Friday, June 11, 2004
Sim City for Webmasters?
If you're a webmaster and a PC gamer as well, VisitorVille is the ultimate website traffic analysis tool out there. VisitorVille does a great job of doing what most traffic analysis tools do. It reports who visited what, for how long, where they clicked next, etc, etc, etc.
But the coolest part is that VisitorVille comes with a completely graphical display of a site's traffic, shown as a Sim City style city (or suburb, if your site isn't very popular). Visitors to your site are depicted in real-time, as little people moving about from building to building. Building height is determined by the page popularity, and the amount of lights on indicates the amount of visitors there "right now".
When a visitor moves from one page to another, he or she is depicted calling a taxi, getting in and riding to the new page (which graphically, is another building in the neighborhood). Arriving visitors are shown coming in by bus, and if that visitor found your page through a search engine, that bus will be shown with that search engine's logo on it!
The features of VisitorVille go much deeper, and include the usual traffic reports capabilities that one would expect from a quality traffic analysis tool, along with extras like the ability to watch what pages a particular visitor is viewing in real time, live chat with the visitors, and more.
VisitorVille makes something as boring as stats fun to watch! It's not cheap though. They no longer offer their $9.95 monthly subscription rate. The cheapest is $29.95us per month, with a 1000 visitor a day cap. Which is unfortunate, as it's too cost prohibitive to use on a site like www.LilGames.com, where the traffic levels are such that I'd have to pay upwards of $89.95 to $169.95 per month!
But the coolest part is that VisitorVille comes with a completely graphical display of a site's traffic, shown as a Sim City style city (or suburb, if your site isn't very popular). Visitors to your site are depicted in real-time, as little people moving about from building to building. Building height is determined by the page popularity, and the amount of lights on indicates the amount of visitors there "right now".
When a visitor moves from one page to another, he or she is depicted calling a taxi, getting in and riding to the new page (which graphically, is another building in the neighborhood). Arriving visitors are shown coming in by bus, and if that visitor found your page through a search engine, that bus will be shown with that search engine's logo on it!
The features of VisitorVille go much deeper, and include the usual traffic reports capabilities that one would expect from a quality traffic analysis tool, along with extras like the ability to watch what pages a particular visitor is viewing in real time, live chat with the visitors, and more.
VisitorVille makes something as boring as stats fun to watch! It's not cheap though. They no longer offer their $9.95 monthly subscription rate. The cheapest is $29.95us per month, with a 1000 visitor a day cap. Which is unfortunate, as it's too cost prohibitive to use on a site like www.LilGames.com, where the traffic levels are such that I'd have to pay upwards of $89.95 to $169.95 per month!
Comments:
Post a Comment
