As Thomas comments, the only downside to Feedburner’s statistics are that they just weren’t as easy to install as they should have been – so he remedied the problem.

Very cool.

Feedburner’s Standard Stats, free for Feedburner publishers, are a very nice basic statistics package. Easy navigation, nice graphical representations of your visitors and clickthroughs – all the information you need to know to do some basic monitoring of your blog’s success. Well worth checking out – and now a little bit easier.

At any rate, I’ve just implemented these statistics, and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of information I learn about this site.

I know one thing: I’ll get better statistics if I write more articles. Recently has not been my most heavy writing period…

There are no automatic benefits to Sitemaps – this isn’t the infamous mass search engine submission of the late ’90’s. If you create a Sitemap and tell a search engine about it, they’ll happily crawl it. They’ll eagerly learn what you want to tell them about your site: what pages you consider most important, how frequently that page might be updated and when it was most recently updated. Having learned this, they might weight that factor in consider what pages to crawl and when. And, although I can’t say this with any authority, they won’t add your site to the Google Index just because you’ve submitted a Sitemap.

The Sitemap is more for you and your business than it is for Google. If you take a few minutes to look at the information that Google will give you about your site you can learn incredibly valuable information for your business.

What information can you learn from Google Sitemaps?

1. Crawl Data.

   When was your site last visited? Does your site have pages included in Google’s Index? What kind of errors has the Googlebox found? Talk about troubleshooting – has your traffic dropped abruptly? Well, maybe you should log in to Sitemaps and see what’s up. They might even tell you whether you’ve violated their guidelines – in which case you can immediately correct the problem and beg forgivenessrequest reinclusion.

   Maybe you’ve caused the problem yourself: have you blocked Google from your site using your Robots.txt file? Whoops! Google will tell you, and even allow you to actively test different versions of robots.txt so you can determine what you need to change.

2. Query Statistics.

   A search marketing campaign lives and fights on a diet of statistics. All of these statistics tell you valuable information: and Google is willing to provide you with a handful of very valuable information through the Webmaster Central console. If you’re interested in PageRank, for example, you can see how PageRank is distributed amongst your pages. And if you think that the trifold distribution graphs are too simplistic: well, PageRank is already a simplified system. Don’t worry about it.

   More importantly, you’ve got access to Query stats. What could possibly be more valuable than information from Google explicitly telling you a) what search terms have brought your site into the search results, b) what rank in the search results pages you had for that term, c) what search terms actually brought traffic to your site and d) what position in search results pages you had for those terms.

   Maybe you don’t know how these could be useful: but this is some of the most valuable information you’ll find anywhere. You’ll learn what terms are going to show your site; and you’ll learn what terms will actually bring traffic. You can download this information in a variety of formats and track it to keep a very close look on your site’s behavior. This can easily be the first indicator you’ll have that something is changing in your site’s indexing and ranking.

3. Page Analysis

   You can easily find out what the most common words are in your site. Google tells you this; but there are many other ways of getting that informations. It is, however, much more difficult to learn what the most common words appear in the text of links pointing to your site. Google will supply that information. At the moment, at least, they aren’t giving rich statistics: just a list in no obvious order which states the most common terms found. Nonetheless, if you’re not finding a good match between common link texts and your site’s content, you might need to think about how to build more valuable links. It’s information, and you can use it.

But this is just a sample of what’s available from Google Webmaster Central: setting the speed with which your site will be crawled by Googlebot, choosing your domain suffix preference (www or non-www), joining the enhanced image search program: all possibilities from Webmaster Central. The service is changing rapidly – to follow Sitemaps updates you’ll want to stay tuned to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, where Vanessa Fox and her team provide news covering uses of Webmaster Central as well as new features and processes they’re offering.

Although it is, essentially, a fairly simple interface for tracking competitive information which is easily available, the ability to push all that information together is certainly a worthwhile service. From a consultant’s perspective, it’s worthwhile because you can create multiple projects to track: keep your eyes on each client’s area at a glance.

Naturally, my first thought is about adding more features: for example, tracking ranking reports using your selected keyword list and checking against your competitors’ ranking. I know, I know…ranking reports are practically worthless. However, knowing how your own search performance holds up against your competitors’ is still valuable: and this would be a relatively easily automated tracking tool.

It’s interesting: I know perfectly well that Alexa data is practically worthless by itself. However, between a set of sites all in the same market (say…competitors), the relative performance data may still convey some usable information. It’s not the numbers you need to look at: it’s the relationships.

Web site traffic statistics are famously variable in interpretation. Since no traffic service has a handle on the actual statistics for all website traffic, the numbers are usually based on particularly selective data sets. Rand Fishkin gave his detailed report yesterday on Alexa and Hitwise data, comparing them to the data provided through Feedburner and Indextools. The numbers tell it all – different statistics services provide vastly different data.

