website.net.nz

It’s always interesting having a look at your site stats. Who’s checking out your blog, what search words they’re using to find you, which pages are most popular which sites have links to you etc. etc.

There’s lots of packages around, I’ve used statcounter.com Google Analytics and many more besides. It’s fascinating stuff and can be used to continually improve the performance of your site. What they don’t give you however is the same kinds of stats for other people’s websites. Wouldn’t that be interesting.

You can pay lots of money for this information from the likes of Hitwise but there is one source of other people’s stats that I’ve found that is almost as good. It’s a bit limited but www.traceics.co.nz does exactly that.

Tracics is a free site stats application that makes the stats publicly available. So you can look at the site stats for the likes of http://www.nzdsl.co.nz/ including the last 20 keywords used to find the site. A lot of people are searching for “speed test” and “dsl speed” so if you’re writing a techy blog it might be worth doing a post a bout ADSL Speed and speed tests in New Zealand.

You can also see that their traffic has been steadily decreasing over the last year or so. I don’t know how useful that is but it sure is interesting.

The top site in the Tracics stable is www.nzpersonals.com which predictably enough gets their traffic from searches for “nz personals” of Another site that’s ranking quite highly is http://chrisnz.com which is all a bout “command and conquer 3 map install” and “skyline gt-r V spec II” whatever that is. The Health Connection Directory is mostly hit from searches for people’s names.

Interesting? It’s kinda voyeuristic I suppose.