Five Free Apps » analysis

3 Twitter Analytic Tools to Track and Analyze Your Twitter Statistics

Brian Mongold — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:20:15 +0000

Twitter is one of the most prominent social networking sites and continues to be widely used by bloggers, business owners, celebrities, techies, social networkers and just about anyone who has an internet connection and an excuse to use it these days. While so many have Twitter accounts, few know how effective their Twitter activity is.

My focus today is on providing you three excellent tools that will show you how often you’re tweeting, who you retweet the most, your twitter rank and score and ways you can improve your Twitter experience.

TweetStats – Twitter analytics is a tool to graph your Twitter stats. The different graphs consist of your Tweet Timeline, average tweets per day, replies, who you retweeted and much more information and statistics. Below you’ll find my @EazyCheezy TweetStats.

Twitter Grader – Twitter Grader is a very interesting tool. It calculates your rank, number of followers and individuals you are following and updates. You get a Grade out of 100. My Grade for @EazyCheezy is 97.4, not bad. You’ll also be able to see your tagcloud and garph your trends.

Twitalyzer 2.0 – Twitalyzer is great for businesses and users who are looking to improve their Twitter use. It’s also the closest Twitter tool I’ve found to Google Analytics. From your dashboard, you can get detailed information such as number of clicks for links you Tweet, context, goals, detailed recommendations, referrers and much more. From the main page, you can see scores in areas such as engagement, influence, generosity, clout, retweeted, referenced and many more categories.

Get In-Depth Demographic Information About Your Readers with Quantcast

Brian Mongold — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:11:33 +0000

When I began blogging about a year ago, I thought Google Analytics was all I needed to successfully track the statistics of my blog readers. I soon found Google Analytics is very valuable, but a bit limited in finding more information about your readers. This is where Quantcast comes into play. Quantcast is a free site that provides a ranking for each site and tracks general information such as page-views, visits, page-views per person and cookies. However, the value is in how Quantcast analyzes your specific audience. It tracks information such as age, children per household, education and income levels, male vs. female, business visits vs. home visits, businesses who access your site, etc.

I probably only visit Quantcast every few weeks, but learn something new about my visitors each time I visit. In fact, I just found something quite interesting! I’ve had 2,779 visits from Research in Motion (RIM), from 124 unique users. This is very cool! RIM is the developer of the BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry App World and is a very large and successful company. Since covering BlackBerry Apps is one of my priorities, this is a very intriguing.

Quantcast gives you the ability to embed various charts or even download all statistics into a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. I’ll cover a few of the charts below, which I have used printscreens to capture for your reference.

This chart provides information on your choice of daily, weekly or monthly visits and you can select the range and get an overall view or make it specific by segment, by gender, age, ethnicity, household income or by using a combination.

The chart below is perhaps the most informative! I get US demographics for my visitor’s gender, age, ethnicity, kids, income and educational levels. This chart is quite valuable if you’re looking to target to a specific audience and advertising.

The next chart shows you where visitors are accessing your site from, their business or home.

Most of this information for all the websites can be seen from the public view, but you can get even more in-depth information from your publisher view once you’re logged in. Quantcast also measures the top 1 million sites. Here is a printscreen of the top 25, along with information regarding the type of audience each site attracts. For example, Facebook is number 3 on the list and has “94M+ U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a more affluent, teen and young adult, very slightly female biased following.”

As you can see, Quantcast can be very useful to publishers and advertisers. If you are interested in getting your site quantified, you can start by visiting Quantcast and creating a free login. You can then generate a tag, copy and paste it onto your site, then have your site scanned.

January Traffic, Visitor & Content Analysis

Brian Mongold — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:30:00 +0000

If you’ve been following Eazy Cheezy, you probably know I love statistics and analyzing the various aspects of my traffic sources and visitors. In November, I published the 2008 Visitor & Traffic Analysis and will now be publishing a monthly post to fulfill my obsession with statistics and better analyze my weak spots.

Using data from Google Analytics, I’ve created graphs and charts to display my current statistics. It’s definitely helping me to get a better understanding of where my visitors are coming from, how many of them are returning, etc. I’ve used NCES free Graph Creator to create the following charts. Hope you enjoy.

