Reinvigorate Ajax Web Statistics

Category internet, webmasters | Permalink | 5. May 2007

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A few days ago I received an invite to the beta version of the relaunched Reinvigorate. As I have written before, I’m currently using Google Analytics for tracking my site’s statistics.

Though I like Google Analytics, it leaves a lot to be desired in the interface department — while it looks cool, it doesn’t help when you’re trying to decipher the data in the graphs. And it’s not worth $30 to me to get a copy of Mint. However, stats are crucial to building a better site, so I decided to give Reinvigorate a try.

Installation

Installing Reinvigorate on your site is simple, you simply include a few lines of Javascript (such as <script type="text/javascript" src="http://include.reinvigorate.net/re_.js" mce_src="http://include.reinvigorate.net/re_.js"></script>) in your site’s body tag (for most sites, this is an easy cut-and-paste operation of the footer template).

Stat viewing

Reinvigorate draws graphs using an image generator instead of Flash, so it’s much faster than Analytics. One nice feature is that you can visualize a trend using a linear, parabolic, or polynomial graph. You can view pageviews, visitors, return visitors, and depth in hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly view, with a detailed breakdown of stats at the bottom of the page.

Visitor details

As with Google Analytics, you can view the most common browsers, platforms, screen sizes, and regions, but you can also look at individual visitor sessions, which contain lots of useful information for site owners.

You can view individual paths, entry/exit points, and the usual referrer data. Being able to view individual visitors’ browsing habits comes in handy when you’re designing site navigation and layout.

Information Design

While Reinvigorate excels at providing useful information not provided by Analytics, it fails at well-designed information graphics outside of the “Traffic” pane. Traffic is graphed beautifully, but there could be other types of graphs besides the usual Office-style pie graph in my opinion.

Conculsion

I think Reinvigorate has a lot of potential and a lot of innovative features. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, sign up and hope that you get invited to the beta program.

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