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’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.

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.

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.

Completely rewritten for speed, power, and flexibility.

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!

Custom parameters for visitors.

The visitor list isn’t dead. We’ve taken it to the next level.

We already help you understand your visitors better than anyone else – GoSquared makes it possible to see where individual visitors have been referred from, and dive into their current browsing session to see which pages they’re looking at and how long they’re spending on each page. We even give you all the information you need about the device they’re using so you can make informed decisions about their current situation.

Custom Parameters enables you to take any of the additional data you have about your user base, whether that be the customers on your ecommerce store, the fans of your blog, or the contributors of your wiki, and bring it right into GoSquared where you need it most. Understand the value of individual users, the loyalty of your top fans, and dedication of your top contributors when they’re on your site – right now.

It’s never been easier to understand and engage with your site’s audience.

Improved traffic alerts.

Our customers love the real-time traffic alerts we launched earlier this year.

Being notified immediately about traffic spikes and lulls is proving a life saving feature for all the sys admins out there. Not to mention the customer support teams who can spot issues quicker than ever. You can now to choose to be alerted via email to any email address you choose. Today, we’re also adding the ability to be notified via Twitter Direct Messages – so even if you’re on the go, you’ll be on top of your site whenever you have a Twitter client with you.

All new Live API.

Reforming the architecture of GoSquared meant we could rethink our API. The new Live API brings the power of GoSquared to everyone. LiveStats 3.2 is built on top of our new API so it’s mission critical not only to our community, but to ourselves. The new API enables you to pull all the information you can see in LiveStats 3.2 so the only limit is your imagination. Not only is it possible to build incredible native applications, or bring the same LiveStats tools to your own dashboards, but it’s also possible to start adjusting your site’s content in real-time.

Ever wanted to build a list of the content that’s popular on your site right this second? Do it with GoSquared. Want to promote today’s most popular products on your ecommerce store? Do it with GoSquared. The opportunities to adjust and improve your site’s content automatically are just getting started – and GoSquared is here to make it as easy and as fast as possible.

Learn more about the GoSquared API now.

Respond now. Not tomorrow.

We’ve been working on this release for months, and we’re really excited to hear what you think of it. We’ve been rolling 3.2 out to all of our customers in the last week, so go sign in right now and tell us what you think!

Enjoy,

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

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.

What are the new EU cookie laws?

• EU Directive 2009/136/EC requires prior consent for “storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored” – Articles 5(3) and 6(3).
• Article 29 WP Opinion 171 states that all data read from a device is protected (3.2.1.): “Article 5(3) requires obtaining informed consent to lawfully store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user.”

When do I need to start worrying about these new laws?

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.

How does GoSquared currently use cookies to provide real-time analytics?

We currently have very little dependence on cookies. GoSquared’s cookies are stored on the end user’s device as if they were created by the site that is using GoSquared itself.

The only reason GoSquared uses cookies is to identify each of your visitors as a unique visitor, and to determine whether they have been to your site before.

We do not use cookies to transfer data about individual visitors between multiple sites.

We do not use cookies to enable our customers to adapt content on their sites based on browsing patterns and history across other sites using GoSquared.

We do not share any analytical information that we collect with any third parties without prior consent.

We store all information on our secure servers hosted by Amazon Web Services. We backup all files securely and redundantly. We have strict internal policies on staff access to the analytical information we collect.

View GoSquared’s Privacy Policy.

How do the new laws affect GoSquared?

We’re still assessing how the changes to EU privacy law affect GoSquared’s ability to enable you to monitor your website’s traffic in real-time. We are confident that GoSquared will continue to be just as powerful, useful, and fun as you know it right now.

We do not rely on cookies to detect information about your site’s visitors – knowing which browser, which operating system, screen size, and the location of your visitors (and much more) is all possible whether cookies are present or not.

We are working on a number of different technologies behind the scenes right now, and our reliance on browser cookies is decreasing all the time.

What is GoSquared doing to help explain this complex issue to my site’s visitors?

We are working to provide you, our customers, with an easy-to-read set of text that you can copy and paste into your own sites to help explain what you are using GoSquared for. This text will explain how we use cookies, and how we store, process, and secure all information that we receive.

It is likely that you will need to actively notify your visitors about the cookies they need to accept. It is important to stress that if you are using other analytical services and advertising services, then you will need to notify your visitors of the cookies these services are using and relying on – they may be very different to GoSquared.

Previously, if a visitor’s browser was set to accept cookies then this was classed as “obtaining consent” from your visitors. However, we all know that isn’t really the case – there’s a lot of nasty services out there that store cookies on individuals’ machines for harmful or dishonest reasons, and a lot of internet users don’t realise this. That’s why the new laws state that you must obtain prior consent in one of a number of unsubtle ways:

• The UK ICO site has a PDF on how you can legitimately gain consent from your site’s visitors.
• The ICO site itself has an example of how you can ask for permission to store cookies (along the top).
• All Things D also has a notice that shows when you first visit (you may need to clear your cookies to see it) that clarifies which cookies are being used.

Have questions?

GoSquared is continuing to evaluate the various laws and directives from the EU Commission. We want your feedback on this, and we want to hear from you if you have any concerns. Please feel free to keep this discussion going with us on the blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, or send us an email.

View GoSquared’s Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

This stuff is tricky

Because it’s so tricky, and you’ve taken the time to read up on this, here’s a good recipe for some chocolate chip cookies.