Traffic Overview

Overall Traffic Sources – Overall, I believe the traffic results in January were satisfying, but there’s still plenty of room to improve and better balance my source of traffic. This first chart displays the 3 different categories that visitors used to get to the site. As you can see, I’m doing quite well with the referring sites (i.e. social networking, other sites, etc.), am happy to see my Direct Traffic (those going directly to my site, rather than clicking a link) increasing, but really still need to improve upon my search engine traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be a priority to help me improve the search engine visitors.

Top 10 Traffic Sources – Social Networking sites have been my primary source of traffic. In January alone, Stumbled Upon accounted for 53% of my overall traffic. As mentioned before, I really would love to see some other Search Engines listed in my Top 10.

Top 10 Social Networking Traffic Sources – As you can see, Stumbled Upon has blown away the competition yet again. I would love to see some improvements in Twitter and Facebook, but it’s good to see Delicious and a few other sites are bringing in some visits.

Visitor Overview
Visitors by Country – When I first began blogging, I really never realized just how connected the world really is. The fact is that in January alone, Eazy Cheezy had visitors from 134 different countries/territories. Now, I work to expand my focus to hopefully continue to increase my site visitors from countries outside the US. One important step was inserting a Language Translator to enable visitors from any country to read the content in their language. The US, Canada & UK have consistently been in the top 3, but the Philippines have jumped the charts as I saw 751 visitors from the Philippines in January.

Visitor Loyalty – Stumbled Upon brings in so much traffic, but it doesn’t always convert to return visitors. I had 36,942 one time visits, but it’s interesting that I had 101 visitors who returned between 101 – 200 times in the month of January alone. The goal will be to continue to try and push high quality content and hope that more one time visitors will become return visitors.

Content Overview
I personally think I’ve improved upon my content from when I began blogging in September. With that said, 6/10 of my most visited posts in January were published in 2008. The biggest traffic hit I’ve had in January has been 7 Free Sites to Watch Live Sporting Events, which has had a total of 14,359 views since being published on Jan 22nd. Below are the top 10 posts in January, based on page views.

Top 10 Traffic Posts (Date Published)
1. 50 Free Sites to Watch TV & Movies Online (Sep 23, 2008)
2. 7 Free Sites to Watch Live Sporting Events (Jan 22, 2009)
3. 30 Lessons Learned From a Newbie Blogger (Jan 01, 2009)
4. 10 Popular Sites – How They Once Looked (Nov 21, 2008)
5. 20 Free Music Sites You Should Know About (Oct 17, 2008)
6. 35+ Blackberry Resources (Dec 13, 2008)
7. 10 Questions with Mr. Dushyant Bhatia, CEO of Blogertize (Jan 08, 2009)
8. 20 Easy Ways to Change the World – Small Footprints (Jan 05, 2009)
9. Top 10 Popular Eazy Cheezy Posts in 2008 (Dec 24, 2008)
10. 5 Best Tools to Clean and Speed Up Your PC (Nov 28, 2008)

I hope you’ve enjoyed the analysis. I learn more and more about my traffic sources and visitors each time. I have some goals to better balance social networking, direct and search engine traffic. My biggest weakness is once again in the Search Engine department. SEO techniques can help with this, but I personally need to further my learning as I apply these various approaches.

Eazy Cheezy’s 2008 Traffic and Visitor Analysis

Brian Mongold — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:30:00 +0000

It’s Christmas Eve and for some reason I have statistics on my mind. I love statistics, whether it be in sports, politics, etc. Using Google Analytics, I’ve been analyzing this years traffic the last couple of hours to get a better understanding of where my visitors are coming from, how many are returning and traffic from social networking sites, search engines, etc.

I’ve recently posted my Top 10 Most popular Posts in 2008, but wanted to continue by displaying traffic results by utilizing graphical charts. I’ve been using NCES free Graph Creator.

Visitors
Visitors are very important to me. This first chart analyzes the top 10 Countries I’ve received the most traffic from. In all, I’ve had 232, 300 visitors from 178 different countries and territories. This is why I found it very important to install a Language Translator widget on my sidebar to ensure the usability.
Getting those to visit is only half the battle. How many of those visitors return and how many become loyal readers? I’d love to increase the number of returning visitors, but the best I can do is to try to continue to provide rich content. The most amazing stat to me is that I’ve had 150 visitors come back 51-100 times and 13 visitors who have returned 101-200 times. That’s amazing to me.Traffic
Visitors are extremely important, but it’s important to see how they are finding Eazy Cheezy. This first chart displays the 3 different categories visitors used to get to the site. As you can see, I’m doing quite well with the referring sites (i.e. social networking, other sites, etc.), but I’d love to improve my direct traffic (those going directly to my site, rather than clicking a link). I really need to improve the search engine traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be a priority within the next month or so to hopefully improve the search engine visitors.

