Here’s a little sneak preview of some of the features coming out in our next release.

First, if you look at the sidebars of this site, you’ll see that we now have a Live Map widget.  This is rendered using a shortcode that looks like:

    [tallyopia widget='live_map' width='270' height='150']

It accepts all the regular flags for sizing and controlling the float style.  As with our live monitors, you can skin the maps using the menu under the + buttons.  We wanted to get this out there as we’ve had a few requests for it.

If you’re using the WordPress Admin Toolbar, you’ll see some new additions to it with the next Tallyopia release.  It looks something like this:

The Goals Reached number in green indicates how many goal pages have been reached in the past 24 hours.  Live Viewers is a count of how many people are viewing the site right now – this updates just like our live reports do.  And the Recent Activity sparkline shows you how many actions your visitors have done over the past hour; it updates every minute.  If you forget what these are, just hover your mouse over them for a tooltip.

(If you didn’t know, a sparkline is a small chart, usually without details such as axis labels, that’s designed to let you quickly understand a trend or spot a pattern.  They’re meant to be small and unobtrusive while still being informative.)

Because these update while your looking at the page, you’re free to look at other parts of your site and generally go about working normally.  If you see something interesting in the toolbar, you can click on it to be shown a more detailed report.  So the Goal Reached number takes you to the Goal Tracking report, the Live Viewers takes you to the Live Monitor, and the Recent Activity sparkline takes you to the Last 24 report.

In the next release of Tallyopia, we’re going to add Goal Tracking.  Goals are pages that you’d like visitors to see.  For example, they can be an important announcement, or a signup page, or the thank-you page reached after signing up.

To define a Goal, edit the page or post you’d like to make into a goal and check the Is this post a goal? checkbox found in the Tallyopia Goal box. If you don’t see a Tallyopia Goal box when editing a post or page, click “Screen Options” and make sure that “Tallyopia Goal’ is checked.

Now visits to this page will be considered conversions.  Tallyopia will track both the visit and how the visitor got here.  Unchecking this box will tell Tallyopia to stop treating this as a goal page, and to track the usual analytics only.

While some analytics platforms require you to define “conversion funnels”, Tallyopia takes a different view.  We’ll automatically identify the paths clients take to get here, and report those to you in the Goal Tracking report.

Now that we’ve mentioned the Goal Tracking report, here’s are a few screenshots of the report.  At the very top is the Goal Pages table.  It lists all the Goal Pages that have been visited, along with important statistics about them including when they were last visited, the average amount of time spent viewing each one, and how many actions each visitor took on your site before reaching the goal page.

In this example, you can see that people typically viewed about 2 pages before reaching the Plans page (2.9 actions including viewing the Plans page).  Actions to Goal that are close to 1 indicate viewing this page was  the first things people did when they reached your site; this is typically for what you’d see on a page that appears in search engine results or is used as a landing page for an advertisement campaign.

This table drives the other analytics in the Goal Pages report.  Clicking on an entry in it will show you more detailed analytics about that page.  By default, the entry with the most completions is automatically chosen when you first open the report.

Next to the Goal Pages table you’ll see a map of visitor locations.  Seeing a map of visitors can confirm that a geotargetted advertisement campaign is working as expected.  Maps can also let you know if one of your goal pages is particularly popular with a specific region.

Tallyopia will also automatically identify all the leadpages that lead to your goal page.  It will then compute statistics on each of those pages.  For pages that aren’t part of your site, it will identify referrers and keywords.  For pages that are part of your site, it will also compute conversion rates and related statistics.  The conversion rate for a leadpage is the number of times people viewing that page went to a goal page divided by the number of times the leadpage was viewed.  For example, if half of the people viewing a leadpage went on to view the goal page, the conversion rate would be 50%.

Tallyopia computes other statistics that help you identify how accurate that conversion rate is.  In the chart below (taken from the Goal Analysis report), we plot the conversion rate vs the standard deviation of that conversion rate to let you see how varied you can expect conversions to be.  If a leadpage’s statistics are deemed statistically significant, we plot them using a green circle and add their titles; red circles indicate that there’s not enough data to give the results statistical accuracy.  Here’s an example using Tallyopia’s data:

In this sample, the measurements for the pages titled “Tallyopia,” “Quick Start,” and “Plans” are relatively accurate.  The tooltip shown is for the page called “Analytics”, represented by one of the red circles.

(If you’re curious, we plot the sample mean vs sample variance.  The size of the circle is proportional to the variance of the sample mean; smaller circles indicate more accuracy.  For “statistical significance”, a result has to differ from the null hypothesis of 0% conversion rate with 95% confidence indicated by a z-Score greater than 2.)

We also include an analysis of the leadpages that are not on your site.  While we can’t track conversion rate data for them (since we can only track analytics on your site), we do track the keyword that were used on those sites to get to your goal page.  This is also especially helpful for running ad campaigns.  Sample table and chart are below.

The Goal Analysis report is going to be one of the more powerful reports that you can run with Tallyopia.  Identifying goal pages and tracking the most successful paths in reaching those goals is critical in running a successful website.  The Goal Analysis report can help you do this in a simple and effective way.

If you’re using the latest version of our plugin, you’ll see an Activity Bar at the bottom of the Live Monitor.  This shows the number of actions visitors have taken; it updates in real time along with the rest of the Live Monitor report.

It also includes an annotation showing you when you had the most activity.

The Activity Bar is pinned to the bottom of your screen.  As you scroll up and down, it remains in view.  This way you can always see it, regardless of which part of the Live Monitor you’re viewing.

This is available in the regular Live Monitor along with the NOC Live Monitor used for monitoring multiple websites simultaneously.

You’ll have access to it in the next Tallyopia update, which will be released within the next week.

Enjoy!

We launched the Tallyopia NOC (Network Operations Center) reports in January 2012.  These are a group of reports designed for monitoring multiple websites.  The first of these is the NOC Live Monitor that lets you see a special version of the Live Monitor report that shows you activity from all of the websites in your account.

You can get to this report by logging in to your Tallyopia.com profile and then choosing “Tallyopia NOC” from the menus on the left hand side.  Or you can just click here

The NOC Live Monitor has many of the same elements you see in the single-site Live Monitor, but we’ve added a few extras that are useful when monitoring multiple sites.  In addition to a new “Active Websites” table showing you the active sites, number of viewers currently on each site, and number of actions they’ve taken, we have added a third gauge showing the number of websites with active users.  You can still drill-down to a single viewer to see what he/she is doing.

As with the single-site Live Monitor, the NOC Live Monitor has a map showing you where your visitors are coming from.  You’ll also notice that this is a new map.  The map works very similarly to the previous version, but adds an “overview” map to show you where you are if you’ve zoomed in; click the plus sign in the bottom right corner to see it.

The NOC Live Monitor is the first of a series of NOC reports that we will be releasing.  We’d love to hear your feedback on it as well as any suggestions you have for similar NOC style reports useful for monitoring multiple sites.