If you’re running many sites it can be difficult to keep up with the stats for them all, logging in and out of so many different control panels to use things like Webalizer or AwStats.

Many people use Google Analytics to be able to have a single control center for their stats, but is this a good thing to do?  Sure, Google provides some great data and is much more user friendly than the control panel programs. The problem is that now Google can see all the sites you have in the account and they now know that these sites are from a single owner.

Many people believe that this is a big mistake, and you might be tipping your hand to them.

Move Over Google…

There is now a new, and also FREE, alternative to Google Analytics.  Blvd Status has launched their beta of Blvd Analytics at http://www.blvdstatus.com

I signed up a week ago and installed a small snip of code on one of my sites and its working great.

The stats it provides are thorough and the interface is very friendly.

You get the standard referrer information, the search keywords as well as the ranking of that keyword (awesome), the URLs visited on your site with the time on page and the bounce rate, “foot traffic” showing hits and unique visitors by day, week, month, etc as well as time of day.

One feature that looks promising is the conversion tracking. This is a page tracking conversion system. It will tell you where people came from and where they left. Basically it’s a click through rate tracker, but no actual sale conversions unless it’s your site and you can place the tracking script on a “thank you” page.

It can track matches by when a visitor hits a certain URL, a partial match on the URL, or even a certain parameter in a URL. These matches can be from the referring URL, the landing URL, or the outgoing URL. You can’t get this from your control panel stats program. Oh, and there is no additional code for this tracking. Just tell it what a conversion is for you. No, this won’t replace PPC tracking systems but it’s great for tracking natural search traffic.

Now you can quickly see your over all site stats and your “conversions” showing where they came from.

You can also see all your sites from within a single control panel all without the worry of a foot print or Google having your data. There’s no foot print as every site you install the stat tracking code to is assigned a different tracking ID. With the ID being per site, not per account, there should be no way that anyone can determine that any two sites using BLVD Stats are from the same owner.

I also heard that there will be a more feature filled version in the future, for a fee of course, but they say there will always be a free version available. And the current free version is pretty nice.

Give it a look: http://www.blvdstatus.com

Jonathan