ReadWriteWeb

After years of waiting, FeedBurner users can finally see their stats in Google Analytics. Google acquired FeedBurner in 2007. Since then, there has been a lot of grumbling about how Google handled the transition and the lack of innovation in FeedBurner since the acquisition. The integration with Google Analytics is still hidden and incomplete - right now you can only see feed item click data - but Google promises to slowly add more data in the coming weeks.

PostRank just launched a new analytics tool that promises to give publishers a better way to track the social engagement around their content across the web. To do so, PostRank Analytics, which costs $9 per month after a free 30-day trial, combines engagement metrics its already collects from social networks with traditional analytics data from Google Analytics. Given that the majority of engagement around a blog post now happens off-site and within an hour after a post goes up, PostRank's ability to give users a real-time view of how a story is being shared on multiple social networks can be quite useful.

In the old days, somebody running a business had a cadre of middle managers who aggregated data about the performance of different parts of the business. They would typically write monthly reports highlighting trends, issues, and exceptions. In a modern, web-enabled, web-centric business, this role is served by the online dashboards provided by various services. The challenge today is aggregating and integrating those services. I see this challenge in the real world from running ReadWriteWeb's business operations. This gap seems like a good start-up opportunity. Perhaps somebody is already filling it?

Google Analytics, Google's tool for generating detailed visitor stats for web sites, just launched an API, which will finally allow developers to create desktop and online tools that can use and mash up data from Google Analytics with other data on the Internet. This API will also allow developers to create mobile interfaces for Google Analytics for Android or the iPhone, for example.

Royal Pingdom, a site narrowly focused on tracking and providing solutions for server uptime-related issues, released a survey report today, claiming that a full 40% of top sites using Google Analytics are using a javascript tracking module (urchin.js) that might simply stop working later this year. According to the report, 50% of these top 10,000 sites use Google Analytics, and almost half of those are still using the old tracking code.

If you're a user of the analytics service SiteMeter, you will now see a better interface when you check your site's statistics. The site redesign provides a host of new features for users that could cause users of Google Analytics to do a double-take. Here's a closer look at what users can expect from the upgrades SiteMeter has made.

UPDATE: Turns out the new design wasn't so great after all. SiteMeter has implemented an immediate rollback to the old design!

Google Analytics may be free, but it is still based on proprietary technology - which means you only ever get reports on the things that Google thinks are necessary and some of those reports are aimed at people using Google's other services (managing campaigns on AdWords, for example). Further, using Google Analytics means that you're tied to Google's TOS. Enter Piwik, which aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It is closely affiliated with OpenX, the open source ad server alternative to Google Ad Manager [Ed: which we just started using on RWW].

Last week, Yahoo! purchased enterprise-level web analytics service provider IndexTools. Yesterday, Dennis Mortensen, COO of Index Tools, announced on his blog that Yahoo! would be setting the service free. The decision to offer a free analytics suite follows similar moves by Google and Microsoft. Google released Analytics (which we use here on ReadWriteWeb) in November 2005, drawing on software it acquired from Urchin and Adaptive Path, and Microsoft's adCenter Analytics is based on Deep Matrix, which it acquired in 2006.

Google announced a new feature for its web analytics product this week that illustrates well the potential in anonymous aggregate data analysis. This siloed product announcement points to an even more exciting future if data portability dreams come true.

Google Analytics Industry Benchmarking will let users opt-in to share and have access to aggregate traffic info for websites in their industry vertical and at other points in their supply chain. (See sample screenshot below.)