“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?

Observe flow of new & returning visitors.

Ever wish you could watch your visitors as they browse around your site? Keeping an eye on them as things happen makes support responses much easier when you can see exactly what they’ve been doing.

A user visiting a website browses through the siteʼs pages, rather than staying on a single page or tab. As a user looks at your website they “flow” around the site. Knowledge about flow of your website is an incredibly important tool for a content provider to have. If you know which links are being followed the most, and which get the least attention then you can very easily serve users the pages you want them to see. Knowing where on your site users are lets you know where to put your high-profile information.

A website is like a city, and it must be treated as such. In order to be profitable you must stay streamlined. If there are areas of your site that have extremely low traffic get rid of them. Make sure the flow of your site sends users to the areas that you want them to be. If you know where users are at this moment, then you can find out where theyʼre going and where theyʼve been. Use that information to figure out how to map your site out.

What works? What doesn’t?

Real-time analytics can be incredibly powerful for planning your siteʼs flow. Watch your users move through your site and keep track of where they go. Pages that attract more users have more potential to be profitable in the end.

Know which pages donʼt attract or bore users. If a user has been on a page for an abnormally short time then perhaps they are not finding what they’re looking for fast enough. Visitors that never show more than a green light on any page are probably leaving pages too quickly to absorb most of the info on each page. These pages are cruft and might distract users from the rest of your site. Often times these pages are an unnecessary step in between a user and their goal. For every user that goes through them, one just leaves your site. Same for pages that have users for an abnormally long amount of time, although often if a visitor keeps a post open for a long time they may have left the tab open while making a coffee or eating some toast – they may return to use the info at a later point.

Real-time analytics can give you some incredibly detailed and powerful data. If you know what to look for. If you use that data successfully you can improve the flow of your site that will benefit not only you as a content provider, but your users as they will be able to navigate your site with increased ease.

Interact with your users.

LiveStats doesnʼt just give you data, it gives you an in with your users. Donʼt let that potential go to waste. Get in touch with your visitors. Because LiveStats shows you where and when (what time zone) your users visit your page from you can change your site to reflect your users. If you have a lot of Canadians visiting at certain times of the day, start offering deals for Canadian users at those times. Target your advertising as well. Interaction is just as important as the content on your site. If you want to reach your visitors you must act.

Create a rapport with your visitors and users, even if it isnʼt actual communication. Make it known that you see where they are and what they want. When you choose to improve the site, people will be more likely to come back.

Respond to Traffic spikes.

Knowing where your users are coming from is great during a traffic spike. If you just got linked from TechCrunch you may want to update your article to appeal more to technically minded visitors. Donʼt wait until the spike has passed, do it immediately. Spikes are a blessing and a curse. If your site is experiencing increased traffic you will want to know exactly where these users are coming from and where they are ending up. Use this info to make your site ready for the traffic.

When instant gratification is everything, you canʼt ignore your users. Make sure that you are paying attention to the data you are getting from your analytics and that you are using it to change your site for the better. The results will be astonishing if you can harness the power of real-time analytics to improve the interaction visitors have with your site, and you have with your visitors.

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.

White Bear Yard

As part of the investment, we decided to move into some amazing offices in central London. GoSquared is now based full-time at White Bear Yard, along with other exciting UK startups including Mendeley, Smarkets, and Timetric.

Learn more about White Bear Yard.

Incredible Response to LiveStats 3

As many of you will know, we released the third major version of our flagship real-time web analytics app – LiveStats in mid January.

LiveStats 3 received some fantastic press attention from some of the biggest news blogs in the wold including TechCrunch, WebAppers, Web Analytics World, FUEL Your Blogging, and TheNextWeb. Not to mention the incredible feedback from everyone on Twitter – we’ve been overwhelmed by the response on Twitter, Facebook, and over email. We’ve made our best attempts to get back to everyone who’s contacted us, but if we haven’t replied to you yet we promise we’ll get round to it very soon. If you’ve mentioned us on Twitter, posted about us on Facebook, or emailed us recently, we thank you.

LiveStats 3 introduced an entirely redesigned interface, making it easier than ever to see what content is popular on your website right now. LiveStats shows you where your traffic is coming from – social media, websites, or search terms, and which pages of your site those traffic sources are leading to. With LiveStats you can visualise your website’s traffic in new ways, such as with a map view which superimposes the location of your visitors on an interactive world map. Close to 5,000 websites are now using GoSquared to monitor their traffic in real-time, and we’re absolutely thrilled with how LiveStats has been received so far.