Imagine that all the webdev category sites receive 9 million uniques per day.

Pimpyourpro.com – 9 mil x 2.07% = 186,300 visitors per day

SEOmoz.org – 9 mil x 0.01% = 900 visitors per day

In reality it should be something like:

SEOmoz.org – 9 mil x 0.085% = 7650 visitors per day

7650 visitors a day is based on SEOmoz’s real visitor traffic. The other data is based on percentage of traffic as reported by Hitwise – see a problem?

So, given that the easily available data is, for practical purposes, only usable as a very general guideline, what kind of data should you actually report to your clients?
Recently, this question was asked at Cre8asiteForums. The answers vary – but the essential focus is that the only meaningful statistics to report must be based on the site’s business goals.

1. Focus reporting on specific metrics: income earned, referrals, registrations, whatever is considered a success for your site’s conversions.
2. Establish objectives for the campaign. The more specific the goal the better – and be realistic.
3. Don’t depend on any statistic that you need to convince your client is relevant. If they don’t understand that tracking campaign revenue is relevant, it may be that you don’t want to be working with them!
4. Identify the characteristics of a successful conversion. Differentiate between visitors who purchase the product and those who don’t. Determine everything you can which is different about these two key groups of visitors.

Pure traffic has some place in reporting – even if the traffic isn’t converting, a lot of traffic means greater exposure for your web business. But pure traffic numbers shouldn’t be the highlight of your statistics analysis. It’s worth mentioning any increase, but the bottom line is not directly related to visitors – it’s all about sales.

Read the report yourself, then decide whether Google has actually lost "market share" – and, more importantly, whether it even matters!

Do not put faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.

William W. Watt quoted in "Medical Statistics: A Guide to Data Analysis and Critical Appraisal" by Jennifer Peat and Belinda Barton

AOL has now removed the database and apologized for the error of judgement which allowed this information to become public, this does little to relieve the concerns for the privacy of those whose searches were released.

Although the usernames have been anonymized and replaced with numeric sequences, these sequences still provide a track for the searches of a single user – which can easily provide everything necessary to make a personal identification. Many people, for example, perform vanity searches – if you observe that somebody has made a large number of searches for a particular name, this may mean they are actually that person. It also may mean that they know this person; or that they are stalking this person. Either way, this is a serious privacy concern!

In fact, some bloggers (prior to AOL’s removal of the dataset) already identified some rather disconcerting query groups. Can any law enforcement body conceivably let this issue go without attempting to gain access to the information? The public availability of information this alarming may greatly weaken the court’s resistance to the Department of Justice’s requests for private data. Although the courts have generally been supportive of privacy, this information could very easily sway a judge.

There’s a lot more information on this issue covered around the web:

• Adam D’Angelo
• Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Watch
• John Battelle
• News.com

Of course, their 5.8% of searches for April of 2006 is still 382,800,000 searches. But out of the 6.35 billion searches performed in March, they had accrued 387,350,000. Hopefully, their second run at TV advertising will be more successful.

I have mixed feelings about Ask.com – the fact is, I almost never use them. They’ve got some great services – take their mapping service. I love the way it works – I enjoy using it when I think of it, and it has features which are near and dear to my heart – like walking directions. Yet, it’s never the first thing that comes to my mind when I’m looking for a map.

Why is this? Certainly, the tv commercials have no impact on me at all – I rarely watch television, and have never seen any of their commercials. On the other hand, I’ve looked at their materials in depth and compared them to others – I know what they offer, I know what I like about it – yet, I turn to Google.

I know that the answer is ultimately force of habit. Google started off with an easy to use, simple, straightforward product. They’ve added much more complex features to it since then, yet I react as if they were still the small company whose product I used when they were a hopeful startup. Ask, on the other hand, began as a question answering service which gradually morphed into their current rich search offering. But a question answering service never bore any interest for me – so the habits I developed were with Google.

This same logic holds true with both MSN and Yahoo for me – I don’t use them because they started as parts of complex structures. Web directories, extra offerings, free email, customizable homepages – I wasn’t interested in any of these. I just wanted to search the web and retrieve a useful result.

Perhaps this is an important thing to note when starting a business – it’s easier to create one simple product well than develop dozens and try and compete. Is this where Google may go wrong now? I wonder. Looking at information such as the Hitwise data on Google’s domains I can’t help but notice that only five of their top products make up greater than 0.5% of their business. Does this mean that Search is keeping them successful, or does it mean that their other projects are dragging them down?

Since they continue to gain in overall market share, it’s hard to believe that their harming themselves today – but the long run is always a hard call.