Need to see who's been on your website in the last day? Week? Month? Want to monitor your website's traffic without having to read a manual first? Want an elegant web analytics solution that updates in minutes rather than hours and works beautifully on all devices? Maybe you should check out Trends.

Since we first launched LiveStats, our web app for monitoring your website's traffic in real-time, we've been determined to figure out how to store historical data at a large scale. Due to the number of sites we serve, and the speed at which we store data for quick retrieval, it's been a huge challenge but we've finally figured it out.

What is Trends?

Trends is a web app for monitoring your website's historical traffic data. All the information you need is easily readable and quickly scannable with bold graphs and readable lists. There's a separate Widget for every metric (like referrers, visitors or top content), making it easy for the whole team to know what's been popular and what's not on your website.

Open Standards

There's not an ounce of Flash in Trends, or any of GoSquared. We're really proud of the graphing engine behind Trends. Because we haven't used Flash, graphs in Trends display just as well on your desktop as it does on your iPhone or iPad. These are the best charts in a web-based analytics service anywhere on the web.

Customisable Interface

The interface of Trends consists of a series of beautiful, easy-to-use Widgets. You can set up every Widget just as you want - choose the time frame for your stats, whether you want to look at a graph, pie chart, bar chart, or just the figures, and even move the Widgets around. Trends will change to suit you. The whole interface will stay the way you set it when you return - every Widget, every state, every time frame will be remembered so you can jump back in where you left off.

Part of GoSquared

As we wrote recently, Trends may be a separate app, but when you sign up to GoSquared you get both LiveStats and Trends as part of the package. You can sign up for GoSquared for free, or if you need more pageviews there's a series of affordable premium plans starting at just $9.99/month.

Check out the Plans and Pricing now - every plan has a 30 day free trial, and you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time.

Enjoy!

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

We quietly launched a new web app into beta a few weeks ago called Trends. Trends enables you to monitor your website's trending traffic data from a single dashboard, with a separate widget containing graphs, charts, and tables for every metric that matters.

We've had some great feedback on Trends, and have continued to improve the app over the past weeks while people have been trying it out. Trends works great with LiveStats - which shows you what's happening on your website right now. LiveStats shows every visitor browsing your site, what pages they're on, which referrers have sent them to your site, and how long they're spending on each page, all in real-time.

What's New?

The price. Until now, we've been charging for LiveStats as a web app on its own. Now for the same price, we're giving you a whole new app - Trends, with incredibly accurate data recording, an intuitive and beautiful interface, and redundant data backups.

New Plans

We've also made a few changes to the individual Plans we offer. We've improved every Plan in a multitude of ways including the number of pageviews, and the number of features. Now every Plan comes with unlimited team sharing, SSL page tracking, Event tracking, and Map View with Geolocation monitoring.

We will continue to offer a free plan, and we've doubled the number of pageviews to 10,000 pageviews/month. We've also integrated a single, unobtrusive ad placement on the free plan. We're working with BuySellAds to ensure the ads shown in GoSquared's apps are consistently high quality and have as little impact on your experience as possible.

Already added a website to GoSquared and want to upgrade its Plan? Sign in and head to the Site Manager.

We hope you like the changes we're making at GoSquared. If you have any suggestions or feedback we'd love to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, or via email.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sign up and start using LiveStats in 3 easy steps. Try it now.

We're really proud of our latest update to the LiveStats sign-up process - signing up is now a really simple 3 step process that's a joy to use.

This is also the first appearance of the new LiveStats radar icon - it'll be showing up more from now on. Those dots that show up when the radar screen goes green? They’re the locations of real visitors on your site. Rad.

The whole team has worked really hard on this pretty complex process to make it seem really simple.

Also, you might like to know - we've brought Map View to all plans. Whether you're paying $99.99/month or just trying LiveStats out on the free plan, now you can see where your visitors are on the most beautiful world map you've ever laid your eyes on.

Enjoy,

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

We're pleased to announce the release of the LiveStats for WordPress plugin for WordPress blogs.

