My favorite service in my original comparison, Measure Map has since fallen into my “ugh” list because of how horribly, terribly poor it is. As they opened it up, the application failed to scale. They seem to miss stats left and right and the reports are more or less unusable. It seems directly related to load as it seems to get better at very weird hours. Guess you don’t ask usability experts about scalability or something. Granted, looking at my blog, you probably wouldn’t ask me about usability. I do happen to know a few things about scaling big web sites, so it makes sense.

You might ask Google about scalability. Instead of just asking, though, they found a way to get Google to buy Measure Map. Awesome. Now, Google has two poor performing web analytics services. At least Measure Map isn’t ugly and is tailored toward blogs. Google Analytics, as I wrote before, is much more business oriented and also had its own scaling issues.

I kid about the Google and poor performing analytics thing, of course. Google should be able to help the (former) Adaptive Path folks figure out how to make their service perform. Now, if they could figure out how it was going to make money…

I got a bit excited today when I went over to the FatMixx SiteMeter Report page because I noticed in FireFox that the RSS icon was present in the location bar, indicating that there was an RSS feed for that page. I was hoping they did what Measure Map did, with personalized feeds for my site. I was surprised that there wasn’t an announcement on the SiteMeter blogs. So I checked out what RSS feed they were pointing at. Turns out the feed tag in the source points to the RSS feed for the SiteMeter weblog. Booo! The RSS icon is only supposed to show on pages that have RSS feeds for the content on that page. Not just that the site somewhere has an RSS feed about something. Booo again!

Just a quick followup to my Measure Map, Google Analytics, SiteMeter extravaganza: I just noticed today that Measure Map rolled out RSS feeds for your site data. In other words, I now have 3 feeds in my aggregator that give me a quick view of what happened the day before on my blog. Very cool.

In case my extravaganza on web traffic analytics wasn’t enough (or was too much), Fred Oliveira has another simple comparison up. It’s a few weeks old, but I just saw it.

I’ve been doing a comparison of a couple of different web site analytics packages over the last few weeks. Originally, it was just Site Meter vs. Google Analytics, but last week I finally got my invitation to the Measure Map beta. As of right now, FatMixx is configured for all three services, and I’ve been poking around at the numbers and comparing the tools. While FatMixx is not exactly a major blog or website by any means, we have enough traffic to compare the services and see how they do.

I started comparing these tools to see what else was out there aside from Site Meter. I’ve been using Site Meter on FatMixx for over a year now and like what it offers. Exposure to an enterprise level service like HitBox at work got me thinking about whether there was anything better out there. After a bit of searching around, I settled on testing two other services. I’m using Site Meter as my baseline so I’ve included a writeup for them below. Let’s take a high level look at the three services.
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