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.
Over the past few days, London has been under siege from multiple rioting mobs of hooligans and thugs. GoSquared (based in London) has been enabling a number of sites reporting on the situation to understand how events have been unfolding in real-time.
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.
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.
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.
We’ve recently been running into a recurring issue with AWS’ Elastic Load Balancing service. The problem manifests itself in vastly increased latency or eventual dropout of requests against the load balancer.
We verified the health of our instances in each availability zone, and concluded that it was not a problem at the instance level. Second, we confirmed that our DNS queries were being routed to the ELB correctly. They were. So the issue was at the ELB level.
As it turns out, there appears to have been/still is a bug where ELB will suddenly decide that there are no available instances in a particular availability zone, or at least it will have trouble connecting to instances in that particular zone. Even if the instances are perfectly fine, and pass all health checks.
The solution was to try to identify the suspect zone, and de-register that zone and all of its instances from the ELB. Once re-registering the zone & instances completed, the ELB was back up to full functionality again.
Hope this helps next time you run into any ELB issues!
P.S. We’re big fans of Amazon Web Services – if you haven’t already, check out our recent feature on the AWS Blog.
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.
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.
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!
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:
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.
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!
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!
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.
Today we’re pleased to announce GoSquared LiveStats 3.2. Despite only a single point update, this is a massive update, and we are very excited to finally share some information about what we’ve been working on recently.
90% of the work in 3.2 has been under the hood. It’s like we gave GoSquared a new engine, new suspension, new gearbox, and topped it off with a new set of wheels and a paint job.
The new GoSquared LiveStats makes use of some cutting edge technologies such as Node.JS which enables us to handle dramatically larger sites with more visitors without trading performance.
We’re continuing to evolve our platform built on top of the hugely popular and growing Amazon Web Services. We’ve done a lot of work that we hope you’ll never have to see or worry about so that we can scale up (and down) with the demands our customers put on us.
Our CTO, Geoff Wagstaff will be posting on the blog in the coming days discussing what’s improved in more detail. Stay tuned!
Chances are you may have heard that the EU is introducing a few changes to legislation around cookies and internet privacy. Not everyone, if anyone, fully understands the new laws coming into effect, but we thought it’d be wise to share what we know and understand so far.
The uncertainty around these laws has caused the UK to delay enforcement for a year to fully comply. There’s a very useful document (PDF) provided by the UK ICO that helps explain what is changing in plain English.
The new EU legislation was supposed to have been passed by all EU countries by 25th May 2011. The only countries to have responded so far are the UK, Denmark, and Estonia.
The UK has given site owners another year to get their sites in order before enforcing the cookie laws.
Enforcement of these laws in unlikely any time soon. However, as a precaution, it is encouraged that all sites review their policies on privacy and understand which cookies they are asking their visitors to store.
