It’s been about 2 months since we started our way down a path of some major upgrades and performance improvements. Starting tonight, we will be rolling out those changes. This is Phase 1 of a 2 phase migration. This first phase makes improvements to the speed of the tracking script along with some data integrity issues and reporting speed. Phase 2 will be taking our reports out of BETA by offering a new and improved dashboard.
There are some important items to consider with this Phase 1 migration. ALL users will be somehow effected.
1. Our original tracking script snippet will no longer be supported starting tomorrow. We notified users about 6 months ago that we were in the process of phasing it out, and to move to the new one. So, please login to your accounts and upgrade if this effects you. We will be sending out an email to all users we think will be effected as well. The snippet looks like this:
<script src=”http://www.blvdstatus.com/js/initBlvdJS.php” type=”text/javascript”></script>
2. “IN Depth” reporting will be deprecated. However, we will provide a link to allow you to access old stats through the “In Depth” reports. Since we are currently working on a new dashboard, it doesn’t make sense to spend the time necessary to re-write the reporting to interface with our new database design.
3. Signups will be turned off for a little bit (hopefully only 1 week) to allow us to watch the effects of this move with our current users. We will open registration back up once things are more stable.
So what’s part of the phase 2 migration? We have some great ideas for reports, a new widget for bloggers, advanced tracking for our keyword vitals report and more. We are excited that we have come this far, and are confident this migration will give us the foundation we need to support some really neat reports and tools in the coming months.
Please contact us with any questions you might have.
Thanks for your understanding and support in making BLVD such a cool movement.
We will be starting some maintenance shortly, with the purpose of speeding up all of the reports. As you know the dashboard and In-Depth reports have been in BETA for sometime. This upgrade will get us one step closer to bringing all the stats out of BETA. This move will not affect any tracking of data. Your sites will continue to receive and track data like normal.
If your site is affected, you will be redirected to a maintenance screen when you try to login to the user section.
We will provide an update once the maintenance for all of our domains has completed. Please check back or subscribe to our feed to receive these and other important updates.
We extremely excited to be announcing two new products that we feel are game changers in terms of how you can leverage analytical data to better understand your site and keywords. I will explain both products in detail and then go into how our company philosophy and direction has changed as well as other changes to the service as a whole.
KEYWORD VITALS: This is our flagship product and it is a marriage between keyword traffic reports and keyword ranking reports. It brings back the keywords that have brought traffic during the date range you set along with their visit count, conversion number, start rank, avg rank and current rank. Start rank is the rank that word had on the start date selected, avg rank is the rank throughout the date range, and current rank is your rank today. Current rank will be green if it is better and red if it is worse than start rank. What we do is frequently check the rankings of the keywords bringing you traffic. We record the data as well, so that you can have long term keyword placement tracking that is update live. You click on any of these metrics to reorganize the results from greatest to least and vice-versa.
Advanced Filters: There are many different ways to filter the report live to bring back the exact data you want to see. First access the “Advance Filters” by clicking on the “More Options” button. You can Filter by Visits which allows you to view only the words that have received a certain amount of traffic. If you want to see every word that brought at least 50 visits within your date range you can do so. You can Filter by Conversionwhich allows you to only bring back words that have lead to some sort of action tracked on the site. The conversions it tracks are those you have set up in your dashboard. Filter by Rank, this is my personal favorite you can bring back all words that rank above or below a certain position. So the first report you will probably want to run with this feature is all words in the Top 10. You can also view all words in the Top 20, all words ranked number 5 or better or all your number 1 rankings. It is awesome for seo’s and those that care about rankings. Custom Reports allows you to save any screen you are on, whether it is a filter by traffic or rank etc. you can save it if it is a common report you will want to run. After you save the filter as a custom report you can access it at anytime in “Custom Reports” section that shows up after clicking on more options.
Filter By Keyword or URL: Aside from the “More Options” section you can filter by clicking on the keywords listed and choose from 3 different filtering options. “Create Alert” us the first option which allows you to get alerted when that keyword moves up or down in Google… awesome I know. “Filter By Keyword” is the next option which allows you to bring back a list of every single keyword phrase that has brought you traffic that has that keyword included in it. If I want to see every variation of the word “SEO” that 97th Floor gets traffic from it will do that and bring back results like, “SEO Firm,” SEO Blog” etc…You can also “Filter by URL” which allows you to view every phrase that a particular URL has gotten traffic for. This is amazing for social media and blogging to prove the effectiveness of a viral campaign. I recently sent a report to a client that showed his viral piece received over 6,000 visitors in a month just from search from 2,997 different keywords. That is powerful proof of Social Media ROI.
