When it comes to analytics I love to use Statcounter for all of my needs. In fact, I do not use the standard Google Analytics tool at all even though Google plays a vital role in the progress of any news-based website. Statcounter is not great, to say the least, when being viewed from a mobile device and thus my analytic browsing has felt incomplete to this day.
Now there is a new application called Gaget that provides Google analytics for iPhone on a mobile-ready screen that looks great. You can observe from the screenshots how the stats work. Rather than showing the number that is small and requires zooming in to see accurately it just has a line graph type view where you have a number in the graph column and the line indicating whether your views have gone up from the previous day or down. When you check your page views most days of the week, that is all you need. We already know the ‘ball park figure’ and all we want to know if has something is drastically wrong or is it slightly up or down from the previous day.
This app has no affiliation with the Mountain View company at all, and because of that, you will be charged $1.99 to download and install this application from iTunes.
GAget has just been updated to version 1.1 and it comes with social statistics included now. From a ranking factor, it is still up in the air how much of a part social media signals matter. Many are putting a strong emphasis on it, while others are not. With over 200 ranking factors, in Google, in my opinion it will only ever cover a small percentage. Still, for many niches, direct traffic coming from the links posted on social media can generate a lot of the sites income and I even know people who make a living direct from Facebook and don’t rely on search results at all.
Cons: the spelling of this app makes it very difficult to find in search results. That is ironic since it is an app based on giving site owners traffic awareness. It is very close to the word “gadget” and because of that Google fills search with extremely authoritative sites to do with the word it is assuming I have misspelled. It could perhaps benefit from a name change in the near future.
Download GAget on the app store here. It is developed by By Zoltan Hosszu and is available in 32 different languages and requires an iPhone running iOS 7 or later.