Minty Fresh Feeling

When originally creating the site, I felt that I wanted to see our little baby that is andablog.com grow.  I knew that until andablog had a decent following, a vast majority of blog visitors do not leave comments so I needed a analytics package so that I could assess what’s going on with my posts.  Was the post a ‘hit’ or a ‘dud’.
I wanted analytics, and lots of it.  I saw using andablog as practice, because at work I’m adding SEO and Ad Networks to my daily job duties.  So I’m going through a few analytics packages at a time, but for today I’d like to talk to everyone about Mint.

Shawn Inman’s Mint (available for $30/site) is a server based web analytics tool which tracks pages accessed, referral information, search trends in nice purty graphs. It is has a following of extensible “peppers” which allow you to track every from duration spent on a page, country origin, downloaded files, and many more.  In order for you to totally get a feel for how Mint operates, you can view andablog's Mint statistics.  Just be aware that at the moment our stats are not impressive.  But at the same time, as of today (Tuesday, Sept 25), the site will have officially went Live.

Since I’m just starting to watch my blog grow, the first Visits panel is what intrigues me more than anything.  It provides me with access to unique views and total views.  Also of interest are search terms used to find the site.  Right now my favorite search that someone searched for, and ended up here is: “how to become an exotic dancer”. 

I also find that Most Popular Pages, and Most Recent Referrers I tend to enjoy watching.  Mint allows me to aslo determine the usefulness of advertising and traffic widgets.  I can verify so far from that the Blogrush blogging widget (you can see it on the left hand side) has given me 1 new hit, not a lot - but expect to hear more about Blogrush soon.

Mint’s lowdown:

• Mint is a PHP application, which runs on an Apache Server which utilizes a javascript located on each of your webpages, to ping a webservice on a server to log a visit, what this means is realtime, live statistics.  It takes this information and stores it to a MySQL database.  This means I can see what’s going on at any time of the day and watch the popularity of pages change while in my underwear.  And let me tell you, even though it’s like watching paint dry…the effect of seeing increased traffic is like having some crack.

• Which leads me to my second point, Mint is addictive.  It’s worse than my recent Twitter obsession, I can’t help it…I’ll even have my laptop open on my coffee table while watching a movie with a wireless mouse hitting refresh every four or five minutes.
  

• Mint costs $30/site

• Very attractive, robust, and intuitive interface.  However it does sometimes has some browser refresh problem causing some data to run astray.

• Mint is also has a very simple installation and was one of the most painless things I've done in awhile.

In conclusion, Mint does a great job of leaving a minty fresh taste in my mouth all day long.  Is Mint the only analytics program I use? Unfortunately it's not, it's not perfect.  I’ll be back to talk more about the other items I'm using later.  

Till then, join me, in me watching my stats.

Tagged with: Analytics, andablog, Mint, Search, SEO, Shawn Inman