WordPress site owners can install this plugin to easily implement the GoSquared Tracking Code required to use our traffic monitoring apps. The plugin is available from the WordPress Plugin Directory and future updates will also be made available there.

Note: If you've already integrated the GSTC into your WordPress theme's template files, you should remove it before installing the LiveStats for WordPress plugin.

Today we're incredibly excited to announce an entirely new product from GoSquared - FutureStats.

We've been working on our second app for many many months, and we think you're gonna love the features we've been sweating over. FutureStats is the ideal companion to anyone already using LiveStats.

Spike Prediction

One of the most challenging issues of the web 2.0 era - the traffic spike. Until now it's been impossible to predict when you're going to receive your next flood of traffic from Digg, a Fireball, or Twitter. Worry no more.

Twitter Reaction Forecast

Worried that what you're writing will be controversial, poorly received, or simply just ignored? Find out in advance how the Twitterverse will react to your Site's content, even if you haven't written it yet.

Member Prediction

Accurately predict the number of new users you'll receive tomorrow, next week, or next month. Even find out their names and emails before they ever signed up. All you need is FutureStats.

PredictionEngine

Patent Pending technology to predict the future of your Site's Stats with 100% Accuracy.

As you may know, dividing by zero can have dangerous, dramatic, and undesirable effects. Don't believe us? Go and try it out, but don't write to us if your computer explodes and destroys your entire neighbourhood). At GoSquared we discovered that if we divided by zero under specially controlled conditions, we could create a small but effective wormhole in the fabric of time and space. By maintaining this wormhole in a high-energy plasma state we are able to pass electrical signals between here and any time in the future we wish. And by ensuring that the other end of the wormhole is continuously connected to a high-speed internet connection, we are able to retrieve browsing data for websites at any time in the future.

In order to cover our energy costs, however, we are not able to enter the product into a free beta to begin with*. From today we are introducing a basic plan (two weeks into the future) which starts at $50,000/month, scaling up to our unlimited plan (watch your browsing stats right up to the end of the universe), priced at just $1337bn**.

Update

This, in case you didn't pick up on it and were blown away by our sudden ability to predict the future, was an April Fools joke. We'll keep the page online, though, for the memories.

We launched LiveStats 2 on February 3rd and so far the response has been fantastic. We're thrilled with your feedback and you'll be pleased to know we're continuing to dramatically develop LiveStats with its new stronger foundations.

With LiveStats 2.1 we've refined some of the new interface features that were introduced in version 2 such as linking to Map View from a row in List View. Also, you can now double click any row to expand it - no need to click on the arrow at the left if that was bugging you before!

New and Improved Map View

What we're most proud of in 2.1, though, is the dramatically improved Map View. Before, Map View was quite simple - we showed a world map at whatever size your browser window happened to be. Now you can zoom in and out, and pan around just like you'd expect from a decent mapping application. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to pan, or click and drag. Zooming can be controlled by the lovely slider in the top left of the screen, by scrolling with your mouse, by double clicking on any location, or with the "-" and "+" keys - interact however you want!

As with anything new - there may still be a few bugs that we haven't worked out yet. With the complexity of showing real-time visitors to your Site on an interactive map, there'll likely be plenty for you to pick us up on. Just drop us a line and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Also new in Map View in 2.1 is the ability to toggle the daylight line. LiveStats is still the only real-time analytics app to show which of your visitors are browsing in the day or night via a beautiful map view.

Support Documentation

Finally! A Help Centre for LiveStats! We've been working on building up a few pages to help you get to grips with integrating LiveStats on your Site, and educating everyone on some of the hidden little features that make LiveStats better in every day use. We should have had these ready from day one, but there's only so much that can be done in a day. Please feel free to have a good read, and ask us any questions you may still be having or to request an article on anything you're struggling with.

LiveStats 2 introduced an array of new features:

Map View

At the tap of a button, switch between a condensed List View showing every visitor on your Site in tabular form, to expanded List View with more information and icons for each visitor's referrer, to a beautiful, fully live Map View showing each visitor's location to city-level accuracy.

