Today, GoSquared is 6 years old. We’re incredibly proud of where we’ve come so far, but the future is what we’re excited about.

Here’s a quick run down of what we’ve done since February 3rd 2006.

Enjoy!

GoSquared’s real-time data is not confined to just the dashboard. For a while, you’ve been able to receive notifications via email or Twitter DM for when your site is experiencing unexpectedly high or low levels of traffic.

Email reports – snapshot of your traffic as the event unfolded.

Now, not only will you be told “how many” people are online. The new GoSquared Alerts will send a snapshot of your site’s traffic directly to your inbox every time you receive a traffic spike or a sudden dip in traffic levels.

We’ve designed the new email notifications to give you all the data you need so you can see why your traffic changed at that specific point in time. You can even view the emails in your browser, effectively keeping a record of every significant moment that’s happened on your site.

What are you waiting for? Start using GoSquared real-time traffic alerts now.

Learn how to set up GoSquared Alerts →

If you like what we’re doing, the team and I would very much appreciate a vote for us in the “best tool for startups” category:

http://theeuropas.com/vote/

Thank you in advance for your time and support!

If you’re a keen WordPress user or developer and you love GoSquared, you’re going to like this.

We’ve created a new GoSquared WordPress plugin!

The new plugin has one major addition – you can now share your stats with the world.

Simply install the GoSquared WordPress plugin as usual entering your GoSquared Site Token and your GoSquared API key. This will place the tracking code in the source of your WordPress site.

Get the GoSquared for WordPress plugin now →

Widgets – share your stats with the world.

Getting a GoSquared Widget on your site.

In WordPress, go to the “Appearance” tab on the left menu bar,  then click on the “Widgets” sub-menu. From here, drag “GoSquared Online Visitors” from the Available Widgets section into the “Main Sidebar” box to the right, or any other widget area your theme uses.

Drag and drop. How easy is that?!

The initial, default, widgets are all oriented around the current visitor count for your site, though the possibilities are endless. The new GoSquared for WordPress plugin makes use of the GoSquared API so you can create any widget you like based on the GoSquared API.

If you’re interested in creating a new widget, take a look at our recent competition which is still currently running – build on top of the GoSquared API and bag yourself some free real-time web analytics.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what you’d like to see in future updates to the WordPress plugin so please get in touch with us at any time on Twitter, Facebook, GetSatisfaction, or via email.

Get the GoSquared for WordPress plugin now →

London Riots Map, based on Google Maps was created when the riots broke out to chart the London riots from a first person perspective by plotting tweets with the hashtag #londonriots that have an associated postcode. Cravify, a service for mapping events has also been used in a similar way.

We decided to put together a simple visualisation of how the events in London have unfolded – both in terms of web traffic that we monitored on GoSquared (we provide real-time web analytics after all – perfect for events like this), and from our first hand perspective being based in London.

Real-time monitoring proven useful again.

We reached out to Ben Fishman, soon after he created such a topical application. The challenge was on to map and analyse the audience and the interest in the app and the riots themselves. GoSquared’s real-time monitoring proved extremely useful in understanding how the worldwide audience were discovering and understanding the London riots as they were happening.

GoSquared is enablng the LondonRiotMap to get an in-depth and professional insight into a variety of information including:

• Referrers to the site.
• Search terms being used to reach the site.
• Tweets related to the riots.
• The locations of specific visitors and the time of day they were finding out about the riots.

GoSquared’s features have shown that in just the first evening there has been a huge international interest with over 26,000 web visitors from North America, Europe, East Asia and Australasia.

The GoSquared team has thankfully been largely unaffected by the riots in London and the rest of the UK this week. We wish the best of luck to everyone recovering from such a difficult week in the UK.

Please let us know if any stats or details are incorrect – we’ll do our best to fix them as soon as possible.

Try GoSquared now – free for 30 days!

Thanks,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor, Saul Cullen, Gerhard Lazu and Micky Blackburn (our new intern!)
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

GoSquared has always enabled you to understand what your visitors are doing on your site. Given that we show you who’s on your site right now, it’s always been tempting to “reach out” and assist people from the GoSquared dashboard.

Often you may notice visitors on your site who appear to be hitting pain points or who might be thinking about signing up to your site or service. And until now there’s been very little you could do other than make a note to improve it “for next time”.

All that changes today.

Start chatting to your visitors today.

GoSquared customers on the Plus plan and above can now pair GoSquared with one of the most popular live chat applications on the market, Olark.

By using GoSquared with Olark, no longer do you have to wait for your visitors to get in touch with you, or wait until you “improve it for next time”. Instead, you can now get in touch with your visitors – no waiting, no guessing.

You can actively monitor your visitors in GoSquared identifying those experiencing any issues. Perhaps someone has been on the checkout page for a prolonged period or maybe someone is erratically navigating support documents. Instead of sitting by helplessly and losing a sale or ending up with an unhappy customer, why not do something about it?

As a site owner, if you get in touch and provide the best help you can, with the right information they require, your visitors will have a great experience receiving on tap, proactive support and advice. By using GoSquared and Olark together you can effectively become a sales assistant in your online store, with the added understanding of what your visitors (and potential customers) may be looking for already.

Olark + GoSquared. Made for each other.

Olark live chat is part of our drive for site owners to act now, not tomorrow. Start using GoSquared with Olark and see for yourself.

Head over to the Olark site to grab yourself a 14 day free trial. Then follow their helpful setup instruction to start turning your site’s visitors into paying customers.

Once Olark is set up, a magic chat button will appear in the visitor details area of your GoSquared dashboard. Simply click this button to initiate a chat. Simple!

We really hope you enjoy this feature – it’s something we’ve wanted to do for months.

