“I’m already using Google Analytics” is what most people seem to say when asked if they’d like to try a new analytics solution for their site.

Google Analytics is great if you’re looking at trends, and seeing how your site has been doing in the past. It’s a fantastically advanced tool that does almost anything you could want a reporting tool to do. But it’s never up to date – it’s never instant. Google Analytics is great at finding out why things happened. Sometimes you need to know what’s happening right now.

GoSquared LiveStats is about deciding how to make changes now, how to improve your site to maximise the effects of what is currently happening, rather than what’s happened.

When you tweet about your latest blog post – you likely want to see the immediate response. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could see exactly who was on you site before and after you post on Twitter? Wouldn’t it be great to see if the people who saw your tweet actually stayed around on your site?

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Today is a very special day for us. Today is GoSquared’s 5th birthday, and what a birthday it is.

Angel Investment from Stefan Glaenzer and other top Investors

The GoSquared Team is thrilled to announce today that we have just closed an initial round of angel investment from leading investors Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge, Robert Dighero, and Thomas Jones.

We won’t be disclosing the amount raised, but we are extremely excited about the position this puts us in to push GoSquared even further along our path to building the best real-time website analytics platform on the web. It’s fantastic to have the backing of some of the most experienced, connected investors in the London tech scene. Their belief in our plans for the future fills us with excitement for what we can achieve next.

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Today, we’re very excited to announce the latest version of GoSquared LiveStats – version 3.

We’ve rewritten LiveStats from the ground up to focus around seeing which content is popular on your site at a glance. The centre of the interface shows a list of all the pages people are viewing on your site. The left side shows where your traffic is coming from – what people are tweeting, which sites are linking to you, and what people are searching for.

Learn more about the great new features of LiveStats 3, and sign up now!

Visit the GoSquared site tomorrow (Tuesday 11th January ’11) to see the latest from GoSquared.

Today we’re announcing two huge improvements to GoSquared. We’re introducing a new structure for user accounts and plans to make GoSquared more affordable, easier to join and simpler to upgrade. We’re also releasing an overhaul of the Site Manager application and renaming it Settings.

The new Settings app

Introducing a completely redesigned application for managing everything in your GoSquared Account, along with all the websites you’ve added to GoSquared.

Settings will look familiar if you’ve been using GoSquared for any period of time – it’s replacing what was previously known as Site Manager for managing the sites in your GoSquared Account. All the settings that were there before – editing of website name, URL, updating your site image preview, sharing options – are all still available.

Along with managing your websites, you can also edit your personal details, change your password, and upgrade your GoSquared Account (more on that shortly).

Updates to GoSquared Accounts

The most notable change introduced with the Settings app is that there is a new option in the sidebar called “My Account” – head here to upgrade your GoSquared Account.

Until today, when you signed up for a plan (see plans and pricing), that plan would apply to a website on GoSquared. From now on, plans will apply to user accounts rather than to websites.

What does that mean? Before – if you signed up for a premium plan, that plan would only apply for one website, so even if you had 3 websites in your GoSquared account, you would only gain the increased pageview limit and additional features of the premium account for one website. We didn’t think that was fair – and a lot of people requested we change things so that the pageviews they were paying for could be shared across all sites in their account.

From today onwards when you sign up for a plan on GoSquared, the features and the number of pageviews on that plan will apply to all sites in your GoSquared account.

If you’re only on the free plan and you currently have multiple websites in your account then not too much will change except the pageview limit on the free plan – 10,000 pageviews monthly, will now be shared across all of your websites.

If you have any queries about the latest changes to GoSquared accounts, have a look at this support document.

Behind the scenes

We’ve improved the functionality of the Settings app to be easier to use, and even faster than before by utilising the latest in HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery goodness. You won’t have to reload the screen at all – everything refreshes immediately, and tabs switch as soon as they’re clicked without any waiting.

Settings is there to be quick and easy – people want to jump in, change a detail, and get back to looking at their stats. That’s why we designed the URL structure to allow you to bookmark any screen in Settings and return to it at a later date. It’s also why you can jump straight to Settings from the sign in screen by clicking the Settings icon. Small things, but hopefully they’ll save you some valuable time.

I don’t understand! Help me!

We’ve put together a support document outlining some of the top questions you may have regarding the changes to GoSquared accounts. Have a read of the support page, and if you still have questions please feel free to email us, tweet us, facebook us, or leave a comment on Get Satisfaction.

Still not using GoSquared for real-time web analytics? Sign up now

This has been a huge project behind the scenes for the whole team, and we hope you like the changes. It’s very easy to keep adding new features when building software, but this is one of those occasions where we dedicated considerable time to simplifying, clarifying, and improving a core part of our offering. We look forward to your feedback!

