I like Feedburner better than Google Analytics

I recently installed Feedburner's Site Stats tag onto this site. I also have Google Analytics which I installed last year when it was released. Both tools are free.

My typical behavior, pre-Site Stats, was to login every morning to Google Analytics to see how much traffic I received from the day before and where that traffic came from. My site is not overly complex - no ecommerce, no registration - so I rarely would dig deeper unless I was trying to figure out which page that a user clicked on or where they came from. The process would take me just 5-10 minutes and with the release of the new Google Analytics version this past summer, it was even easier because I created a custom dashboard.

I'm not even sure why I installed Feedburner's Site Stats. When I was checking my stats from my RSS feed, I guess I saw a link saying that I could upgrade to Site Stats for free. To be clear, I am cheap and anytime something is free, I figure it's at least worth checking out. More importantly, one of the purposes of this site is to constantly evaluate new tools available for marketing and analytics. I work for a marketing services company which sells a premium marketing analytics tool to large advertising agencies and corporate marketers. So, between the off-chance of spotting the link to upgrade free and my general curiosity for what's new in my industry, I installed the code onto this site. Here is what happened next...

I basically stopped logging into Google Analytics. It was not a conscious decision but between my need for only a minimal amount of data, the simpler interface, and the rush of real-time data, Feedburner met all my needs without any real complication. The most important part is that it met my core priority 1 needs: total traffic and source of traffic. The bonus is that the reporting interface is very simple (no baggage from trying to be analytics) and data is presented real-time (about 1-hour delay). Because of the real-time data, I usually end up checking my stats at the end of the day (and sometimes throughout) instead of in the morning which I did for GA. This is important because when I check in the morning, there is nothing I can do to affect yesterday's traffic (blog posts are only fresh on the day they are written), but when I check during the day, I can make tweaks and work my traffic much better. My traffic has really spiked since I implemented Feedburner's Site Stats - I can react to the day's events and traffic patterns to increase my traffic throughout the day.

I have not uninstalled Google Analytics because it provides a much greater depth of data for use if I want to analyze things later, but I do not need to use it everyday anymore - - which is great because site analytics tools have always been clunky and daily analysis, at least with my site numbers, is not really valid or needed anyway.

So for the average blogger, I would highly recommend Feedburner's Site Stats for daily use. If you need to track trends, conversions, sales, leads, etc. then you should definitely still use Google Analytics. The interesting thing is that Google owns Feedburner so I wonder how/if the integration between the two will happen. Also, when is Google going to integrate Adsense reporting into their reporting? That is the one outlying piece of data that would complete the picture and the hack they recommend only sorta works...