Now that I’ve taken a look at the overall traffic, it’s time to dig into the top 10 specific traffic sources. As you can see, Stumbled Upon has given me almost 75% of my overall traffic. The direct traffic has also been great. I was pleasantly surprised to see some great traffic from a Turkish site, Bildirgec (987 hits) and ThePostmansCorner (452 hits).

This next chart displays the traffic received from the various search engines. Google has done quite well for me, but I’m quite disapointed with the other search engine results, primarily Yahoo and MSN.
The last thing I wanted to take an in depth look at was my Top 10 Social Networking sites that are giving me traffic. Stumbled Upon completely blew away Digg as you may have read in my Stumbled Upon vs. Digg Traffic Experiment. Surprises in the list included some sites I’d never registered for, such as Squidoo, Friendfeed, Live Journal and Plunk. I was also very surprised to see Facebook giving me 411 hits. My disapointment from the list was Twitter, which gave me just 53 hits.

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this post as much as I have. It will prove to be a great tool for me as I move forward with the site in 2009. A goal of mine in 2009 is to better balance out the referral traffic with the search engine and direct traffic. This could take significant work, but I’ll continue to make improvements. Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.

36 Free Security Tools – Anti-Spyware, Privacy, Antivirus, Firewalls & More

Brian Mongold — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:46:00 +0000

In today’s information age, if you don’t have defense to help prevent and fight against all the spyware, adware, viruses and countless other threats that exist, you are losing the battle. Fortunately, we can defend ourselves by using free programs.

I wanted to share some of the best free programs that are available to help keep spyware down, speed up your system, block those popups, keep the viruses away, etc. I have a computer security background, but am in no way an expert on these programs. I linked each program to its download.com downloading location since they are a reliable downloading source that will provide you with additional information, ratings, downloads, etc.

The listing below will hopefully provide enough options for both MAC & Windows users. Also, the extensive listing is to provide different options for you. I wouldn’t recommend downloading too many of these programs, since it would bog down your computer.

Anti-Spyware
1. Ad-Aware 2008 (Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista(32- and 64-bit)
Ad-Aware cleans your system by scanning your RAM, Registry and hard drives for known data-mining, advertising & tracking components.

2. HijackThis (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP)
HijackThis is a very handy program that scans your registry and files, then gives you a report. Rather than try to “fix” any programs yourself, you can copy the log file and post it in the HijackThis forum for assistance. They can tell you exactly what to remove. I’ve used this program on several occasions and love it.

3. Spybot – Search and Destroy (Windows 2000/XP/Vista)
Spybot finds and removes adware files from your computer and has the capability to clean Web-usage tracks from your system. If you are on the advanced side, you can use it to fix adware and malware-related inconsistencies in your Registry.

4. WindowsDefender
Windows Defender gives you protection against pop-ups, security threats from spyware, slow performance and other unwanted programs. It will find the spyware and remove it. Windows Defender gives you real-time protection and provides recommendations for actions to take against spyware.

5. SpywareBlaster (Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista )
SpywareBlaster prevents spyware from being installed by preventing the installation of ActiveX-based spyware, adware, dialers, browser hijackers, and other potentially unwanted programs. It also includes a System Snapshot feature, which lets you take a snapshot of your computer in its clean state that you can later revert back to if necessary.

6. Spyware Terminator (Windows 2000/XP/Vista )
Spyware Terminator gives you real-time and antivirus protection. Use it to remove spyware, adware, trojans, keyloggers, home page hijackers, and malware threats. It’s easy to use and doesn’t suck up too much of your system resources.

Privacy
7. CCleaner (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Another program I use on a regular basis, CCleaner is an excellent tool to remove your temporary files, history, cookies and many more unecessary stuff that slows down your computer as it builds. It will surprise you how much memory it frees up. It normally eliminates around 300MB to 500MB of space each time I run it.

8. KeyScrambler (Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
KeyScrambler is a free plug-in for your browser that helps to protects everything you type from both known and unknown keyloggers.

9. Eraser (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Eraser is an advanced security tool that lets you completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive. It works by overwriting it several times to effectively remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive.

