If you’ve used Google Analytics, PostRank Analytics will feel familiar, although it has a nicer-looking design. Once you’ve logged into the service, you get an overview of your site’s stats via a Flash-based chart (you can select to view last week, last month, last three months, or a custom period).

One thing that is different from Google Analytics, though, is the metrics you can track using the app. Not only do you get to keep an eye on your page views and visitors (PostRank Analytics will pull this data from your Google Analytics account, if you have one, for increased accuracy), you can also track “Engagement,” which is an aggregate score based on many times your content is commented on, how often it’s mentioned on Twitter, how many comments it has on FriendFeed, how many people bookmarked it using Delicious, etc.

Hit the “Analyze” tab to see a list of recently published posts, together with traffic and engagement stats for each of them, and individual scores based on number of Twitter mentions, bookmarks, etc:

Drill down further by clicking on a post title to bring up the “Analyze Story” page, which features traffic and engagement charts for that particular post. You can also get to these pages from the timeline on the Overview page.

Usefully, the “Analyze Story” pages also contain a “conversation feed,” which brings together tweets, comments, blog posts and bookmarks related to that content, so that you can see  — at a glance — what people are saying about your content.

You can also choose to receive a daily “Concierge Report” in your email. In its current iteration, I don’t find this to be that useful, as it just contains basic page view and engagement stats — it would be better if it was customizable, like the reports that Google Analytics can generate.

While I’d like to see more detail on how the “Engagement” score is actually calculated, and think it would be useful to be able to get separate charts for stats like Twitter mentions and Delicious bookmarks, I’m adding PostRank Analytics to my toolbox, because it provides data that’s not available elsewhere. If you’re interested in getting a better idea as to what’s being said about your content, and where, or if you’re just a stats geek, PostRank Analytics is definitely worth checking out. It’s free during the beta; sign up at analytics.postrank.com.

Let us know what you think of PostRank Analytics in the comments.

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My favorite filtering techniques involve Yahoo Pipes, which looks and sounds much more complicated than it is. Jackson West described Yahoo Pipes pretty well when he called them “hard to grok, but snazzy“; however, Yahoo Pipes doesn’t have to be quite so difficult for people to understand. The first time I looked at Pipes, the interface scared me away until a friend of mine gave me a very quick demo that showed how easy it was to use. After using Pipes for while, I gave similar demos to help other friends get started and even recorded a 2 minute introduction to Yahoo Pipes that shows how to use Pipes to filter RSS feeds. How complicated could it be if I can explain it in a 2 minute screencast?

Here are a few of my favorite filtering techniques that I use to find the most relevant content.

Filter high volume feeds. Many of the big technology news blogs have a huge volume of stories in the feed. The aggregated feed for the entire GigaOM network, for example, contains dozens of posts every day. I have a hard time finding the content relevant to me when I have to sort through a large number of posts, so I use Pipes to search these stories to find the ones that matter to me. The example pipe below shows how to filter the entire GigaOM network feed down to the few posts containing certain keywords.

Example: Filtering high volume feeds

Aggregate and filter less relevant content. There are certain categories of blogs that have outstanding content, but they rarely publish posts that I want to read. For me, this is true of industry analyst blogs. While I really want to hear about the latest research in online communities and social media, most of the reports published are on topics that are not interesting to me. The Pipe below is one that I use to aggregate 17 industry analyst blogs together into one feed while filtering the posts for a few keywords relevant to my interests.

Example: Analyst research blogs filtered for social media

Find the posts everyone else is reading. For news junkies like me, it helps to be able to find the posts that are generating the most buzz. PostRank, a service that used to be called AideRSS, simplifies this process by finding the most talked about posts from any RSS feed. I often use PostRank in conjunction with Pipes to rank and filter posts at the same time. The example below ranks the posts here on WebWorkerDaily with a feed containing only the posts that are generating the most conversation.

Example: PostRank for WebWorkerDaily and feed for the top posts

WebWorkerDaily PostRank

Both Yahoo Pipes and PostRank have an option to get the output as RSS, so I make sure that the results from these tools make it into my RSS reader. With these more efficient filtered feeds, I can remove some of the aggregated and filtered source feeds from my reader. By using these filtering techniques to further prune my feeds, I plan to spend less time catching up on feed reading and more time working, exercising, or spending time with friends and family.

What are your favorite filtering techniques?

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