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Frederic Lardinois

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Google Analytics Now Makes It Easier To Track Inbound Links And Stats From Its Social Hub Partners

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Google today announced that it has redesigned some of Google Analytics‘ social reports to make it easier for publishers to see when they get inbound links from other sites. The update also makes it easier to track how people are engaging with a publisher’s content through the new Data Hub Activity report. Google Analytics’ Social Data Hub gets this data from partner sites like Reddit, and Digg, through commenting systems like Disqus, Echo and Livefyre, as well as a number of other services.

The standalone Data Hub Activity report provides publishers with a “timeline of the number of activities that have occurred in the Social Data Hub and the raw activities in a list below.” The data can also be filtered by specific networks.

This Social Hub data was already available previously, but it was mostly buried inside Google Analytics’ social reports. Now that this data is more visible, integrating with the Analytics Social Data Hub will surely become more interesting for companies that operate social networks and platforms, as more Analytics users will now be aware of it and ask for this kind of integration so they can track their social engagement data in one place.

Stats about trackbacks, too, were already available in Google Analytics, but they are now available in a standalone report. Previously, however, it was hard to see how important a certain inbound link really was. The new report, Google says, now provides more context “for the significance of each of these trackbacks by displaying the number of visits that were driven by each endorsing URL during the reporting period.”



How Many Daily Downloads Does It Take To Reach The Top Of The App Store? [Updated]

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It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is probably the single most important app discovery mechanism for most iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to rank in the top 25? Mobile app store analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answers just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free iPhone apps and 3,530 for paid iPhone apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes significantly fewer downloads, with games unsurprisingly being the most competitive category. It takes 25,300 daily downloads to rank in the gaming top 25 for free apps and 2,280 downloads for paid apps.

For free apps, other competitive categories include ‘entertainment’ (6,700 daily downloads), ‘social networking’ (5,800), ‘lifestyle’ (3,900) and ‘music’ (3,900). Interestingly, in the paid app charts photography apps rank just behind games and entertainment apps. Still, it currently only takes about 270 daily downloads to rank in the photography top 25 for paid apps.

These numbers, of course, are always changing and this just represent a snapshot of what Distimo found when it compiled this data last month.

Update: We just talked to one source with a lot of experience in building mobile apps and who also currently runs a top App Store app. According to this source, Distimo’s numbers are too low and may just represent data from a relatively small number of apps. Keep that in mind as you read Distimo’s data.

Given the popularity of games on iOS, Distimo also took a closer look at the various gaming subcategories. Here, arcade and action games lead the pack:

This is the first time Distimo is releasing a detailed set of these numbers. It’s worth noting, though, that at the end of 2011, the company reported that it still took about 45,000 daily downloads to rank in the top 25 of most popular free apps. Since then, though, Apple has been working hard to shut down various scams and bots that automatically downloaded apps and allowed developers to rank in Apple’s charts without having a real user base (then, once you are in the top 25, of course, real users will automatically find you, of course). Judging from Distimo’s latest data, these efforts are starting to pay off and will hopefully make life a little bit easier for legit developers.