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!

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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:

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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!

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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.

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We’ve noticed some odd things happening to some of our stats, and it’s been brought to our attention that some of you, our customers, are experiencing similar issues. The problem pertains to pages with Facebook’s “Like” button or any of their other social plugins.

Quietly duplicating requests.

Under certain circumstances, a page with a Like button can register one extra pageview for every button you have on the page. This is undesirable, because if you run a site with, say, ten like buttons on the homepage, you’ll see eleven pageviews for each and every time someone actually views the page, not one. Obviously this is going to completely throw off all your tracked stats and analytics. Not good.

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What’s this? A new GoSquared Help Sheet? Hell yeah!

We’re pleased to bring you a brand new GoSquared Help Sheet for your Node.JS needs.

What’s Node.JS?

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know, but for those intrigued, Node.JS is an evented I/O framework for the V8 JavaScript engine. It’s ideal for writing scalable network programs such as web servers.

We’ve been working on some exciting things with Node.JS, and we felt it was only fair to share our knowledge in the form of an easy-to-read Help Sheet.

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GoSquared is proud to announce the release of our GoSquared for Magento plugin.

Users of Magento, one of the premiere ecommerce solutions on the web today, can now integrate the GoSquared Tracking Code (GSTC) at the click of a button by simply installing the GoSquared for Magento Plugin.

The plugin is available to download for free over on the official Magento site.

How does GoSquared help Magento users?

For ecommerce website owners, it is critical to know what’s happening on your store right now. With other services such as Google Analytics – you can gain great historical reports about what has happened, but you don’t know what’s happening right now.

On Magento, GoSquared can alert you immediately when you are experiencing a traffic spike, and enables you to find out what product pages are gaining most attention. GoSquared can enable you to find out why your traffic is spiking – has Oprah just tweeted about your new line of shoes? Has TechCrunch just linked to your new lineup of iPhone cases? GoSquared helps you find out, so you can engage with the current audience with the added knowledge of where they’re from and what they’re viewing.

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How have you found the first few weeks at GoSquared, Saul?

Hi all. Thanks for the welcome.

The first few weeks here have been great! Joining such a rapidly growing company as GoSquared, every day poses new challenges to get stuck into. There is never a dull moment!

The team here is great – we all make sure that if one is stuck, help is always at hand. We also make sure that while working hard, like all good companies, we play hard – a beer on a Friday is always a great end to the week!

What has caught your attention while working at GoSquared?

The thing that stands out most (apart from James’ dented MacBook) is the focus the team has on our awesome users!

Every decision we make is made based on what you guys want and the comments you make through feedback. Throughout each day we always ensure that time is set aside to discuss your feedback and look at ways of integrating your requests into GoSquared to allow you to make the most out of your websites.

So what’s your role?

Like in many small companies, it is important to be able to fill any role. So far I’ve been working on both development and business development tasks, but, who knows what I’ll be working on tomorrow!

We have some really cool ideas lined up and I’ll be working hard with the team to realise them.

Out of all of your tasks, what is your favourite?

I love working on the things that impact our users directly – whether that is A/B testing the website to improve usability or whether it is developing a new feature. If our users see it, I love being a part of it! It’s always great to hear the feedback on what we do.

When not working with the GoSquared team, what do you like to do?

I enjoy doing all sorts of things – running, music, reading and travelling – I love trying new things and going to new places.

Even when not in the office, I can usually be found reading up about new tech and thinking of how it can be used practically – It is really important to us here at GoSquared that we all know what is going on in the tech world around us so that we can use our knowledge to ensure that we are bringing our users the most up to date, cutting edge features.

Any final thoughts on working with us here at GoSquared?

I think we have a fantastic, tightly knit team here at GoSquared.

Geoff and JT are insane developers and it is awesome to see some of the things they are working on.

James is always thinking of you guys, our users, ensuring that we all put you first and make things as straightforward and easy as possible.

I hope that together with the existing team, I can help GoSquared to push boundaries and to explore new, exciting avenues. The possibilities of what we as a team can achieve are endless and I’m really excited to be a part of GoSquared. Watch this space!

Thanks for that Saul! Again, welcome to the team!

Back in September, we wrote about how we dramatically improved load times of the GSTC (GoSquared Tracking Code), the snippet of JavaScript you place on your site to enable GoSquared to track your traffic. We made it asynchronous, non-blocking, globally distributed, and reduced load times by 80%. Now we’re back with another update.

This time we’ve focused on the actual JavaScript executed by the GSTC. We’ve been through every line of code with a fine toothcomb and optimised it for blazingly fast execution, and we’ve made some real breakthroughs. We’ve now reduced the total script execution time from about 300ms to an average of 10ms. Yes, you heard that right. We’ve made our tracking script thirty times faster. In fact, in some browsers, the tracker is more than a hundred times faster than before. And no, this is not a late April Fools joke.

Besides that, we’ve also done some clever optimisation of our code to reduce the size of the tracking engine’s footprint. It wasn’t easy, as it was pretty small to begin with, but we’ve managed to make the tracking JavaScript file more than 25% smaller. That means 25% faster load time across the board. Add that to our crazy execution speed improvements, and this means that while our tracking code was very unobtrusive before, its impact on the performance on your site is now barely detectable.

And despite the fact that we’ve reduce the size of the tracking engine, we’ve actually gone and added more functionality. We’ve added in a few new functions to make it easier to integrate GoSquared into your site if you have a lot of JavaScript. Take a look over at the full documentation of these functions, and have a play around.

And the best part about all these changes? You don’t have to do a thing. The tracking code you put on your website is still exactly the same. So you’re already taking advantage of these performance improvements, and can start using the new functionality straight away.