10. Simple File Shredder (Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 Server)
Simple File Shredder securely deletes your files so they can’t be restored. The deleted file will exist in a recoverable state until it’s over-written with other data. Simple File Shredder overwrites your files with with random bytes before it’s deleted. If the file was ever restored using recovery software, it would be worthless.

11. Hotspot Shield (Mac OS X 10.4) | Hotspot Shield (Windows 2000/XP/Vista)
Hotspot Shield lets you maintain your anonymity and protect your privacy when accessing free wi-fi hotspots.

Encryption
12. AirSnare(Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server)
AirSnare is an intrusion detection system that monitors your wireless network. When you get any unfriendly addresses or requests, you’ll get an alert and you have the option to track it’s access to IP Addresses and Ports.

13. TruCrypt(MAC OS X 10.5 Leopard)
TrueCrypt helps protect your sensitive data by its open-source disk encryption software. You can encrypt an entire hard disk partition or a device, such as USB flash drive.

Anti-Virus
14. AVG (Windows 2000/XP/Vista )
AVG Free Edition Antivirus provides provides a high level of detection. It’s easy to use and is lean so it won’t slow your system down by its use. AVG Resident Shield provides real-time protection as files are opened and programs are run.

15. Avast (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista )
Avast is a lean antivirus program that doesn’t suck up all your computer’s resources. It takes care of your viruses and also provides live scanning as a first line of defense.

16. iAntiVirus (Mac OS X 10.5)
iAntiVirus protects against threats attempting to gain access to your Mac and personal information. You’ll get real-time protection and comprehensive system scanning to ensure your Mac remains safe and virus free.

17. Avira AntiVir (Windows 2000/XP/Vista )
Avira AntiVir is an easy to use antivirus that provides malware recognition of viruses, Trojans, backdoor programs, worms, etc. The Virus Guard gives you real-time monitoring.

Firewalls
18. ZoneAlarm (Windows 2000/XP/Vista)
ZoneAlarm is an easy to use firewall that allows you to configure outbound protection. ZoneAlarm works by giving you a pop-up alert and you can allow or deny the connection.

19. Ashampoo (Windows 2000/XP)
Ashampoo FireWall is a program that is lean and doesn’t suck up too much of your memory and resources. It is simple to setup and features a Configuration Assistant that helps guide you through each step of setting your firewall up. If you are a beginner, just select Easy Mode and it will walk you right through it.

20. Online Armor (Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Online Armor Firewall is mentioned as the “first free firewall to pass 100% of leak tests out of the box.” Online Armor is a powerful firewall that has several security features, but is also designed to be easy to use.

Firefox Plugins
21. McAfee Site Advisor for Firefox (Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Firefox 1.5)
McAfee Site Advisor is a tool that protects you from various web-based security threats, which include spyware, spam, adware, viruses, online fraud and identity theft, etc. When you are surfing the net, downloading or even registering online, Site Advisor provides safety ratings.

22. Flashblock (Windows XP/Vista, Firefox: 1.4.1 3.0a7) Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that blocks all Macromedia Flash content on a webpage from loading. If you wish to view a particular placeholder, you can click to view it.

23. WOT (Windows (all), Mozilla Firefox 1.5/2.0/3.0/3.)
WOT lets you see reliability of companies and websites and warn you before you interact with a harmful sites. As you search with Google, you will see a icons by each link; green to go, yellow to slow down, red to stop. You can easily customize the protection level to your way of surfing the Web.

24. Adblock Plus (Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista, Firefox 1.5, Thunderbird 1.5, SeaMonkey 1.0)
Adblock Plus elminates ads and banners. Right-click on a banner and choose Adblock from the context menu – the banner won’t be downloaded again. Or click Adblock Plus icon in the toolbar to see all elements of the page and block the banners.

Utilities
25. Smart Defrag (Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Disk fragmentation is generally main cause of slow and unstable computer performance. Smart Defrag helps defragment your hard drive most efficiently. Smart Defrag not only defragments computer deeply but optimizes disk performance. With ‘install it and forget it’ feature, Smart Defrag works automatically and quietly in the background on your PC, keeping your hard disk running at its speediest. Smart Defrag is complete free for home, organization, and business.

26. Glary Utilities (Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Glary Utilities is a collection of easy-to-use system tools and utilities to fix, speed up, maintain and protect your PC. You can clean junk files, invalid registry entries, traces of your internet activity and so many more tasks with this program.

