analytics

Web site tracking service Compete has announced the launch of their "Pro" plan today. They are dropping their previous payment system which basically required you to buy credits and then each report you selected was some amount of credits. Going forward the plans will all be monthly - this should be easier for their current customers but also easier to market to new customers.

They have also added more reports which include: page views, visits per person and daily reach. They are keeping more data as well and you can now go back up to 25 months for report purposes.

The new plans start at $199 a month which includes 50 reports. Compete might lose some customers over this - sometimes you only need one report a month, other times 100, now you are stuck with a minimum of $200 a month. It seems like if you have any credits they are giving you a free month of the basic Pro package. Perfect for the large enterprise customers, not so for small customers, consultants or media outlets. My hope is that they will add a ppv report option as well for say $5-10/report.

Yesterday we looked at job aggregator traffic. Today we take a look at two sites that are major players in the travel planning and booking space. I took a lot at a variety of travel sites and two stood out: Expedia and TripAdvisor. I use both sites but for different purposes. I am part of the TripAdvisor community and also use the service for hotel reviews. I use Expedia for price information across hotel chains.

The chart below is very interesting - the traffic to both sites nearly is identical. Both sites appear to be running 600,000 daily unique visitors and that amounts to 18,000,000 monthly uniques. The charts get even closer in May and June.

If you've been reading CN for a while, you know we like ClickTale. We said that Omniture should acquire the service and we've also interviewed the ClickTale CEO, Tal Schwartz. ClickTale is basically a worldwide virtual usability lab for your Web site, application, ecommerce site or blog.

Today the company is launching a new product -- Form Analytics. Over my career I've seen several products do something similar but not to the scale that ClickTale is. From the ClickTale blog, "Form Analytics reveals how visitors interact with online forms and provides recommendations that can increase shopping cart conversion, form completion rates and reduce visitor abandonment."

Form Analytics is currently in beta and includes three reports: Time, Blanks, and Refills. Tal tells me that additional reports will be coming out soon. The Time report shows you how long people are spending on your forms. It gets even crazier with the Advanced Time report which shows you how much time was spent with each individual field. Blanks provides you with details on which fields users are leaving blank when submitting a form. And lastly, the Refills report provides details on how often a user is forced to redo some part of their entered data.

Based on their initial testing, they've seen two common errors that developers and content creators are making. One is around ZIP codes and not taking into account non-U.S. postal codes. The other is password fields which don't provide any specifics on the type of password required which forces the user to refill the form.

My hope is that they provide regular blog posts with more form analytics data - optimizing your forms can return huge value and they could offer excellent guidance with the aggregated data.

One of my colleagues in the office told me about a website statistics service named Woopra (he knows I love quantitative data). I had not heard about it prior, so I went a did a little research around the Internet about it. Apparently, it launched on/around May 30 2008, as it’s relatively new, but had a nice little writeup on TechCrunch. I did some Tweet tracking and saw that a healthy early adapter audience was using it.

What is Woopra you ask? Very simply: MyBlogLog meets Google Analytics and has a baby, and then morphs into a Bloomberg Terminal of the next century. Very, very interesting, at least to me it is. I’ve taken some screenshots of my Woopra Terminal and put them below for you to see:

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Tomorrow at the Conversational Marketing Summit in NYC, ad network Federated Media (FM) will make two announcements: the launch of the Conversational Measurement Toolbox and that they will now represent hardware reviews and forums network AnandTech. Federated Media describes the toolbox as, "a suite of campaign measurement, planning and reporting tools offering marketers greater control and insight into their conversational marketing efforts." The company claims that this is a first-of-its-kind offering.

The system will suck data out of the analytics tools used by FM publishers and then aggregate the data back to the advertisers with a focus on conversational metrics. There's also an API for developers to use who want to leverage the analytics that FM is collecting. No specific analytical categories have been provided yet. Once I get access to the system, I will provide a more in depth review.

Federated Media CEO John Battelle is also a board member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and will now sit on the social media measurement taskforce to ensure that the Conversational Measurement Toolbox work follows whatever the IAB pushes in terms of standards and guidelines.

Perhaps the development of this new measurement toolbox is where some of the new $50 million in VC funding has gone.

In other news, ultra popular, been around forever, hardware news, reviews and community forum site AnandTech has joined the FM publisher network. AnandTech reports 8 million monthly users with over 55 million pageviews. I guess this is a good replacement for Ars Technica which has left FM after being acquired by Conde Nast.

Aah, Alexa - the statistics service that told us last month that they fixed themselves -- our tests indicated they weren't more accurate than before.

Back in February we reported that Alexa had "stopped counting" for nearly 10 days. I wondered if anyone actually cared that the service stopped updating as no one was talking about it. Today, Duncan Riley reports that once again they have stopped counting. The graphs last updated on May 19th, nearly 10 days ago. The graphic to the right displays what I see when I browse Alexa's data. Duncan also notes that Alexa was acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million.

It does appear that the numbers in the charts might be updating - the CN rank appears to continue to drop though our traffic hasn't dropped. Of all of the sites I tested, we lost the largest number of slots when they changed their ranking process - nearly 90,000 slots!