Enjoy,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

Your chance to earn money from GoSquared has arrived. Today we announce the release of our Affiliate program, which enables you to earn cash from promoting LiveStats to your audience. Upon referral of a paying customer, you’ll receive a cut of up to 50% of the amount paid.

If you’re already a member of GoSquared, you’re already set up to start earning money. If not, sign up now and you’ll be ready to start earning in under 60 seconds. On the Affiliates Dashboard, you’re given a unique affiliate URL and a selection of banners we’ve carefully designed for you to use on your web pages to promote LiveStats to your audience. Every time someone purchases a LiveStats plan, you’ll receive a tasty slice of the pie.

We’ve been busy

We’ve been working hard behind the scenes for the past few months, making countless improvements and feature additions to the underlying infrastructure of our system. Our improvements to infrastructure have been largely focused around increasing performance and developing a more scalable platform to build upon. The front-end changes have been subtle, but we’re starting to roll out better navigation within GoSquared Account screens and between GoSquared apps such as LiveStats and Site Manager.

Map View for the Masses

Until now, Map View was only available to Standard and Pro users. Starting today, all LiveStats users will be able to experience the power of LiveStats’ real-time geolocation panel first hand. Observe exactly where your visitors are browsing from, in the context of time of day, by navigating the beautiful interactive world map.

Dramatically Improved Performance

In our minds, performance is the key. That’s why we always design our applications and the engines powering them with performance as a top priority. Recently we’ve made a bunch of tweaks under the hood to make LiveStats more streamlined. Now you can enjoy faster loading times as the LiveStats loading bar slices swiftly across your screen when the application starts up.

New and Improved Signup Process

We’ve redesigned the way new users get started with LiveStats. Implementing that tracking code can be a tricky business, so we do our best to guide them through the process in a clear and concise way when they first run the application. First impressions are the most important.

Check out the sign up and welcome process for yourself – sign up for LiveStats now.

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The time has come to introduce the next major version of LiveStats. LiveStats is a web app that enables you to monitor your Site’s traffic in real-time.

Since we launched LiveStats just 3 months ago, we’ve received an absolutely fantastic response with almost entirely positive feedback. We couldn’t be more thrilled with your reactions. Over 1,000 Sites have signed up to LiveStats since launch ranging from small personal portfolio sites, up to the corporate sites of some huge institutions and companies. With the most recent updates we’re confident we can push forward and develop LiveStats knowing we can serve every Site real-time traffic stats all the time.

We’ve said from the start that we won’t be able to keep LiveStats free forever. On Wednesday, we’ll be introducing some very affordable payment plans for the service. Purchasing a LiveStats plan will enable us to continue pioneering the real-time analytics market, and in return gain some extremely high end features from day one that aren’t available with any other service.

We also wanted to take this opportunity to begin putting together a list of supported and unsupported services that LiveStats runs on.

List of Supported Services

• Any Self Hosted Site
• Tumblr
• WordPress
• Squarespace

If you know of or are responsible for any services that can benefit from LiveStats (most services can), please contact us so that we can update our list of supported services.

Services we Cannot Currently Support

The following services do not allow you to embed custom javascript so cannot take advantage of LiveStats real-time traffic monitoring.

• Posterous blogs
• Facebook pages
• Twitter pages

We really can’t wait to share more information about LiveStats 2. See you Wednesday.

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team.

Our elevator pitch with Hermione Way of Techfluff.

What a way to kick off 2010 – our first video appearance on YouTube.

Check out LiveStats if you haven’t already, we hope you like it.

What a week.

On Tuesday* last week, we finally released LiveStats into the wild – our web app for monitoring your Site’s traffic in real-time.

Everything went exactly to plan until Thursday when our good friends at Smashing Magazine decided to tweet about us and the just launched LiveStats. We were really hoping to grow our user base after launch, but could never have imagined the response we would get from that one tweet – in under 10 minutes we received over 1,000 new visitors and in that hour almost 400 sign-ups.

400 signups to our blog wouldn’t be too much of an issue, but those new 400 people wanted to add their Site to GoSquared and check out LiveStats for themselves. We thought we were prepared for increased load when we launched LiveStats, but we just didn’t expect so many Sites, and so many Sites with such high traffic levels joining in such a short period of time.

Let’s not forget that a substantial number of our 400-or-so new users also had more than one Site. You get the message – we were swamped.

There was no way we were going to let any of our lovely new members down, so we went about implementing an extremely long, and still growing, list of performance & reliability improvements:

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