You can also filter by keyword or URL in the Filter/Search Bar located directly above the report results. Simply type in the phrase or URL you want data on and hit return.
ALERTS: We have leveraged our analytic data to build an alerting system to notify you via email or Twitter when anything note worthy happens on your website. There are various scenarios to which you can be alerted, the idea is to set up preferences that watch your traffic and rankings for you, so don’t waste any unnecessary time. “Traffic Alerts” allows you to set up an alert based off of an influx in traffic. You can set the amount of traffic in a certain amount of time and if that occurs then you will be notified. “Referral Alerts” similar to Traffic Alerts in that it is based off of tracking visits within a time frame except this is particular to traffic from a specific domain. If you want to track your content on social sites, or blogs simply enter the url you want to watch along with traffic details and BLVD will do the rest. “Conversion Alerts” lets you be notified every time a specific conversion or opportunity occurs on your site. Choose from the conversions you set up and select when and where. This is a great way to stay on top of sales and to understand live what is working “now on your site. “Keyword Alerts” is one of the coolest features in the alert system, it allows you to be notified if your rankings for a specific keyword move up or down in Googles rankings.
Both features are available to all accounts. What has changed the most with our free accounts is you are now limited in how much you can track. If you exceed the free limit simply upgrade to one of our 3 monthly plans and unleash the full features on your site. See here for full pricing and traffic limits.
As mentioned above our philosophy has changed, we don’t look at ourselves as an analytics company; Omniture and Google have a handle on that. We are focused on leveraging analytical data and turning it into live digestable reports that inspire action. We want you to use our tools so you can know what you should do next on your site to increase your rankings and make more money. Please let us know what you think about the tools. We have put a lot of time into them. We will update next week via blog post about some more features coming soon.
Over the past couple months we have been working on a lot of changes. First and foremost making the stats load faster, which you’ve probably noticed. We have also been working behind the scenes with some of our friends and heavy users to make BLVD even better, unique, useful and innovative. Today we have a couple updates that are going to start a chain of all kinds of new features and updates coming in the next couple of weeks.
1.) Multiple domains under one login. We have now made it possible to manage multiple domains under one login. If you look on your main page after logging in there is an “Add New Domain to Track” link. Add in the URL info and make sure that new domain has the right custom BLVD script running on it.
2.) Login with your email address now. No more usernames. We feel most people are used to logging in with their personal or business email to websites. In order to make it easier on our users, rather than adding one more username they have to remember, we took away usernames altogether. If you had multiple accounts with the same email address, the site just chooses the oldest account and assigns any domains that were attached to the duplicate accounts to that oldest one.
So, if a you signed up as bob@bob.com three times (different usernames), the 2nd and 3rd accounts you created will be merged into the first . That means that you will use the password from the first account you created along with your email address, to access the dashboard.
For quite a few users, this shouldn’t be a problem at all. But, for anyone who doesn’t have their original password, they can use the password reset tool to change it.
*If you created multiple accounts under different emails contact us with your accounts and the emails you used, and the email you want to be the master account, and we will merge it manually for you.
*If you forgot which email you used to sign up and you can’t login please contact us for that as well.
3.) Add additional users to view your stats on a per-domain basis. You can now allow read-only access to another user for any domain you track, by clicking on the “Manage User Access” link on the “Account Info” page. If the user you grant access to ALREADY has a BLVD Status account, the password(s) you provide will have no effect on their login information. If they don’t have an account, one will be created for them and an email will be sent to them with their login information.
4.) New Tracking script. As part of making the stats load and run faster and to also enable new features we have a new bit of java script to paste into your site. Please update your script before July 1st 2009, as it will enable your account to be a part of the new features and better running stats. It is now available in the main login page. We will stop supporting the current tracking script on July 1st, 2009. We will send a couple reminders if we see that you still haven’t made the switch, to help you avoid any downtime.
5.) Updated Wordpress plugin. We have updated the wordpress plugin with the new script and we made it better as well. Again this is sweet if your site is solely or mostly built with Wordpress as running stats is as easy as uploading and activating our plugin. You can download it here.
Upcoming: We will be releasing a paid version of BLVD Status soon, rest assured we will not take away any features that are currently free, and all the above mentioned items will remain free. However we are very excited about the new paid features. We think they will be worth every penny and we will be posting here in the next few days or so asking for some existing users to beta test the new paid versions.
As always we strive to make BLVD Status a “for us by us” type analytics, we listen closely to our users and we love to hear feedback, suggestions or feature ideas. So please don’t hesitate to contact us on our form or via email (support at blvdstatus dot com), contact form or Twitter.