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor, Saul Cullen and Gerhard Lazu
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

We just pushed out another update to GoSquared – see the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and organisations that your visitors are browsing your site from.

This new functionality is available in 2 places – if you dive down into the details for an individual visitor, you can see which ISP or organisation that visitor is browsing from. In addition to this, in the new aggregated visitor metrics panel that we introduced in version 3.2, you can get a breakdown of the top ISPs and organisations right now.

How does this help me?

Ever wanted to know whether your competitors are keeping an eye on you? Now you can. Large companies often have their own networks named appropriately – for example visitors browsing on Microsoft’s network would show up as such – might be handy if you’re Apple.

Most people will not be working at a large company though, and if they’re visiting your site from home then you can still see which ISP they’re on. This can really help in identifying potential issues with speed and responsiveness that might be specific to certain internet connections in certain areas. Additionally, it can help you identify individuals with much more confidence, removing more of the guesswork about who is using your site.

We hope you like this new feature, and we have plenty more on the way.

Enjoy!

We’re often told that that our real-time data is analytical gold for the decision makers behind all kinds of online establishments; from personal portfolio sites right up to the busiest e-commerce enterprises. We pour all our passion, blood, sweat and tears into making our applications as useful, intuitive, and beautiful as possible, so you benefit from our continued efforts to make our data as insightful and actionable as possible.

But it gets better. We’ve opened the gates to our analytical gold mine, empowering developers with access to the same raw data that fuels our very own applications. With 3.2, we’ve announced the immediate availability of the new real-time GoSquared Live API.

Calling all developers!

We’re very excited about the possibilities. Using the API, you can write adaptive applications that display your sites’ traffic in any number of interesting ways. These could range from epic visualisations that boldly showcase your Ãœber development talent, to adaptive modules on your website that respond to traffic changes in real-time. The best part is, it’s all platform and language agnostic, so you can use the languages and tools you love.

Head on over to the developer documentation to check out what this baby can do.

Read on for details about our competition – win $150 of analytics by playing with our new API!

Example apps we’ve built with the GoSquared API.

(What we built in 2 days)

We couldn’t wait to have a play ourselves, so we’ve whipped up a couple of example applications to help inspire your creative flair and show you what’s possible with the API. We’ve created two applications:

Radar

The radar shows you a dynamic real-time representation of your users’ geographic location. Now you can view your websites’ traffic through the eyes of a James Bond villain. Sound effects not included.

Try Radar now →

Top Content

The top content widget tells you what content on your site is the most popular, right now and over time, enabling you to effectively and adaptively funnel your audience to your hottest content without even lifting a finger.

Try Top Content now →

Competition time.

The GoSquared API also facilitates seamless integration with 3rd party products and services, so platform developers can start integrating GoSquared analytics with their own systems.

I think this calls for a little competition. We’ll give away 6 months of the GoSquared Plus plan to the 3 most impressive applications built using the GoSquared API. One entry per person please (but of course you can make as many apps as you like!) To enter the competition, start working on your apps and give us a shout (and a link) via Twitter (@GoSquared) or leave a comment on this post.

So, what are you waiting for? Get to grips with the GoSquared API documentation now!

We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

A few weeks ago, GoSquared CEO James Gill (me), and CTO Geoff Wagstaff sat down to chat with Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch Europe. We discussed growing the business, our experience as young entrepreneurs, and life as a tech company in the heart of London, on the roof terrace at White Bear Yard.

Check it out!

P.S. GoSquared has some big competitors:

Exclusive outtake!

Here at GoSquared we know how important your website visitors are to you and your business. After all, any one of those anonymous people poking around your site could become a customer, a user, a client, or whatever is important to you. You just need to make sure you engage them correctly.

We go out of our way to make this as easy for you as possible. One of the best ways to improve the effectiveness of your online presence is to understand as much as possible about your audience on both a macro and micro scale. In 3.2 we bring you a whole new perspective to your visitors: aggregate stats. And of course, it’s real time.

New macro perspective – aggregated metrics.

This new section can be found under the “Visitors” tab in the 3rd column of LiveStats. It presents you with a ranked breakdown of the number of visitors online on your site, segmented by their country of origin, the language they speak (with regional variant), the browser they’re using, and platform they’re on. The lists are ranked by number of visitors making up each segment, so the most popular segments will be displayed at the top.

This overview is essential for gauging, at-a-glance, the nature of the audience you’ve got right now. It’s particularly ideal for making sense of the diverse traffic of large sites.

The insight is truly valuable for making informed decisions for your immediate actions. Running an ad campaign? Monitor the demographic return and tailor the campaign to the audience catching the most bait for maximum ROI. Getting international press attention? Prioritise the translation of your content by audience size by language. Seeing lots of IE users? Better get your site to work well in IE!

Tag visitors with information important to you.

We’re always trying to make sense of exactly how our own customers are using our applications, browsing our site, and importantly, creating accounts. We also understand that each site has its own collection of metrics that mean the most to them. That’s why we’ve improved the already data-dense visitors column with custom parameters.

You can now assign custom snippets of information to your visitors through a very simple API in the tracker. You can use these parameters to keep track of information that you would like to know about that visitor, for example how many times they logged in, the values of items purchased, how many cupcakes they like to eat – anything you need!

Restructured visitors area.

We thought long and hard about how we were displaying individual visitors in the GoSquared LiveStats interface. We’ve now made it even easier for you to dig deep into you website traffic and understand how people are using your site. The visitors column in LiveStats has been restructured so that all drilldowns and list traversing happens in the same column. This feels more natural than the disorientating panel shifts we had before, allowing you to browse your visitors and their information smoothly and effortlessly.

Learn more about the new features in GoSquared LiveStats 3.2 and see pricing information now.