One of the things that people are always surprised at after using an analytics suite for the first time, is how many visitors come from countries all over the world. Even a site that only receives a few dozen visitors per day may have visitors from 10-20 different countries! Beyond the novelty factor, knowing which countries your visitors are coming from, can help you to customize your services and/or content in order to better fit multicultural expectations. One thing to keep in mind when using myRT is to try to cross-check the “Countries” report with other reports such as “Domains” (often it is easy to figure out which domains are in other countries), “Referrals” (same as “Domains”) and “Search Engines” (look for popular search engines ending in different ‘dots’ such as google.ca for Canada) in order to pinpoint how exactly these international visitors to your site are finding you. From this data you should get a good idea of what your international visitors are interested in and adjust your site accordingly.

Recently, we launched our new Visit Widget website. The new site makes it easier than ever to find the right Visit Widget for your site, quickly install it and then start to show your visitors your data. As we’ve mentioned before, we are currently working on a new version of the myRT interface which will be followed by a new homepage design for myrt.auriq.com. Please take a look at our new visitwidget.com design and let us know what you think.

We just read through this great post about myRT as an alternative to Google Analytics and we’d thought we share it with you. We’ve always felt that the independence of our service - you can use our service on any site and with any combination of other site tools, including online advertising services - is a key reason to use myRT web analytics. Please take a look at the article and feel free to leave any comments here on this post.

The myRT web analytics and widget team will be attending Digital Hollywood this week in, you guessed it, Hollywood. In addition to tracking web pages, myRT can also be used to track rich content including Flash, video and audio, whether streaming, through downloads and/or podcasts. So if you’re planning on attending Digital Hollywood, or just want to learn more about how to use myRT’s features to track these types of web content, just leave a comment.

AuriQ Systems will be attending both Community Next on October 5th and 6th and the Widget Summit on October 15th and 16th. We’ll be there talking to and learning from other developers in the social media space. If you plan to attend just drop us a line at blog AT auriq.com and we’ll be happy to talk about both myRT Web Analytics and the Visit Widget line of tracking widgets. Looking forward to see you all over the next few weeks.

Today we (AuriQ Systems) are releasing our new World Visitors Map Widget. The World Visitors Map Widget is the latest in the line of Visit Widget site tracking widgets. Coming in a variety of colors and adjustable to just about any size, the World Visitors Map Widget is a great way for your users to interact with your site as well as with other visitors.

Here’s how it works: first, the World Visitors Map tracks and pinpoints the location of every visitor to your site, then these results are added up and show up on your map as both as both a color and a number (on mouseover) – the darker the color the more visitors you have from that country!
Now here is where the World Visitors Map Widget is really different (and better) than other map widgets – the World Visitors Map Widget allows you to see data by World, Continent and Country views. Users just need to click on the area they wish to see closer up, and a new map will appear. For certain countries (USA, China, Japan, UK – more to come soon) we even provide web analytics data by state/province. Views go both ways, so once users have drilled down to a smaller geographical area, they only need to click the up-arrow-button to see data from a larger area. Data starts to show up in just one hour, so choose a color, size and a place on your page, and start seeing and displaying where in the world your visitors are coming from!

After a final round of testing, we’re expecting to release a few new Flash widgets this week, including our new web analytics based map widget, as well as Flash versions of some of our previously released HTML Visit Widgets. Also, we are working on a Wordpress plugin/widget that we’ll release sometime in the next month or so. We are taking functionality requests for the Wordpress plugin, just leave a comment here or on the myRT forum. We’ll announce here when each new widget is released.

Last week we released the first of our Flash version Visit Widgets. The new web analytics widget is the Flash version of our previously released HTML widget “Popular Pages”. Features of the Flash version include an easy to resize form factor, fly-in links to your most popular pages and a “flashy” way for your users to get the widget. We plan on releasing Flash versions of our other widgets soon.

Website Magazine, one of the leading online and print magazines for website owners, recently published an article (text below) about some of the useful ways in which Visit Widgets can be used.

Tracking Widgets from AuriQ Systems

Looking for a new transparency tool for your website? Try Visit Widgets from AuriQ Systems, Inc. The free widget will track and post visitor information about your site including, Popular Pages, Top Visiting Countries, Top Referring Search Engines, Top Keywords and Top Referring Sites.

This is yet another way to engage site visitors. If you are confident in your traffic, it could be a nice way to show your site visitors where the conversation about your site is originating. In addition, it provides a nice snapshot every time you view your page as to where you are having success and where you need to get better - perhaps a good tool for your internal interests or for potential advertisers to get a sense of your site’s traffic patterns.

Today we’d like to share some helpful web analytics tips. When using the free myRT web analytics service, try to leverage some of these ideas, which should help increase your traffic:

Keep a close eye on your Search Keyword report. If a certain keyword(s) are bringing good traffic, increase the use of those keywords in the body of your site. If you see a new keyword, go to a site that has tag (keyword) clouds (Technorati is a good one) and type in the new keyword to see related keywords. Then add both the new keyword and the related keywords to your site.

The Entry Pages and Exit Pages reports in myRT will help you understand what pages attracted your visitors attention, and which pages are the exit points. This means that you should strengthen your entry pages to make them even more attractive (always try to work from a position of strength) and adjust your exit pages so that they turn your visitors back into your site and not to somewhere else (unless of course the purpose of the page is to send visitors somewhere else, such as a Links page!)

By using the “Pages by View Time”, “Session Length”, “Click Interval” and “Pages by Session” analytics reports inside myRT, you can get a strong picture of how engaged your visitors are with your site. If you have blog posts or articles, time yourself reading them. How long does it take to read them completely? If it takes you 3 minutes to read your own article, and your visitors are only spending an average of 1 minute on that page, obviously you’ve either got speed reading visitors or content that is not engaging enough to hold your visitors’ interest for the entire article. If you’re earning income off of your site, as we mentioned before, time spent on sites/pages is becoming increasingly important.