Analytics App Makes Me OCD. I like it.

In the few short months I've been involved with TapCritic, I've felt in myself a fever and a fervor not yet known.  I enjoy writing reviews.  I like to talk to app developers, and I love geeking out about iPhone news with my fellow TapCritic-ers.  

But more than all of that, I love obsessing over analytics.  I love to know how many people are hitting our site, how they got there, and what country or state they are in.  I love seeing how many pages people look at, which articles are most popular, and what google searches brought them into our modest domain.

Google Analytics is amazing.  And the Analytics App, by Inblosam lets me take that power...that knowledge...that obsession with me 24/7.

If you don't know what Google Analytics is, here is the short version.  It is a way to track, graph, and access information about visits to your site.  It consists of a customizable dashboard as well as a number of customizable segments and reports to look at almost any information you can think of.  It's great, so the challenge for the Analytics App was to translate this to the unique interface that is the iPhone.  Does it succeed?  For the most part.

Setting up the app to link with your google account is easy.  Once you put in your name and password, the app dials in and gives you access to all your websites and personal settings.  It even pulls in your specific "Dashboard" configuration.

Click on dashboard and you will see all your at-a-glance information, from visits and absolute unique visitors to bounce rate and connection speed.  On the home screen, you can also easily change the date range for this and all reports.  

A few small problems become clear right away, though. First, the app does not offer the interactivity of the web version.  You cannot hover over dots to find information about specific days...which is something I love about Google's version.  You also can't click on a statistic to be taken to that statistic's specific report.  Instead, the charts and graphs and lists  are static.  I understand that there were limitations as to how you can access Google Analytics to provide this interactivity, but would love to see these features included in a later version.

Also on the "problems" list is the fact that the dashboard does not include graphs of some personalized dashboard preferences.  Instead, you just get an empty chart.  The text information is still there, but the chart doesn't show trending.

The app, though, does have some great added features, the coolest of which is the "today" button.  If you click "today" for any of your sites, the app automatically generates a report that gives you all the basic dashboard information for the current day.  To do this in google, you have to manually change the date.  This is actually easier and more useful as I am almost always checking this app to see if a certain article is doing well for the day.

And while the app does not have the interactive list of menus and reports that Google Analytics has, there is a list of most of the reports on the home screen, including everything from "content" to "visitor loyalty" and "destination pages."  It might not be as interactive or neat, but almost all of it is there.

This app is pricey at $5.99.  Is it worth it?  Most definitely--if you have a serious site whose progress you need to constantly track.  I would like to see a little more interactivity and a slightly more spiffy design, but the basic app is good enough to warrant spending a few bucks.  Think of it as an investment, and write it off as a business expense.  

Be careful, though.  It could ruin your life if you aren't careful.  But that's...another story.

Buy Analytics App HERE.

Comments

[squarerhino]

one of my top 5 for sure