27. Auslogics Disk Defrag (Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista/2008 Server)
Disk fragmentation leads to system slowdowns, PC crashes, slow startup and shutdown and sometimes to system failures. Auslogics Disk Defrag is designed for fast optimization of today’s modern hard disks. Get the maximum performance out of your expensive hardware investments.

28. Speedfan (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003)
Ever wanted to checkout your voltages, fan speeds and temperatures within your computers that have hardware monitor chips? Speedfan can do all this and more.

29. Auslogics Registry Defrag (Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Your registry is accessed by Microsoft Windows and many other programs hundreds of times per second. This leaves your registry fragmented and can slow your computer down. Auslogics Registry Defrag can speed your computer up by defragmenting your registry.

30. Recover Files (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Ever delete something you wish you could get back? Recover Files can undelete and recover deleted files after you’ve deleted them. Recover Files can get back files you have deleted from your recycle bin, drive, flash cards, portable devices, etc.

31. Process Explorer (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server)
Process Explorer gives you detailed information about processes your computer is running. You can see each processes memory statistics, security attributes, icon, etc.

32. Belarc Advisor (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Belarc Advisor is a handy tool that shows a profile of both installed software and hardware. You’ll see information such as Microsoft Hotfixes and software serial numbers

33. Abexo Free Registry Cleaner (Windows 98/Me/2000/XP)
Abexo Free Registry Cleaner can help make your computer faster by cleaning your Windows registry. You can backup, cleanup and defragment your registry with this tool.

34. Free IP Scanner (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Free IP scanner is a IP and port scanner that can help you monitor and manage your network. It works by pinging each IP address to check if it’s alive and can also resolve its hostname, scan ports, etc.

35. MSKeyViewer (Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
MSKeyViewer retrieves Microsoft product installation keys and service pack levels, then provides them in a listing for you. This can come in handy. If you ever need to reinstall software, chances are you don’t have the product keys. It supports quite a bit of different products.

36. Fresh Diagnose (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)
Fresh Diagnose works by analyzing and benchmarking your computer. It can handle many types of hardware, including CPUs, hard disks, video systems, and mainboards. This tool can help show you more information about your computer and components, detect or diagnose problems, and increase performance.

Do you have any great free utilities or programs you would like to share?

Stumbled vs. Digg Continued and Traffic Ranking Updates

Brian Mongold — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:30:00 +0000

I thought I’d provide a few updates on both the Stumbled vs. Digg Traffic and the Alexa and Technorati Traffic Rankings. Here are the previous entries: Alexa Traffic Update and Traffic With Stumbled Upon & Digg. I am not shooting for any particular rankings, but am more interested in the process and how quickly one can increase his/her rankings.

Alexa Rankings
Oct 2nd – 7,061,154
Oct 3rd – 4,130,697
Oct 7th – 3,098,288
Oct 18th – 1,133,260
Nov 4th – 284,626

Technorati Ranking
Oct 18th – 4,666,062
Nov 4th – 308,212

Stumbled vs. Digg Continues (Note: only Stumbled, Digg & Direct Traffic Listed)
Day 9 (Oct 20, 2008)
Traffic drops from 2,528 visits to 1,939
Overall – 1,765 visitors, 1,939 visits, 3,449 page views

Stumbled – 1,269 visits (65%)
Direct – 473 visits (24%)
Digg – 1 visit (0%)

Day 12 (Oct 23, 2008)
Traffic jumps from 1,939 visits to 9,784
Overall – 9,265 visitors, 9,784 visits, 16,554 page views

Stumbled – 7,834 visits (80%)
Direct – 1,659 visits (17%)
Digg – 4 visits (0%)

Day 15 (Oct 26, 2008)
Traffic stays steady, with less visitors but more page views
Overall – 8,831 visitors, 9,518 visits, 16,585 page views

Stumbled – 7,146 visits (75%)
Direct – 1,946 visits (20%)
Digg – 15 visits (0%)

Day 18 (Oct 29, 2008)
Traffic begins to decline from 9,518 to 6,829 visits
Overall – 6,829 visitors, 7,332 visits, 12,858 page views

Stumbled – 5,587 visits (76%)
Direct – 1,337 visits (18%)
Digg – 10 visits (0%)

Day 21 (Nov 2, 2008)
Traffic increases from 6,829 to 7,840 visits
Overall – 7,201 visitors, 7,840 visits, 14,355 page views

Stumbled – 5,786 visits (74%)
Direct – 1,574 visits (20%)
Digg – 6 visits (0%)