Alexa's blog hasn't been updated in a week and there's no status blog. Maybe they see that with Twitter, outages get them more buzz... who knows but I'd prefer that Alexa post a notice that the service is not functioning correctly. Sadly many marketers and ad agencies still use Alexa to help them base marketing and advertising decisions on.

C'mon Alexa, we give you chance after chance - fix it or shut it down until you do so.

Web site monitoring service Pingdom is out with another report today, this time focusing on Google Analytics usage within the Alexa top 500 sites. Pingdom verified each site and found that 32.3% of the top 500 use Google Analytics to monitor their sites. The 33% number is a bit high in my opinion. Most large sites use "industrial" analytics applications like Omniture or Webtrends.

Pingdom suggests that most use Google Analytics because it's free. What we still do not know is how the data is used on the backend - even if Google suggests it's not being used, it's still being dumped into the huge database that Google maintains on each one of us.

My guess is that if Pingdom runs the same test on the top 2,000-10,000, the Google Analytics count will be much higher - probably in the 60% range. This is currently their sweet spot - outside the Fortune 500 and down to the brand new blog with one reader.

I still believe a combination of internal trackers and external trackers (both for the local site and for the competition) is the optimum combination for success.

If you are interested in not being tracked by Google as you browse site-to-site, check out James Thomas' article about how he lives without Google.

We've written about Clicky Web analytics several times including our first product review just shy of a year ago. It's my favorite medium-level analytics application on the market. Why? Speed, features, the freaking addictive real-time spy and excellent support from the one person team of Sean Hammons.

Today Sean has posted about a variety of new visualization tools that Clicky now offers. Clicky has hired the team at Open Flash Chart to create even more customizations on their charting solution. Here is one basic example chart that's now possible (bar charts were available previously):

The charts update on the fly and the "compare" feature is where the charting tool shows its strength. You can compare practically anything you want to see if there are correlations between the data. Sean has created an example displaying social media inbound traffic vs. bounce rate - perfect for checking how many Digg'rs come back a second time. The comparison possibilities are endless - I already have a list of charts to create.

In the title of this column, I included, "Clicky...Shows You How Freemium Is Done." Freemium means that the service offers a free version and then premium upgrades. I said this because these new charting features are free through this Sunday and then they move to the pro account (paid). Sean gives you the first crack rock free, gets you hooked so you keep coming back to him to buy more crack. I've written before that too many startups who employ the Freemium model give away too much for free and customers never have a reason to upgrade. But giving a taste of premium features every now and again makes perfect sense for trial.

In case you are interested, we are currently running the following analytical tools on CN:

• Clicky
• Google Analytics
• Mint
• ExtremeTracking
• A homegrown proprietary analytics tool

On the CN job board, Clicky is currently seeking a Web developer.

Editor's note: Yesterday we wrote about the new MySpace featured gallery for applications with a cost ranging between $50-100k per week. Hussein Fazal, AdParlor CEO has put together an analysis of how long it would take to show a return on the featured investment.

I just read Nick O-Neill's article MySpace Begins Charging for Application Promotion. Instead of taking the approach that most are taking by simply declaring it outrageous, I decided to take a mathematical approach and look at the ROI. I have made many assumptions and obviously every app is different. I have tried to take an average or an educated guess in some cases - PLEASE let me know if you have any reason to believe they are far off.

MySpace has ~15 Million unique visitors / week. Let's say of those 15 million, 1% check out the application directory - 150,000 people. Assume a conversion rate (people who see your promotion click on in and add your application) of 30% (It is quite the prominent display) so 45,000 people add your application. Also assume that each person has an average of 3 friends who also add the application, so you are looking at a total of 180,000 installations from your $75,000 investment!

Now, assume each person that adds your application will visit your canvas page 5 times a week.

Showing ads on your canvas page, an ad network like AdParlor has an ~eCPM of $2/1000 impressions, let's be conservative and use an eCPM of $1/1000 impressions so each person who adds your application will earn about 0.5 cents / week. Earning 0.5 cents/week from each of these 180,000 people = $900/week. That translates to about 83 weeks (~1.5 years) to earn back your $75,000.

I will leave it up to you now to decide if it is worth the investment?

I've been having a fascinating time reading through papers on NextStage Evolution, a company in the business of metrics and online media analysis. And I'm compelled to write briefly on some core methodological principles, primarily because the methodology behind social analytics warrants careful consideration. All of us in this space want to know what the user wants, does, and might likely do. That would be valuable information, and having it would allow us to anticipate and deliver, and engage, with users. Unfortunately, user's don't declare their motives or intentions, and so it is up to analysis to model user interests from user behavior.

I sincerely believe that social media analysis needs to account not only for the user's proximate activities, those being his or her online behavior and actions as trackable by analytical tools (be they within a walled garden social network, on and around blogs, in conversation tools like twitter, or even through social applications and widgets), but also deeper and less available interests. These are the interests that underlie interpersonal interactions, communication, and relationships. And no matter how near or far interactions, communication, or relationships may appear through social media applications, they form the basis of user agency.

Agency is a sociological concept, and it underlies user actions and activities. Agency, to me, involves intentionality and motive, as well as content (information), and is interested (identifies or attaches to an object or subject). User experience is about agency. Interaction design is about agency. And inaction can be about agency, too. Fundamental to the concept of agency is that of self-reflexivity -- that we know what we are doing. MORE »