Web Worker Daily

One of the big challenges of running a web site has always been figuring out how successful it is. For years, most of us did this by analyzing the information in web server logs using one of many statistical packages on the market. More recently, Google Analytics has captured a fair chunk of this business with its off-site analytical tools. But even after its recent redesign, the Google Analytics interface can be overwhelming and confusing, and some people are growing wary of shipping more and more of their data off to Google’s servers. Enter Reinvigorate, a new set of analytical tools initially aimed at the blogging market but suitable for any web site.

Reinvigorate takes the same approach as Google Analytics: you insert a few lines of JavaScript on each page you want to track, and visitors’ activity is then registered on the Reinvigorate servers as well as your own. They also supply WordPress and Drupal plug-ins to make installation simple on those platforms. As an added bonus, with minimal coding you can add “name-tagging,” associating unique identifiers from your user database (assuming that you have one) with records that Reinvigorate keeps, so that you can analyze patterns by actual user. After you deploy the modified version of your site, you can view statistics in real time on Reinvigorate’s web-based dashboard, which breaks things up into six major categories:

• Overview, which gives you a quick look at current and recent activity, as well as Reinvigorate configuration options.
• Traffic, which tracks visitors across hour, day, month, and year, and offers a variety of graphs and visualizations.
• Visitor Detail, which provides breakdowns of factors such as browser, platform, geographic location, and so on.
• Session, which shows you precisely what each visitor did on the site.
• Site & Path, which shows you how people navigated around the site.
• Search & Referrer, which covers where your traffic came from.

It’s all clearly presented and is generally a useful subset of what you get in the high-end analytics packages that try to wring every last drop of information from the data. I experienced a bit of slowness when navigating around the Reinvigorate site itself, but the JavaScript imposed no perceptible performance penalty on my own site. Reinvigorate is currently in beta; it took about a week from when I signed up until they sent me an invitation, but once you get in, you can use it for free to track any number of sites. There’s no hint of when or whether they’re planning to actually charge for this service in the future.

The lack of apparent business model is where I feel some caution with Reinvigorate. Though I do like their user interface better than that of Google Analytics, and it feels better suited for small sites (especially those that are not relentlessly focused on monetizing AdWords), I’d like to know more about the future before plunging in and depending on it. It’s also worth noting that there is currently no way to export data from Reinvigorate, so you can’t grab the summarized numbers to do further analysis in a spreadsheet or database. Still, for tracking a personal site this has definite promise.