analytics Archive

Video hosting service Viddler has announced the availability of their new analytics tool today. The reporting engine is provided through a partnership between Viddler and TubeMogul.

From the announcement, “Comprehensive statistics about your videos are now only a click away. Of course, Viddler Analytics answers even more questions than those above. How much storage has my account used this month? How much video bandwidth have we used so far? Am I close to my account level threshold yet? These questions, and others, are very important to our Business level accounts.” The partner analytics provides more “social” stats around comments, total video views and individual video stats.

To use the Viddler analytics tool, you must be a business or partner customer. Business accounts start at $100/month. When I attempt to load the analytics tool I am redirected back to the Viddler home page. They should probably change that to redirect to a page describing the analytics option and how to get access to it.

I love seeing more stats and analytics around the content I create so I welcome a new set of video metrics. Now I guess I need to create more videos…anyone see the BloggerKing lately?

Here’s an overview video of how the analytics tool works:
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One of the most practical talks at FOWA London came from the CEO of Freshbooks, an online invoicing app for individuals and small businesses. Mike McDerment reminded the audience of designers, developers and wannabe web 2.0 rock-stars that the excel number-crunchers of the corporate world can teach us a lot about how to measure business performance. When you’re trying to create the next widgetized social aggregation platform which is powered by supercharged virality it might not seem very sexy to fire up excel and start facing those cold white boxes. However, Mike urged everyone there to cook a monitoring system directly into their web-apps so that they know where their visitors are coming from, how many of them are signing up, and, crucially, how many of them are actually sticking around. Importantly, he urged everyone there not to assume that Google Analytics is the answer to all your measuring needs. Measuring is a business philosophy and Mike practices what he preaches. Freshbooks ads are all over the web and the ones that aren’t delivering ROI quickly are cut with the ruthlessness of a ninja swordsman.

This kind of obsession over the numbers is common among successfully bootstrapped companies. When you don’t have an enormous pile of green bills to cover in petrol and set alight, you don’t – simple as that. After spending the first two years in his parents’ basement, Mike has built Freshbooks into an extremely successful business with dozens of employees, thousands of paying users and, most importantly, extremely happy customers. Viral growth is a rare and elusive feat achieved by very few companies. Predictable growth is driven by regular measurement and informed improvement. In any case, if your app is growing like a weed, wouldn’t be nice to measure that?
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Web metrics reporting service comScore has announced a new partnership today with the newly-Adobe-acquired Omniture. The new strategic partnership is being announced in conjunction with New York’s Advertising Week. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

From the announcement, “the offering will combine the power of Omniture’s Web analytics with comScore’s new Media Metrix 360 hybrid audience measurement to help provide publishers and advertisers with a unified and comprehensive view of online audiences.”

My guess is that Omniture customers will now be able to view their own data next to industry and competitor analytics provided by comScore. It’s a smart move for both companies and should help Omniture customers save time and generate better analysis.

Could this bring comScore closer to the “quantified” service offered by Quantcast? From the announcement, “The strategic partner relationship is intended to allow joint Omniture and comScore customers to use Omniture tags to collect and share information with Media Metrix 360 using Omniture Genesis integration technology, quickly bypassing the normal implementation process for Media Metrix 360. The relationship also opens up the possibility of joint product initiatives that will leverage the granularity of the Omniture site-specific data with the Web-wide view of Internet user behavior provided by comScore.”

We were the first to report last month on Twitter tracking your links. The click functionality adds a “click event” to add links clicked on the site. So if you click a link to CN, click a friend’s profile or click a link over to one of the third party apps, Twitter is tracking it.

The links appear normal to the naked eye but when clicked they morph to something like this:

http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url

From my previous post, “It does not look like third party apps (HootSuite, Tweetdeck, Sobees, etc.) are affected by this link tracking change. Frankly tracking links without tracking the third party apps seems silly as apparently the hardcore Twitter users use some application with the service.”