Event Tracking

Building a web application? Using some nifty javascript in your company site? Just because it's on the same page it doesn't mean it can't be tracked. Integrate LiveStats Custom Events with your site to see more than just pageviews.

Advanced Real-Time

Real-time traffic monitoring like you've never seen it before. LiveStats constantly checks to see whether a visitor still has a page open, knows exactly when they leave, and can even tell if they've opened several pages in different tabs or windows

Custom Name Integration

By default, every visitor to your Site has a unique ID. You can double click any unique ID to assign a name to that user. If you have a database of users for your Site or web app you can automatically show their username when they visit.

Key Strokes

The minimal interface of LiveStats belies it's power. By using some of the keyboard shortcuts we've added to LiveStats 2, you'll be able to zip around the interface with barely any need for a mouse whatsoever. Try hitting "M" for Map View, or expanding and collapsing List View with "X" and "C". You'll zip around when you know them all.

And a Load More

The new foundations of LiveStats 2 allow us to build some great new features in the future that would have been impossible on version 1. Using LiveStats with OS X is a pleasure - with full Fluid and Growl integration LiveStats feels like it's a native app. LiveStats 2 can now be used as an integral addition to your arsenal for usability testing, as well as a comprehensive real-time component for traffic analysis.

Thanks for being awesome,

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

LiveStats 2 is here.

We're thrilled today to announce the all new LiveStats 2 - real-time analytics completely rebuilt from the ground up for faster performance, more accurate results, and a more powerful interface.

Here's the press release we sent out this morning:

LiveStats 2 pushes the innovations made in the first version to the next level. This update introduces second-by-second live monitoring of all visitors so there’s no guess work left in discovering whether people are on your Site, actively reading your content, or just have it open in the background.

By monitoring your Site’s traffic in absolute real-time, LiveStats can detect whether a visitor is actively focused on any page on your Site, and whether they have more than one page of your Site open at the same time in separate tabs and windows. You can even see which of the pages the visitor is looking at, gaining an insight into their habits by watching as they jump from page to page in real-time. No other analytics package, real-time or otherwise, offers the ability to view a user as they travel through your Site like this. The experience puts you in the observation tower, while enabling you to observe details that would otherwise only have been achievable by looking over a visitor’s shoulder.

Understanding where your visitors are coming from is easier than ever with the new Map View. As soon as a visitor loads a page on your Site, LiveStats will pinpoint their location to city level accuracy on a beautiful full screen map. We’ve even built in a dynamic daylight line so you can see how your visitors browse your Site at different times of the day in different regions.

The interface of LiveStats is built entirely in open web technologies. We’ve embraced jQuery and Raphaël javascript libraries to build a user experience that many have assumed was Flash based. The simplicity and ease of use of the LiveStats interface completely belies the power and information that can be gained from it.

We believe LiveStats is the best way to find out what’s happening and who’s on your Site right now.

LiveStats is available to everyone and does not require a download. You can sign up for a basic plan to try out the service for free. Premium plans that offer some of the great features of LiveStats 2 such as Map View and Event Tracking start at just $5.99 per month. The ideal plan for most small to medium sized website owners is available for $9.99 per month while there is a professional plan for larger websites and corporate clients for $49.99. These are aggressively priced plans for a service that outclasses our rivals in the real-time analytics market.

As a note to you, our wonderful existing members who have enjoyed LiveStats for free up until now - we will not automatically start charging you. All existing Accounts will remain free for the next 30 days on an unlimited plan, but at the end of these 30 days, if you haven't upgraded to a paid plan, all Sites in your Account will automatically be downgraded to the free LiveStats plan that tracks 5,000 pageviews per month. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time and there are no nasty contracts.

We'll write again this week to explain in more detail how LiveStats 2 is a giant leap forward from version 1. We're really proud of how far we've come, and we believe that this latest release pushes us even further ahead in the real-time web analytics industry.

Enjoy.

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.