If you haven’t already, check out LiveStats 3 now, and watch your traffic unfold.

One more thing – LiveStats 3.1 with Alerts

We’re pleased to bring you an update to GoSquared LiveStats. Version 3.1 unleashes a myriad of bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as a few great new features including Alerts.

LiveStats Alerts notifies you if your traffic is behaving in interesting ways. You can set upper and lower boundaries for your traffic volume, and LiveStats will alert you by email every time your traffic breaks past these boundaries. You will know immediately when you’re experiencing a traffic spike, giving you the opportunity to load LiveStats find out what’s sending you your traffic. LiveStats Alerts also notifies you when your traffic is lower than a defined boundary, for those dreaded days when your site might be having issues or is unable to cope with its current load, so you can immediately be on hand to monitor the situation.

Sign in to your GoSquared Account now to gain access to LiveStats 3.1 – start using Alerts by going to your LiveStats Preferences. Set up is easy peasy, but if you have any issues, you might find an answer on the Alerts support page.

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.

We really hope you enjoy these improvements to the GoSquared experience, and that we can help you earn some extra cash on the side through GoSquared Affiliates.

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

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:

Increased Hard Disk Capacity Three Fold

To cope with the dramatically increased amounts of data that are flooding into our databases, we have grown to 3x the capacity of our old servers. At one point, thankfully while we had taken LiveStats offline, we ran into our last GB of hard disk space causing all sorts of fun problems to solve. But we fixed them. Now we have some breathing room – at least on the data storage front.

Reduced Time for Data Expiry

Before we launched LiveStats we intended to retain traffic data collected by LiveStats indefinitely. Why? We wanted to make it easier for members to migrate to something we have planned for the future. At launch though, we decided this was an impractical and likely unnecessary practice. We now store traffic stats data collected by LiveStats for a minimum of 10 minutes. Anything stored longer than 10 minutes will expire once you leave the LiveStats application.

Data is written to our databases constantly so that all your traffic is shown to you as soon as you launch LiveStats. This is one of the reasons LiveStats is such a resource intensive application. When we were storing this data over longer periods of time, our databases grew and grew until reading information from them started to take insane amounts of time.

LiveStats Memcached

Memcached is a caching system designed to reduce the number of times external data sources (such as databases) need to be accessed. We’ve been running Memcached on GoSquared for a while but mostly to improve performance on our (as yet) unreleased applications. It was a big challenge implementing Memcached for LiveStats but it has enabled us to reduce database query time massively – resulting in dramatically faster performance.

Database Replication

Over the weekend we implemented database replication. Put simply this means we are now running three copies of the LiveStats database on our servers. This means we write to one database (the master), copy to another two, and can then read from any of the three. This helped to reduce some of the performance issues by balancing the load out, but what’s unique about LiveStats is that it does a great deal more writing to the databases than reading. We’re still working to reach a more effective solution for balancing out the writing of data across multiple master databases while keeping them all constantly in sync. We’re getting there.

Splitting Up

Another change made just yesterday – we are now running the GoSquared user database on a different server to the one that records data for LiveStats. One of the most annoying issues for users was that while we were having issues with LiveStats, at times most of the GoSquared site was inaccessible. We have done a lot of work to ensure the public facing GoSquared site is very much structurally detached from the LiveStats app and other apps that will be coming along in the future.

OK, I think that’s all I’m going to go into for now on the performance and reliability side of things. I’ve pretty much touched on each of the main improvements, but my words don’t do justice to the efforts and time put in by the team.

New Sign-in Page

We introduced a new sign-in page yesterday for all GoSquared Accounts. It’s been received pretty well so far – we just want to ensure your experience while visiting and using GoSquared is as pleasurable as possible.

Improvements to Welcome screen including new Site Preview Images

We’ve been improving the Welcome screen (the screen you are met with once you have signed in to your GoSquared Account) to make it easier to know what’s happening with regards to LiveStats system status, and for accessing your Sites.

When we launched LiveStats we didn’t know how many Sites people would be adding to their GoSquared Accounts. Our estimates tended towards 1, but since launch the majority of people have 2, and many have 3 Sites under their name. So we implemented a feature we were saving for the Sites app – Site preview images. Now when you access your Welcome screen the first thing you’ll see is a large preview image of each of your Sites.

No text, no visual clutter, just a large image that’s easy to find and click on – making LiveStats even easier to access.

