I’ll admit it, I am much more interested in creating content and in reading and learning about new material than I am in digging around in the stats and analytic data associated with any of my Web sites. I know that’ll surprise some of you because I talk about the importance of being at least a closet “quant” so you know what’s popular on your site and what it tells you about your audience, but the fact is that I just don’t really enjoy digging into the arcane world of traffic and log file analysis applications. So I don’t.
But this still leaves me sporadically wondering how people are finding my site and what pages are most attractive to them. As a result, when I bumped into a reference for new startup service HitTail.com on my friend Chris Pirillo‘s “braintrust” mailing list, I was intrigued. A third party traffic analysis system that was inspired by Chris Anderson’s thought-provoking The Long Tail and was free?
Hey, what’s not to like?
So I signed up my busy Ask Dave Taylor Tech Support site, let ‘er rip for a week or two and slammed into the “beta” wall…

First off, I have to give you a sense of the traffic level of the Ask Dave Taylor site, because sometimes I watch it and am pretty amazed at how much data is zipping off that server 24×7. The site sees upwards of 25,000 page views every day representing at least 10,000 unique visitors. Looking at hits you get a fairly impressive rolling average of 12,500 hits/hour, 207 hits/minute, or, if you really want to go there, 3-5 hits per second. On a monthly basis, the site has well over 250,000 unique visitors.
But then again, I’m guessing with unique visitor counts because, well, you already know I’m not paying such close attention to these sort of analytics. I mean, really, does it matter whether I see 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 unique visitors in a given period of time?
Anyway, HitTail isn’t focused on helping me figure out unique visitors to a Web site, it’s focused on helping identify which search phrases are used by visitors and then analyzing them to identify the “long tail” results, rather than just the most popular. Of course, it does show you the most popular too, but that’s rather incidental to its purpose even if it’s likely some of the most interesting to its average user.
However, it’s still in beta, and it’s a real drag to learn that my site is too busy and generates too much data for their system to work and produce its recommendations for optimal “long tail” topics to focus on as the site grows.
When I log in, the traffic display itself works (and it’s a very attractive presentation at that):

You can see that the top ten searches only account for 3.4% of the 159,007 unique keywords collected (I disabled HitTail at that point since there’s no point in collecting more data when I can’t use their tool to analyze it) and are presented in red. The basic premise of HitTail is that it’s the other 96% of my traffic that I should be exploring, the green bars in the figure. Indeed, the actual page on HitTail scrolls down and down and down, showing thousands of popular keywords in reverse popularity.
The problem is, if I want to do any data analysis of their information at all, I hit the “beta wall” and am told that the system is “loading data…” until, finally, I just give up. The tab of greatest interest, of course, is Suggestions and when it worked, it was darn interesting!
I emailed the HitTail folk and asked them what was going on and here’s their explanation:

I’m looking forward to them working out the bugs since HitTail definitely seems cool and worth checking out, but meanwhile I am forcibly reminded of just how much beta software we all rely on to run our businesses and work in the brave new “Web 2.0” world.