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!

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.
(Click here to read the rest of this post)