboard.

Mahalo’s guide will be particularly useful for new WordPress users as it tells you exactly how and where to insert your code ““ that’s bound to be the hard part for a lot of newbies.

Steps 3, 4 and 5 are “˜Get an Overview of Your Site Performance’, “˜See How Your Site is Performing Daily and Hourly’ and “˜See Where Your Traffic is Coming From’, and helpful screenshots are provided.

Google Analytics For Beginners ““ How To Make The Most Of Your Traffic Reports by Flyte

This one doesn’t cover setup and it offers more of a personal touch ““ discover how to generate reports that are some of the “˜most useful’, in the author’s opinion. It’s pretty spot on: you’ll learn how to generate:

A Visitors Overview report. See how much traffic you have, how many page views (as opposed to unique visitors), the average time spent on your site and your bounce rate (the percentage of people who only visit one page on your site before they “˜bounce’ somewhere else). See it all in one handy graph!

A Traffic Sources Overview in graph form. See whether your visitors are coming from Referring Sites, whether they’re finding you on search engines or whether they’re referring themselves.

A Referring Sites Overview in table form. See a list of the specific sites your visitors are coming from. For example. I use this to see how many people are coming to my blog from my MakeUseOf author page!

Keywords Overview in table form. What keywords did your visitors enter into Google (and other search engines) in order to find you? Great for learning which keywords are useful to you.

Flyte’s guide is written clearly and provides plenty of images ““ a really useful resource.

8 Useful Google Analyics Tips by Jatex’s Weblog

A little more advanced. This one is really neat ““ they provide simple code that lets you tinker with Analytics to get what you need.

For example, Tip 1 gives a line of generic code you can insert whenever you put an external link on your site. Say your blog has a link to a YouTube video- insert this code and Analytics will start tracking how many people are disappearing to go and view it!

Also learn how to:

Exclude internal visitors from your reports using a filter
Track full referred URL’s (because sometimes referring sites will append their general URL instead of a specific one ie. www.makeuseof.com instead of www.makeuseof.com/google -analytics-tips-you-should-know-about)
Track eCommerce transactions and
Track exact Adwords keywords!

Google Analytics Videos On The Web by The Official Google Analytics Blog

For the visual learner ““ Google’s very own Google Analytics video playlist! Find full-length videos on advanced Analytics techniques.

Get Google Analytics On Your iphone by Conor Darcy Dundalk

An iphone afficionado explains how to access Analytics data on your iphone using some handy software.

7 Analytics Plugins & Reports You Probably Didn’t Know About by Aimclear

Plugins that let you see data numbers instead of percentages, a “˜What’s Changed’ report that tells you which referring sites to keep your eye on, a device for integrating Analytics with Google Docs and much more.

If I have missed any other good Google Analytics tips, be sure to put the links in the comments.

Get Click Heatmaps for Your Website with ClickHeat

Kyle Judkins — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:18:11 +0000

Analytics are a great tool to use with any website or blog. They help you understand where your traffic comes from and some of the ways that traffic behaves. In the past, MakeUseOf has covered several free traffic analytics tools to track all of your site’s statistics. Today, I’m going to tell you more about a free heatmapping analytics tool.

ClickHeat is a free software that lets you see heatmaps of your website and all the pages in it. In order to make your content and design better, you need to know how your readers currently use your website. ClickHeat allows you to learn more about the behavior of your readers than basic analytics tools do.

What are heatmaps?

Heatmaps are a visual way of showing you the behavior of your readers. Think of it like the storm tracker you hear about all the time on the weather report. The darker areas in the storm tracker mean a much higher concentration of bad weather. The same rules apply to the view of your website. The traffic areas on your website will get various colored areas around them to show how many clicks that area receives with the higher traffic areas being denoted by much darker areas.

As you can see, the bubbles show where my readers were clicking. I do wish there was a little more red in the picture, but getting that many visitors will take some time.

Installation

The installation of ClickHeat can be a little challenging, but I’m going to provide you with a few tips that will make it much easier. The first thing you must do is upload the ClickHeat files to your website. Once that is complete, you need to go to http://www.yoursite.com/clickheat/index.php and follow the instructions to install ClickHeat.

Those steps were all fairly easy, but the part that gave me a challenge was applying the HTML code to the different parts of my blog. I tried to follow the instructions, but I was unable to get the code in the correct place after several tries. Finally, I just placed the code at the bottom of my pages. I started seeing results after I placed my code there, so I would recommend that you just start by putting your code there.

ClickHeat Options

One of the first settings you need to check when you install ClickHeat is the layout of your website. You need to let ClickHeat know if your website is liquid and how it is set up. Having a liquid website means that your website adjusts to the resolution of the person that is viewing the site. If your web design options aren’t put in properly, the heatmaps won’t make any sense, because ClickHeat can’t collect the data properly.

ClickHeat gives you several options when it comes to your heatmaps. You can find out which browser your users used or how people with different screen sizes used your website. The changing of screen size could be a great source of data if your website doesn’t display properly for certain resolutions. You can also change the transparency of the heatmaps in order to get the best view. Also, you can group your heatmaps by day, week or month.

Conclusion

ClickHeat won’t replace your traditional analytics tool, but it is a great way to quickly see how users and readers really use your website. It is easy to get lost in all the numbers of a tool like Google Analytics and not see the big picture. ClickHeat allows you to step back and look at how people use your site every day. This knowledge will help you determine better ways to catch readers’ attention or find new ways to display your content. I definitely think that anyone out there that is serious enough to check out their statistics should give ClickHeat a shot.

