It’s fun to measure things. The downside is that people and services know that we like to measure things and, therefore, they want to charge us for every small bit of data we would like to collect. And as we are a curious kind, mankind, we want to measure and learn from every aspect of life. As I’m into web analytics, I sometimes think about what I would like to measure instead of what I actually CAN measure. And as I use SlideShare from time to time, without paying for a PRO Account – I still want some kind of idea of what’s happening over at SlideShare.
Enter, StatCounter.
StatCounter is in my opinion that obnoxious drunk uncle of Google Analytics. That uncle who’s got a strong opinion about everything but without any experience or deeper analysis on the subject in matter. Still, our drunk uncle’s opinion could entertain us a bit. Let’s have our drunk uncle, StatCounter, entertain us with tracking and sending us some basic data from our SlideShare profile. Our free SlideShare profile that is.
Beware that StatCounter will not save any data when the mobile version of SlideShare is being displayed. It just doesn’t work since the layout is different from when you’re on a desktop computer. Anyway, let’s get us some profile views data. To the code! (hum the Batman theme here)
Open up StatCounter and SlideShare. Log in, or sign up. Both are two free services that we’re going to be using. Set up your SlideShare profile so we’ll have a URL, in my case, http://www.slideshare.net/petterssonper, and then hit Add Project in StatCounter:
- Enter the URL to your SlideShare profile
- Give your StatCount project a name
- Set country and timezone (so you can understand your data a bit better)
- Set the tracking to Invisible
- Check a box if you want email reports from StatCounter (or not) and then who’s going to get those reports
Simple. Let’s fetch us some coffee, save this page and go have a look at your current Projects. We need to do some configurations before launching the StatCounter tracking code on our SlideShare profile, so click the wrench icon next to your new project in StatCounter and Edit Project Settings.
I would recommend you to change the Idle time between visits to 1 hour, set the tracking to Ignore crawlers and bots, block myself with IP Blocking (StatCounter doesn’t segment or filter – yeah. It’s like 1998 up in here…) and Update Project.
Next step is to click Default Guide in the left navigation menu under Reinstall Code. Click the Basic tab under StatCounter Code for Default Guide and copy the image code. What’s that, you ask? It’s the <img src=”http://c.statcounter.com/yabadabadoo/”> part.
Go to your SlideShare profile and hit the Edit Profile button. Under Personal information, add the image code we copied from StatCounter in the beginning of your About section, hit the Save button and we’re officially done for the day. We can now see profile views in StatCounter for our SlideShare profile:
Have you been playing around with either Google Analytics or StatCounter to measure things that doesn’t give you any data by default or, do you have something in mind that you Would like to measure? I would love to have a crack at it.
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