WebProNews

Tina Bean, director of sales and marketing for online analytics firm, VisiStat, has a great pitch. Invoking the image of "the grumbly IT guy" (you know you have one), Bean says VisiStat's software-as-a-service model (SaaS) can rescue you from spending the better part of the afternoon with him.

"We were created out of frustration for what you currently find on the shelf," said Bean before speaking of eyes involuntarily rolling backwards to avoid focusing on another server log printout.

VisiStat, in contrast, brings that information to the desktop. Instead of a printout, it looks a bit like email, and has lots of nifty charts and graphs your boss likes so much.

The information provided on screen is from a real-time refreshing data stream that shows what visitors are reading that moment, where they came from, what language they speak, how they found your website, and what they're clicking.

"Users don't have to spend hours massaging data to make a report," said Bean. "It instantly creates a report you can put on your CEO's desk."

From Tina's demo, VisiStat really does give you a creepy big-brother live look at website visitors. Well, Tina called it "voyeuristic." There are maps, even of Antarctica, that detail the town a visitor is browsing from, with Google Maps style balloons that pop up as each new visitor hits the site.

But the service also gives details like what version of Flash most visitors are using as well as they're Web browser language settings to give you a clue as to whether you should add a language.

Pages can be tracked individually, as can download files, PDFs, and banner ads to measure clicks and popularity. Page views can also be filtered by IP address so company views don't skew results.

VisiStat is a hosted domain service. The company gives customers HTML code to be inserted into the website. Of course, all that desktop functionality and user-friendly design comes with a price. VisiStat charges by page view, said Bean.

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