5 Top Statistical Site Traffic Trackers

Wendy Limauge — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:01:53 +0000

If you want to create a successful blog or website, it is important to understand where traffic is coming from and what people do when they get there. There are a number of free tracking tools available to help you keep track of how many visitors are on your site right now, what site they came from, what keywords got them there, how long they stay, and other statistical data such as country, state, browser type, monitor resolution, and what operating system they use.

All of these traffic trackers are very easy to setup and offer a lot of help through FAQs and forums on their websites. Each one gives accurate, real-time website statistics with detailed visitor tracking, traffic analysis, and are free to use. Just pick the one that suits you and your site the best.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is the most unique site tracker available. Their system focuses on tracking visits and shows where a visitor clicks on the page using confetti view. This shows you the referring sites, a list view which shows you commonly used keywords (exportable as CSV), a heatmap which shows you areas that are “hot” on your site, and an overlay view which shows you popular areas on your site using color-coded buttons.

CrazyEgg helps you visualize your visitors instead of just seeing numbers. When you know where your visitors are clicking, you can fine-tune your site’s performance, change ad placements, and improve the overall productivity of your site.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is considered one of the most comprehensive website tracking tools available. It helps you find out what keywords you need to use to attract site visitors and it integrates with your Google AdWords account.

Google Analytics is easy to use for the beginner user and it has the capabilities that experienced web professionals want. Reports are available with very detailed information and custom reports are also available.

SiteMeter

SiteMeter offers a decent amount of free statistics that enables a typical blogger or website owner the basic understanding of the type of traffic they’re getting, where it is coming from, how long the visitor is staying, who is online now, and other things like amount of page views, browser used, computer type, and location.

SiteMeter only counts up to 100 visitors at a time then resets and starts counting again. You can set the privacy level so that you can view your statistics directly from the SiteMeter link on your site. Your site visitors will also be able to view your statistics or you can make them private.

One of the unique components of SiteMeter is the Traffic Estimator which looks at your former site traffic and will give you expected traffic estimates for the coming hour, day, week and month.

StatCounter

StatCounter evaluates the last 100 visitors which is enough information for the average site. It allows for an invisible counter installation which is important if you wish to include StatCounter code on your site without it interrupting the design of your site.

You can set the font size and color, the background color, and whether to display pageloads or unique visitors. To view your statistics you need to log into your account. The free account tracks up to 250,000 pageloads a month. Your statistics are available for download in Excel or CVS formats.

GoStats

Packed with lots of great features, GoStats has been providing a reliable web stats traffic counter service since 1999. This free hit counter is quick and easy to use but includes all of the features you need to keep track of your site traffic statistics.

It has the option to fully hide the counter or display as much web traffic data as you want, an account management control panel, site data updates by email, and a simple interface.

So those are just five options to choose from. Do you know of any others? Do you have a favourite you would like to recommend? Or does Google Analytics rule them all?

Master Your Website Traffic Stats with BLVD Status

Kyle Judkins — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:00:21 +0000

There are several good website traffic analytics tools out there, and the most popular today is probably Google Analytics. The other day I came across another alternative called BLVD Status. BLVD Status is currently in public beta, but it does provide a good service even at this stage. It comes with the basic analytic tools you would expect and adds Digg tracking to that mix. This analytics tool also brings with it live traffic stats which is very cool.

Let’s take a deeper look at what BLVD Status has to offer.

Installation

The installation of BLVD Status is fairly easy. You must first add the domain or domains that you want to track to your BLVD Status account. Once this is done, you are provided with a snippet of HTML code that you need to add to the pages you want to track. That’s it. It only took me about 10 minutes to completely set up my BLVD Status account.

Avenues

Avenues is just BLVD’s fancy way of saying statistics. They may have a reason behind it, because the first thing you will notice about the Avenues screen is its unique set up. The page has six different windows on it that display a summary of all the major statistical categories. The statistical areas tracked are referrers, foot traffic, search keywords, conversions, outgoing links and site URLs.

One nice little feature is that you can rearrange these windows to your liking. Each window has at least a couple tabs that will give you more summary information. For example, the foot traffic window allows you to look at yearly, monthly, weekly or daily traffic stats.

This summary information is great, but you are going to need to find out more information than that in order to effectively track your websites. In order to do so, you can click where it says “In Depth” at the bottom right of each window. This will take you to a new window that contains much more information about each category. Once in this new area, you will be able to tab through each of your categories to view the more in depth statistics for each category.

Conversions

Goal setting can be a great way to keep you motivated, and BLVD Status allows you to set up some campaigns and conversions that will track your progress towards the goals you set. Right now, there are only two types of goals to set. You can use a simple URL trigger or a parameterized URL trigger. The simple URL trigger will track when a visitor gets referred from a specific URL, the visitor visits the URL or the visitor leaves a page to visit the URL.

The parameterized URL trigger will track the same type of stats, but it just uses a slightly different method to obtain the same information.

Digg Tracking

Digg tracking is definitely a unique feature to BLVD Status. This feature allows you to see where the people that Dugg your website or post came from. BLVD Status makes this easy, as they provide you with the code necessary to add a Digg button to your websites or posts. Using this button in conjunction with the BLVD Status tracking script will allow you to learn more about the people Digging your posts.

Shortcomings

The one thing that was missing stuck out like a sore thumb. Where are the graphs? I am a very visual person, and the graphs that Google Analytics makes are extremely helpful to me. Also, a few more conversion options, and a more simple way to set up those conversions would definitely be a plus.

Conclusion

Overall, BLVD Status may not replace your preferred analytics tool right now, but remember that it is still in beta. I am definitely going to keep an eye on this tool as it gets more features, it shows some promise.

[rating=2]