May 29th 2009 Update: We have upgraded to version 2.0 of our wordpress plugin. Everyone will need to upgrade to this plugin by July 1st, 2009 in order to continue tracking their script. The old BLVD Status code will be deprecated. This updated plugin supports the new tracking code.
Version 2.0 supports the new tracking code within your BLVD Status account. It also supports automatic version upgrades and notices within your WordPress Admin.
Upgrading the Version 2.0 is easy:
Delete any old the blvd-status.php file within your “wp-content/plugins” directory.
Simply download the plugin here, and upload the “blvd-status” folder into your wp-plugins directory
Activate the plugin
Click on “BLVD Status” in the “Settings” menu.
Copy and paste the new tracking code found within your BLVD Account after you login.*
*Make sure you paste the tracking code of the domain you are trying to track. Now that we support multiple accounts under one login, you need to make sure you select the domain in the drop-down menu, and then copy and paste the code.
If it doesn’t seem to be working:
Make sure the template you are using has the “wp_footer()” hook.
Make sure your server is running PHP 5.
We will continually be adding to this plugin, as more features become available!
If you have problems or ideas of how we could make this plugin more robust, please contact us.
One of our goals when creating the Beta features for BLVD Status was to make tracking out going clicks easy so you could track unconventional conversions like RSS subscribers and so on. I wanted to mention how to set up a specific micro conversion in about 45 seconds that will track which domains are sending the most people to your Twitter account. If you have a link similar to, “follow me on twitter” or anything like that on your blog that is an out going link. It is pointing to your Twitter URL and within a couple easy steps you can see which referrers send the most people to your Twitter page, whether they follow or not…well that’s up to you.
Step 1: Set Up New Conversion
You can do this from two different areas, either from the Main area right after you log in.
Or from the Dashboard by clicking on the Config Tab at the top of the Conversions Box.
Then Click on the “Add a New Campaign Button”
Step 2: Set the Specifics
Name the Campaign and select an icon to identify the conversion.
Then put in your Twitter URL exactly like you have it on your site. If you have it with the www. in front make sure you add that, if it is without make sure you do that too. EX: http://twitter.com/chrisbennett.
Then set the “Situation” to “Vistor Leaves a Page to Visit Specified URL”
Hit Create Campaign and you are done. Now you can see which referring domains and what content drives the most people to your Twitter account.
When you are done you should be able to track those clicking on your Twitter Account and what referrers are bringing those people like the screen shot below. You can do it live as the conversion happens or “All Time to see the total amount for the conversion.
For the most part we have received nothing but positive feedback on BLVD Status. But if there was one thing we get along the lines of constructive criticism is how slow the Stats can be at times. So we have been working hard over the last couple of months developing better ways to process data to speed things up. We feel confident that we have a solution and we want to roll that solution out as soon as possible.
So starting tonight at 8pm PST, we will be shutting down for maintenance and since part of this new roll out will be implementing a new database structure as well as new servers we are expecting to be down all of Tuesday and maybe even a little into Wed. All of your stats form the beginning of 2009 will be saved. However, NO stats will be tracked during this maintenance window.
So essentially, you won’t have stats from Monday night to Wed Morn. We know that sucks. But, we love stats as much as you do and this is the quickest way for us to get over to the new and hopefully lightening speed process. Once this change is live, we will have more stable and scalable stats where we shouldn’t have to do this sort of thing again.
*Also, starting April 1st, you will need to update the BLVD javascript snippet you have on your websites. The current tracking code will work for a while on the new system but, we will be providing a different code that will become your new permanent code that will make your stats even faster. So while your old Java Script will work it is encouraged that you move to the new code given you as soon as possible to benefit from the new processing. The old tracking script will no longer work starting April 1st.
This and some upcoming features are moving us one step closer to coming out of beta! We have a lot of really cool features in the mix, really cool integration stuff, and a public API on the way. We are very excited for the future.
As always please contact us about suggestions, wish lists or anything else, we do listen. You can also follow both Chris and Patrick on Twitter to get the latest updates on BLVD.
I just found out MC Hammer is quite the web entrepreneur, and he has a startup called Dance Jam. He is living and speaking in Silicon Valley at events and after I saw this video of him professing his love for analytics analytics, I couldn’t help but get stoked for the man.
We have been having problems with not receiving emails through our contact form. The issue should now be resolved. If you sent an email and haven’t heard a reply, please send your email again. Also, feel free to send an email directly to support[at]blvdstatus[dot]com.