Some Questions You’ve Been Asking

Over the course of the week many of you have been asking questions about GoSquared and LiveStats, I think we’ve replied to all of them, but here’s some that kept cropping up:

Is LiveStats in Beta?

We still regard LiveStats as a very much in-development product. We will be closing new Site sign-ups tomorrow to ensure we can develop and grow the LiveStats app and underlying engines with a controlled number of Sites. We will introduce an invitation system soon to grow the user base further.

For now, everyone who already has a Site in their GoSquared Account can continue using LiveStats as usual, and anyone after tomorrow that wants to monitor another Site with LiveStats will have to wait. If you have a friend that might like to try LiveStats, tell him/her now! We’ll be closing off new Site signups tomorrow (November 4th) at midnight GMT.

Is LiveStats Free?

Currently, LiveStats is completely free. You will never have to pay for a GoSquared Account. However, we have been planning a pricing structure for LiveStats for Sites that have considerably high levels of traffic. Currently, we can’t support a large number of busy Sites efficiently without greater expenditures on servers and system infrastructure.

Any changes to the cost of using LiveStats will be discussed with you – our users – thoroughly before being implemented. We haven’t got any fixed figures in our heads, so LiveStats will remain free for the foreseeable future. We don’t want to charge for LiveStats yet – we would much rather build a great community of people that use and love the product and give us valuable feedback than to make a few extra quid.

Where Can I View My Site’s GSTC (GoSquared Tracking Code)?

There is currently no way to access your Site’s GSTC from LiveStats. We’re working on allowing you to access this as soon as we can. In the meantime, just contact us to get your GSTC sent to you. We apologise for the delay in bringing this feature to you – the reason it’s not in there right now is a long story.

How did you make that animation for LiveStats that I saw on YouTube?

We have JT and his Adobe After Effects skills to thank for the LiveStats YouTube animation. We’re pretty proud of it! You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-XHA7Xzr8Y

Where’s my Activation Email?

During the mad hour or so that Smashing Magazine tweeted about us we had to restart the database server a number of times to bring it back to life. This meant a large number of signups that occurred during the reboot time were not activated. We later switched to automatically approving all new signups for the day and simply stopped sending out activation emails. We learned a lot from those couple of hours of madness and have prepared a more bulletproof plan of action for similar scenarios in the future.

Is there an easier way to switch between Sites from within LiveStats?

Currently, no. As I mentioned earlier, we weren’t expecting so many people to have more than one Site in their Accounts. We’ve been looking at ways to switch between Sites in LiveStats for a few months. We will only implement a non-essential feature such as this when we have reached a solution that a) doesn’t clutter the interface and b) doesn’t get in the way for people who don’t need or want to use it.

If I sign-up to GoSquared does that mean I’m signing up to Sell Ads with you too?

No. When you sign up to GoSquared at the moment, you open a GoSquared Account (which is obviously free) and have access to the LiveStats app. We have not yet released the new Get Seen + Sell Ads apps, but when we do, their use will be entirely optional. Selling Ads with GoSquared will also require further approval – we want to ensure all Sites selling Ads with GoSquared are of a high quality and offer significant influence to advertisers.

How do I get access to this “new stuff” you’re working on?

We don’t want to discuss our unreleased products too much right now, but if you feel your Site is pretty influential and happens to attract a creative audience, then please get in touch.

And Finally a Thank You

I couldn’t write this post without showing some gratitude.

I’d like to say thanks to Geoff (@TheDeveloper) and JT (@floopily) for the numerous sleepless nights they’ve had this week working on these improvements to the backend of LiveStats. There’s been some massive overhauls of very integral parts of GoSquared and the only feedback they tend to receive from users is a complaint or two when things go wrong. Stuff doesn’t “just work” without devotion to the intensely complex underlying components that make the system what it is.

Finally, thanks to all of you wonderful, supportive, friendly, and awesome members of GoSquared. Some of you have been with us for years, some for only days (hours even). Your willingness to accept and understand the problems we’ve been having is truly refreshing and fills us with confidence that we’re building a strong community around a great product. We listen to every word you guys and girls say – on Twitter, on Facebook, by email, and anywhere else you care to mention us.

We’ve got some great stuff coming in the next few weeks so stay tuned.

Keep on rocking,

James Gill
The GoSquared Team

*Tuesday: OK, we actually launched at about 2am Wednesday morning. Same thing, right?