Widget Analytics

I posted a bunch on the subject of widgets and the issues surrounding them last week.

One of the issues I didn’t talk about was reporting and analytics. Everyone is happy to give you the embed code to put a widget on your blog or social network page, but they rarely give you the tools to see what is going on with the widget.

Just last week I had an email exchange with Dan, the developer of Streampad about my Streampad widget. I asked him how many plays it had generated. I was happily surprised to find out people have been playing a lot of music with it. So that’s a useful widget.

But I am equally sure there are widgets on my blog that aren’t being used. I should probably take them down. But I have no way of figuring out which ones are useful and which ones are not.

So I was very pleased to see this post by the people at Zvents who have delivered a whole analytics package to go along with their events widgets. Well done!

I suggest that anyone who puts together a widget for a blog or social network page ought to give you the basic analytics along with it.