My guess is that they are tracking the links for both internal and external purposes and perhaps this is the first step to some sort of ranking matrix. Please leave your thoughts on the reasoning behind tracking every link in the comments below.

Update: A CN reader tells me that TweetMeme appears to not be counting correctly and he wonders if this new click tracking has anything to do with it. I don’t use TweetMeme but will contact the service for more details.

If you read CN regularly, you know that I am an analytics nut. I’ve been interested in analytics since I was a baby playing with my Fisher-Price cash register. In the online space I like Clicky because they offer a real-time spy where you can sit and watch where your users and how they are interacting with your website.

Today analytics service ClickTale has upped the ante on real-time analytical monitoring with their own “Real-Time Monitor”. The ClickTale service provides a similar set of features to the Clicky real-time Spy product but adds additional functionality that monitor user’s mouse moves, clicks, scrolling and keystrokes.

Each user session is recorded and can be viewed as a video where you can watch exactly how the user interacted with your site or service. You can watch how users scroll, click, etc. This is pretty powerful stuff as it enables the ability to modify a site not just based on content but also with interactivity and location. It’s a great complement for any A/B testing plan.

The new Monitor service is free for all ClickTale plans including their free offering. ClickTale notes, “the Real-Time Monitor automatically refreshes itself every 10 seconds for our paid plan customers, and every 60 seconds for our free plan customers.”

Checkout all of our ClickTale coverage including why I think Omniture should acquire the analytics service.

Web analytics service Clicky has announced the launch of a URL shortener. I don’t write much about URL shorteners because frankly they are way over-hyped. Dave Winer has been posting a lot about the category so check out his blog for more information and education.

In my scan this morning for the Today’s 10, I noticed that Clicky is now offering a URL shortener of their own. The difference with the Clicky shortener (clicky.me) is that it’s directly tied into your Clicky analytics account. You must have a Clicky account to use the shortener.

They compare the Clicky shortener to the Twitter default shortener Bit.ly. Clicky notes that the biggest difference is that Bit.ly stops tracking the user when they arrive to your site while Clicky continues to track the user within their analytics tool. Maybe one day Twitter will allow users to select which shortener we want to use though that’s doubtful especially with their recent click tracking test.

Clicky now allows for segmentation of users and data by short url. They also boast that their offering only tracks humans not evil bots, search robots and other Internet crud.

In typical Clicky fashion they discuss the revenue model for Clicky.me. There isn’t one – well that’s not completely true. There won’t be any direct revenue from the offering but it should drive new users to the Clicky service and will strengthen the overall offering.

One of the comments on the announcement post wonders if spammers will use it since the shortener will work with the free version. If they moved it to paid-only plans, the new offering could help with conversions.

I’ve been using moourl for my shortening needs as it’s quick and has a cow on the page. The only real suggestion I have for all of the shorteners is to offer the preview option that TinyURL does. I never have a worry clicking a TinyURL as I know I will hit a page from which I can decide to proceed. Bit.ly apparently only offers this if you hack the URL (wtf) and I don’t know if Clicky’s offering allows for a preview but here’s hoping they add it. Safety will become more important with short URLs as more of the evil gets a hold of them. 

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It appears that sometime today, Twitter added new functionality that adds a “click event” to add links clicked on the site. So if you click a link to CN, click a friend’s profile or click a link over to one of the third party apps, Twitter is tracking it.

Darren Stuart first found this functionality earlier and noted that Twitter isn’t modifying the actual URLs but instead adding a javascript event which runs the “http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=’urlhere’” function.

It does not look like third party apps (HootSuite, Tweetdeck, Sobees, etc.) are affected by this link tracking change. Frankly tracking links without tracking the third party apps seems silly as apparently the hardcore Twitter users use some application with the service.

We can guess that the URLs are being tracked for internal stats, for some sort of hot URL board, for metrics to use with advertisers, etc. There’s also been talk about Twitter creating some sort of engine so perhaps this is the first step.

Leave your thoughts on the reasoning behind tracking every link in the comments below.

Update: it appears the tracking links are gone as of now.