Today we announce the second instalment in our series of GoSquared updates. This update has been in development since November and marks out a key milestone for LiveStats in terms of the service's under-the-hood architecture. LiveStats 1.2 introduces a completely re-written and re-structured tracking backend, geared up for blazing performance, lower latency, more accurate statistics and greater app stability. In short, the LiveStats 1.2 update launches us into the freedom of unlimited scalability, enabling us to take full advantage of the expansive power of the Cloud. Although there are no notable front-end improvements to the UI, the update allows us to scale our hardware horizontally and provide you with an even better service.

When LiveStats was experimentally released back in late October, we didn't have a great idea about how the app would perform under high load. However, thanks to a surge of sites implementing the service, we weren't in the dark for very long; we quickly discovered that the system in its initial incarnation was unable to cope with the load it was being subjected to. LiveStats 1.0 was hideously unoptimised, and was completely dependant on a sluggish database which was unable to scale to a high level of writes.

Something needed to be done quickly to tune the performance of the system so that it could hold for long enough while we worked on a different approach to the tracking architecture. James detailed these modifications in his post LiveStats - One Week On and that was the system we had been operating since... until now. So, what's changed?

Server layout

Previously, the system was bound to a single server running a single, slow and unoptimised MySQL database. Now it has been liberated by a horizontally scalable design in which any number of new servers running our custom AMI can be manually or automatically booted up as LiveStats "nodes" when other nodes approach their load limits. We developed our own internal API which empowers all of our servers to collaborate with each other in a conglomerated stack. Using this API, Sites are allocated to specific nodes depending on their size and resource utilization of each node, so resource constraints can be easily avoided, leaving LiveStats functioning quickly and reliably. In addition to this, we have moved our DNS hosting to UltraDNS for super low-latency, high availability DNS query resolution for all of our services, and also thanks to their API, granting our systems with the ability to dynamically assign subdomains to our server nodes.

Software

A major objective for the 1.2 rewrite was to completely eliminate reliance on the MySQL database. Data collected by LiveStats is currently not persistent anyway (apart from custom naming, more on that later) so there was no need for the use of a MySQL database when there are far more suitable tools available, like memcached. LiveStats 1.1 introduced partial memcached support which, along with closing the service as invite-only, relieved a considerable amount of load, allowing the system to just about hold out for this long despite still being database-bound. With LiveStats 1.2, each node operates its own native memcached instance with access to a large amount of memory, in which the real-time statistical data is temporarily stored. This way data is not delayed by arbitrary disc I/O caused by MySQL, and instead resides in memory which is extremely fast to access.

Persistent Data

For certain features like custom naming of visitors, persistent data is required. Memcached however is not a database, and a database of some sort is usually the best way to go for persistent data. While we haven't yet committed to a particular solution, we've been researching into a relatively immature technology: Key/Value databases, like Redis, Project Voldemort (used at LinkedIn) and Cassandra which is in production use at Digg and Rackspace. Currently we're using a simple implementation of Redis for custom names, although this is subject to change in the future once we take a closer look at persistent data.

Code

All of our backend code has been redesigned from the ground up to take full advantage of these changes in our system architecture. The way we handle our data has completely changed, and has been fully optimised with performance in mind. As such, we hope you'll find the requests in the LiveStats app load at consistent intervals with fewer delays. Furthermore, accuracy of the data has increased. In LiveStats 1.0 and 1.1, due to the database architecture and data propagation across databases, some hits would occasionally be dropped, or sometimes null or "ghost" hits would show up where incomplete information has been received. These problems have been eliminated and LiveStats now displays a very accurate reflection of who's visited and where.

Now that our capacity has increased, we will soon be distributing more invites more regularly. If you want one, ask us on support or twitter, it's likely you'll get one! As always, new software isn't perfect and there are likely to be bugs, so if you encounter problems, get in contact and we'll look into it.

Finally, just a quick mention of LiveStats 2; it is under development and introduces some really intuitive new features that we know you're going to love! More on this soon.

From all of us at GoSquared, we wish you all the best this year and we hope you enjoy LiveStats!

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