I was fortunate recently to get an invitation to the beta test of reinvigorate.net, a new player in the field of website metrics.

Google Analytics is a great package, but it is designed for commercial sites. The emphasis is on measuring conversions, that is, actions like completing a sale. As such, Google Analytics does not emphasize real-time results. The owner of an online store will review the stats for the day before.

Bloggers are often more interested in real-time activity. Conversions also don't factor in so much. reinvigorate seems to position itself for that audience.

Here is a capture of the overview screen:

Right from the start, reinvigorate focuses on what is happening right this moment on your site.

Traffic numbers are kept up to date by the minute:

Interestingly, on the traffic page, the first chart is page views, not visitors. For advertisers, that is really what matters (each page view is an opportunity to make a sale). Bloggers who focus on just the number of visitors might be missing out on improving their page views. Many analytics packages give visitor statistics first, and that reinforces that focus on visitors over pageviews in the mind of the blogger.

A nice touch: showing the traffic for the same hour 24 hours earlier.

Detailed activity information is pretty detailed. Path information, time spent on page, IP addresses, browser, operating system -- all very useful and nicely presented:

Notice the first visit on this page shows a person spent 2 minutes and 10 seconds on one page. This is important because the technology used by many systems cannot provide time on page when only one page is visited. If the reader hits your page and then exits without visiting another page on the site, the time of the visit reads as zero. For bloggers, this is particularly irritating, because a large number of visiters will hit exactly one page via a link from another blog or from an RSS feed. With so many visits reading zero time at the site, time on page or average time per visit is hopelessly skewed.

With reinvigorate, I've started paying attention to that number now.

If you are a blogger looking to improve traffic and to successfully monetize your site, you must look to improve traffic from search engines. reinvigorate provides all the important data you need to know how readers using search engines find you:

Hey look! I rank #24 on Yahoo for the keywords "harry potter end revealed" for the post I wrote about how the cut rate pricing on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows mimics the way how online content is often given away for free as a way of drawing in visitors that convert in other ways.

I love Yahoo.

That Harry Potter piece was written because (1) I thought the observation was an interesting one, and (2) I wanted link bait indexed and prepared for when Pottermania hit. That's because I study what people are searching on, what they are likely to be searching on, and how the search engines rank stories. Tools like reinvigorate support that work.

There is a lot more that I could show. A nice piece of eye candy is snoop, a utility that shows in real time who is visiting and from where. The graphs are gorgeous throughout reinvigorate, with many options to alter the presentation and emphasize different aspects of the data.

I'm afraid I don't have any invitations to give away right now, so if you are interested, sign up for the beta and cross your fingers. If I do get invitations, I'll let you know and issue them out. In the mean time, consider what metrics package you are using, and whether you are using it to its fullest potential. If not, or if it does not provide the information you need as a blogger or as a website manager, check out the alternatives. Not all metrics packages are the same, nor are all users. There is a package out there for you.