[This is an unsolicited, un-sponsored review of Gaug.es. No promotional money or incentives were offered.]

Why would you pay for analytics when Google Analytics is free? (RECENT: Alternatives to Google Analytics)

This little package gaug.es might just be one answer.

At $6 per month, I was skeptical, but kept coming back to the gaug.es dashboard during my free trial period and liking what I was seeing.

Here's the overview screen:

And the Top Pages screen can really show you a lot of information about your deep content. How many posts are actually getting traffic? Do you know what your highest, overall, traffic generating pages are? Which ones continue to get hits months or years after they've been written? Questions like these can lead you to some healthy content strategies about what to write next.

Standard Referrers, Search, and Browsers Stats

And the Current Visitors page. Now  has a map to pinpoint where your content is being consumed. This is again, more fun than useful, but that's part of the fascination with metrics. You can be obsessed by them, but opening GA is often a pain, and the internal WordPress plugin-type stats are often incomplete.

For my $6 a month, Gaug.es is a deal. And it got me thinking about the deeper content on my blog and how I can make the long tail SEO traffic work for me.

Go check it out for free: http://get.gaug.es/

Note: yes, I'm watching you on gaug.es right now. ;-)

@jmacofearth
Permalink: http://uber.la/2011/07/gauges/

UPDATE: And here's the pay off. I have a post that's starting to pick up some steam. It's about a recent hack on Twitter. It's fun to see the map light up with people.

This presentation is available for download from Slideshare.net.

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