Since I'm an analyst by trade I started thinking more about measuring our blog's impact given our renewed focus on contributing more. I was initially surprised to see that last year Google had bought MeasureMap, one of the more interesting tools. However, 14 months later it remains a closed beta and has no recent info. In spite of this early setback I powered on to compile a list of the tools out there and a brief description of each.

MeasureMap - Google

- While it looks interesting and very Google-ish based on the screenshots, it's still in a closed beta and shows no signs of life right now.

StandardStats - Feedburner

- This used to be blogbeat, now it's split into a standard version which is free if you use feedburner, and it includes simple analytics. With a paid upgrade you get TotalStats, which is far more robust if you're willing to spend.

pMetrics - Performancing

- The free version is available to sites with less than 1K pageviews per day, but it does lack the power of the premium version, which is a very reasonable $15 per year. This is a very full-featured tool with a simple and intuitive web interface. Their demo is the actual stats for their site and they're live!

Mint - Shaun Inman

- A decently robust web analytics tool with some blog tracking built in, but this is more of a pretty face than a work horse. $30 per site.

BlogPulse - Nielsen

- This is a free service that can show general trends, much like Google Blog Search, but it has charts too.

Google Blog Search - Google

- This is a free service that can show general trends.

Technorati

- This is a free service that can show general trends and rankings for blogs.

What this shows is that the space is still pretty wide open, there are no clear leaders and most are probably waiting in fear for Google to deploy MeasureMap, which may or may not happen. But given the influence Google Analytics has had in the web analytics space they have reason to be scared of MeasureMap.

In the end I have come to the conclusion that pMetrics looks like the most bang for the buck... and it's the tool I want to deploy on this blog. Check back for updates on how it went and how it works.