Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Blog Tracker: Cost-Effective Traffic Monitoring For Weblogs

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Extreme_DM.gif

Extreme-DM is a live tracking service. It allows you to monitor in near real-time the traffic of visitors on your site, including which pages are being viewed, where visitors are coming from and much useful information about their demo- (from which country, domain, day of week and time) and technographics (what operating system, browser, screen resolution, number of colors they have).

Extreme-DM is a direct competitor to Hitbox though its service is much less sophisticated. Extreme-DM offers though a very low-cost service and a high-performance access to your stats.

Cost is only $5/month for up to 10,000 page views and scales up from there. Overall it costs less than half the price of an equivalent Hitbox and though the two services are not comparable in terms of features and facilities, Extreme-DM does provide a very useful, simple and extremely cost-effective service.

With the help of Robin Good's webmaster Mihai Alexandru Bocsaru I have been able to develop an automatic system whereby the Extreme-DM tracking code can be automatically integrated into each and every new post made by a weblog personal publishing system like Movable Type.

As I run a whole initiative with over 10 professional bloggers in it, this has been by far the best and most cost-effective solution to integrate effective live traffic monitoring onto their sites.

Extreme-DM, based in Amsterdam offers excellent, prompt and personal customer service helping each one client get up to speed in no time at all. Extreme-DM offers also a free version of its quality tracker which requires you only to display a small graphic logo on your pages. The free service is limited to track only one page but you can open multiple free accounts to track several key Web pages at no cost whatsoever.

Herald van den Hoek Ostende, the owner and principal of the company takes care of each one of his clients like kings and queens and I owe a bottle of wine for the kindness and promptness with which he has served me at any time of the day or night.

I have been personally using Extreme-DM since over three years and I have had only very little if nothing to complain about this service.

One much overlooked benefit fo the free tracker offered by Extreme-DM is that your traffic stats are made accessible to all of your site visitors. While for some this maybe a disclosure of information they would like to keep for themselves, it can also be seen as a sign of transparency and a truthful indicator of a site authority and following in its field.

If you want to monitor all of your site pages or even all of the articles/posts on your weblog you need only to pay $ 5/month for tracking an unlimited number of pages , as long as the total number of views for these pages does not exceed 10,000 in a month. Each additional 10,000 page views cost $ 3. To track all the pages on this very site (about 650 pages), which presently have more than 50,000 monthly page views would cost me $17/month.

Unique positive features:

Competitive section. This page allows you to see all of the pages of your site ranke according to number of visitors received today.

Fast and responsive. (Though not as much as it used to be.)

Easy to consult. Easy to navigate.

Light pages with simple and easy to understand bar graphics.

Reliable.

Cost-effective.

Great customer service.

And here some of Extreme-DM few quirks:

Opening multiple accounts
Since Extreme-DM works so well it is likely that if you, like me, manage, control or edit several Web sites, you may want to open more than one tracking account after you have discovered in first person how good the Extreme-DM service actually is. But the surprise comes when you try to pay and order for a new account. Unless you utilize a different credit card each time, the payment system will recognize the credit card you have used to open your first account and will amazingly acknowledge your attempt to spend more and willingly refuse to open a new Extreme-DM account for you.

Happily, the problem, which is evidently not accidental but apparently a planned defense system again too smart customers, can be easily solved by contacting directly Herald, Extreme-DM principal via e-mail and signalling him of your increased desire to do business with him. Contact:
mailto:info#extreme-dm.com
mailto:support#extreme-dm.com
(please replace the "#" signs with "@" signs).

iBills
Extreme-DM uses iBills, one of the largest and more capable payment processors and gateway system providing all of the infrastructure needed to verify and approve your credit card payment. iBills only fault is to be also the main provider of payment systems for porno sites. Image, reliability and confidence in whoever utilizes such a supplier are somehow diminished and the company (iBills) would do well to serve customers not operating in the pornographic industry by completely differentiating itself through another brand.

Overall I have no specifc quarries over iBills service, though in the past, and due to a subscription to a different service, I have had to spend quite some time before obtaining thorough and useful feedback from them. Personally, I would not use iBills, especially given the wide variety of options available on this front in the market (Share-it!, is a solution that I would be more than happy to recommend).

Archive of log traffic
Extreme-DM does not keep a detailed, historical archive of all traffic data. Extreme-DM summarizes all unique visitors over a weekly, monthly and yearly table but it is not possible to go to a specified date and see who and how many where the visitors on that specific day.

One Dream request
A feature allowing any non-public tracker to provide a public access link to any of its statistics pages should be seriously considered. I would certainly use it immediately. This is something lacking even from major tracking tools and something that in view of my views about credibility, transparency and authority could turn to be a definite plus.

In simple words I would like to have the option of allowing anyone of the Extreme-DM statistic pages monitoring the traffic on my site to be publicly accessible through a simple link I can display on my home page. The link should be freely selectable by the owner of the account in terms of look and text displayed. As said, this would provide trmendous boost to those who deserve it and further marketing promotion for Extreme-DM.

Best Opportunity Yet To Leverage
Create documentation and tutorials that would help the fast growing independent publishers, reporters, journalists and bloggers to easily integrate Extreme-DM code into their CMS (content management system) in a way that completely automates tracking code generation and placement inside each new article/page they publish.

As such a feature is not really and readily available through major blogging tools like Movable Type, Blogger and other blogging tools (if not in a very limited, would say "useless" way) Extreme-DM and other similar/competing services would find an extremely interested market and a fast growing demand for such additional service.

To see how much other people have liked Extreme-DM service check out:
http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/?kudo

See also my original review of Extreme-DM - 2001 -.

I am a happy customer and would want to personally recommend Extreme DM to anyone looking for a very cost-effective, reliable, performing and well designed basic traffic monitoring service.

Related articles:
Top Of The Class Live Tracking
Hitbox Customer Support Shines Only On Sign-Up
Online Traffic Monitoring and Analysis Service
Real time monitoring of users navigating through your site
Monitoring "live" your web site traffic
Monitoring your web traffic online - Part II log analysis tools
Real time monitoring of users navigating through your site

 
 
 
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posted by Robin Good on Wednesday, August 20 2003, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


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