We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here’s What We Learned.
Scout, our server monitoring service, has grown quite a bit in 2009.
2 min read
Jan 13, 2008
Tracking the results of your blatant self-promotion campaign can be a time-consuming effort. You might be using Google Analytics for web traffic and FeedBurner for blog subscribers. You’re probably checking link referrals. You’re querying the database for usage statistics (user signups, logins, etc.), etc.
Scout is an honest friend that gives it to you straight. Our friendly retriever will track, mash, and graph all of this data in real-time.
For example, below is a graph generated by Scout. It shows the FeedBurner circulation of this blog (in red) vs. unique visits from Google Analytics on our Highgroove homepage (in blue):
It doesn’t look like there’s a huge correlation there. What about unique visitors on PlaceShout (in red) vs. unique visitors on our Highgroove site (in blue)? Data via Google Analytics:
There’s a correlation there. Traffic to PlaceShout appears to drives traffic to Highgroove.
Currently, 3 Scout Plugins exist for grabbing external data:
Seeing this data is extremely useful for answering questions that take quite a bit of work to find out manually (and can’t be updated in real-time):
How many of our unique visitors create a shoutout on PlaceShout?
As the number of sites linking to us increases, how does this impact traffic on our site?
How is traffic impacted when we publish our email newsletter?
The great thing about these reports is they don’t require any updates – Scout continually grabs new data and updates the graph.
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I’d like to create a plugin to report back the number of people linking to a url on del.icio.us, but haven’t had time yet. Want to create this plugin? Let me know here!
Scout, our server monitoring service, has grown quite a bit in 2009.
It hurts - it feels like giving up. You’re stuck on a problem and do the last thing that makes sense - stop thinking...
Andre, Charles, and myself leave for RailsConf Thursday.