Today, GoSquared is 6 years old. We’re incredibly proud of where we’ve come so far, but the future is what we’re excited about.

Here’s a quick run down of what we’ve done since February 3rd 2006.

Enjoy!

GoSquared’s real-time data is not confined to just the dashboard. For a while, you’ve been able to receive notifications via email or Twitter DM for when your site is experiencing unexpectedly high or low levels of traffic.

Email reports – snapshot of your traffic as the event unfolded.

Now, not only will you be told “how many” people are online. The new GoSquared Alerts will send a snapshot of your site’s traffic directly to your inbox every time you receive a traffic spike or a sudden dip in traffic levels.

We’ve designed the new email notifications to give you all the data you need so you can see why your traffic changed at that specific point in time. You can even view the emails in your browser, effectively keeping a record of every significant moment that’s happened on your site.

What are you waiting for? Start using GoSquared real-time traffic alerts now.

Learn how to set up GoSquared Alerts →

If you like what we’re doing, the team and I would very much appreciate a vote for us in the “best tool for startups” category:

http://theeuropas.com/vote/

Thank you in advance for your time and support!

Thank you Steve.

If you’re a keen WordPress user or developer and you love GoSquared, you’re going to like this.

We’ve created a new GoSquared WordPress plugin!

The new plugin has one major addition – you can now share your stats with the world.

Simply install the GoSquared WordPress plugin as usual entering your GoSquared Site Token and your GoSquared API key. This will place the tracking code in the source of your WordPress site.

Get the GoSquared for WordPress plugin now →

Widgets – share your stats with the world.

Getting a GoSquared Widget on your site.

In WordPress, go to the “Appearance” tab on the left menu bar,  then click on the “Widgets” sub-menu. From here, drag “GoSquared Online Visitors” from the Available Widgets section into the “Main Sidebar” box to the right, or any other widget area your theme uses.

Drag and drop. How easy is that?!

The initial, default, widgets are all oriented around the current visitor count for your site, though the possibilities are endless. The new GoSquared for WordPress plugin makes use of the GoSquared API so you can create any widget you like based on the GoSquared API.

If you’re interested in creating a new widget, take a look at our recent competition which is still currently running – build on top of the GoSquared API and bag yourself some free real-time web analytics.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what you’d like to see in future updates to the WordPress plugin so please get in touch with us at any time on Twitter, Facebook, GetSatisfaction, or via email.

Get the GoSquared for WordPress plugin now →

London Riots Map, based on Google Maps was created when the riots broke out to chart the London riots from a first person perspective by plotting tweets with the hashtag #londonriots that have an associated postcode. Cravify, a service for mapping events has also been used in a similar way.

We decided to put together a simple visualisation of how the events in London have unfolded – both in terms of web traffic that we monitored on GoSquared (we provide real-time web analytics after all – perfect for events like this), and from our first hand perspective being based in London.

Real-time monitoring proven useful again.

We reached out to Ben Fishman, soon after he created such a topical application. The challenge was on to map and analyse the audience and the interest in the app and the riots themselves. GoSquared’s real-time monitoring proved extremely useful in understanding how the worldwide audience were discovering and understanding the London riots as they were happening.

GoSquared is enablng the LondonRiotMap to get an in-depth and professional insight into a variety of information including:

• Referrers to the site.
• Search terms being used to reach the site.
• Tweets related to the riots.
• The locations of specific visitors and the time of day they were finding out about the riots.

GoSquared’s features have shown that in just the first evening there has been a huge international interest with over 26,000 web visitors from North America, Europe, East Asia and Australasia.

The GoSquared team has thankfully been largely unaffected by the riots in London and the rest of the UK this week. We wish the best of luck to everyone recovering from such a difficult week in the UK.

Please let us know if any stats or details are incorrect – we’ll do our best to fix them as soon as possible.

Try GoSquared now – free for 30 days!

Thanks,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor, Saul Cullen, Gerhard Lazu and Micky Blackburn (our new intern!)
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

GoSquared has always enabled you to understand what your visitors are doing on your site. Given that we show you who’s on your site right now, it’s always been tempting to “reach out” and assist people from the GoSquared dashboard.

Often you may notice visitors on your site who appear to be hitting pain points or who might be thinking about signing up to your site or service. And until now there’s been very little you could do other than make a note to improve it “for next time”.

All that changes today.

Start chatting to your visitors today.

GoSquared customers on the Plus plan and above can now pair GoSquared with one of the most popular live chat applications on the market, Olark.

By using GoSquared with Olark, no longer do you have to wait for your visitors to get in touch with you, or wait until you “improve it for next time”. Instead, you can now get in touch with your visitors – no waiting, no guessing.

You can actively monitor your visitors in GoSquared identifying those experiencing any issues. Perhaps someone has been on the checkout page for a prolonged period or maybe someone is erratically navigating support documents. Instead of sitting by helplessly and losing a sale or ending up with an unhappy customer, why not do something about it?

As a site owner, if you get in touch and provide the best help you can, with the right information they require, your visitors will have a great experience receiving on tap, proactive support and advice. By using GoSquared and Olark together you can effectively become a sales assistant in your online store, with the added understanding of what your visitors (and potential customers) may be looking for already.

Olark + GoSquared. Made for each other.

Olark live chat is part of our drive for site owners to act now, not tomorrow. Start using GoSquared with Olark and see for yourself.

Head over to the Olark site to grab yourself a 14 day free trial. Then follow their helpful setup instruction to start turning your site’s visitors into paying customers.

Once Olark is set up, a magic chat button will appear in the visitor details area of your GoSquared dashboard. Simply click this button to initiate a chat. Simple!

We really hope you enjoy this feature – it’s something we’ve wanted to do for months.

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor, Saul Cullen and Gerhard Lazu
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

We’ve recently been running into a recurring issue with AWS’ Elastic Load Balancing service. The problem manifests itself in vastly increased latency or eventual dropout of requests against the load balancer.

We verified the health of our instances in each availability zone, and concluded that it was not a problem at the instance level. Second, we confirmed that our DNS queries were being routed to the ELB correctly. They were. So the issue was at the ELB level.

As it turns out, there appears to have been/still is a bug where ELB will suddenly decide that there are no available instances in a particular availability zone, or at least it will have trouble connecting to instances in that particular zone. Even if the instances are perfectly fine, and pass all health checks.

The solution was to try to identify the suspect zone, and de-register that zone and all of its instances from the ELB. Once re-registering the zone & instances completed, the ELB was back up to full functionality again.

Hope this helps next time you run into any ELB issues!

P.S. We’re big fans of Amazon Web Services – if you haven’t already, check out our recent feature on the AWS Blog.

We just pushed out another update to GoSquared – see the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and organisations that your visitors are browsing your site from.

This new functionality is available in 2 places – if you dive down into the details for an individual visitor, you can see which ISP or organisation that visitor is browsing from. In addition to this, in the new aggregated visitor metrics panel that we introduced in version 3.2, you can get a breakdown of the top ISPs and organisations right now.

How does this help me?

Ever wanted to know whether your competitors are keeping an eye on you? Now you can. Large companies often have their own networks named appropriately – for example visitors browsing on Microsoft’s network would show up as such – might be handy if you’re Apple.

Most people will not be working at a large company though, and if they’re visiting your site from home then you can still see which ISP they’re on. This can really help in identifying potential issues with speed and responsiveness that might be specific to certain internet connections in certain areas. Additionally, it can help you identify individuals with much more confidence, removing more of the guesswork about who is using your site.

We hope you like this new feature, and we have plenty more on the way.

Enjoy!