analytics Archive

Google made two big announcements today around their Analytics service: a real-time chart which we covered earlier and a new premium analytics service. The premium analytics service is geared towards Google’s largest customers and includes the following items listed on their announcement posting:

• Extra processing power – increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
• Advanced analysis – attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
• Service and support – experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call – all backed by 24/7 support
• Guarantees – service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

So basically for a fee, Google will provide a stronger server to run your custom reports, a dedicated account manager and a 24/7 support and service level agreement (SLA). The one thing Google didn’t note in their announcement post was the cost for the premium analytics offering.

I have received tips from several sources noting that the price for the premium analytics service is A WHOPPING $150,000/year.

If your company wants to use Google Analytics Premium, you can either signup directly with Google or with one of their resellers. Be ready to bring your checkbook.

For comparison, many report paying over $100K a year for Adobe’s Omniture SiteCatalyst offering. I can’t remember what we used to pay for Webtrends Enterprise at my old job but it was in the same ballpark.

Today Google announced the launch of real-time analytics within their Google Analytics service. I’ve been in the web analytics area since the first beta of Webtrends and am glad to see Google finally offering a real-time feature as part of their very popular metrics offering. Real-time stats are critical when you run ad campaigns or are now using social media tools to help spread your marketing messages. When you monitor real-time stats, you can make changes on-the-fly to your campaigns to optimize the heck out of your spend. I also hear from other bloggers that they use real-time metrics tools to monitor for traffic based on adjustments to story titles to see which provide a better response.

Naturally today’s Google Analytics announcement must mean that real-time analytics tools including Clicky, Chartbeat, SiteMeter, Woopra and ExtremeTracking are dead. Maybe these tools should consider a quick pivot to real-time daily deals (I kid!).

Blogger Holden Page immediately noted, “Google Analytics went real-time. In one fell swoop hit about four startups, one of which I use religiously (Clicky) with an iron fist.”

I like the blog post by the Clicky team – they always use pepper sarcasm into their posts. The title of their blog post reads, “SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING.”

They note, “Hmm… did anyone actually read the announcement that Google made today? This isn’t “real time Google Analytics”, this is a single report in GA that is real time. The rest of GA remains the same. This is more akin to Chartbeat, to be used as a real time compliment to a standard analytics package, rather than a full standalone real time service like Clicky is. But I guarantee you Chartbeat will be just fine, as will everyone else. We’ve all had, and continue to have, plenty of advantages over GA other than real time data.”

They then link to a number of tweets that signal death for Clicky, Woopra and Chartbeat. The quotes include:

• “Sites like Clicky will soon be out of business”
• “getclicky and chartbeat ought to run for the hills”
• “Is this the beginning of the end of Woopra?”
• “Google killing off Chartbeat”

I am still waiting to see proof where death of a service occurred because a large company put out an offering in that space. I guess the closest we could come would be all those tools that built on top of Twitter only to have Twitter build their own – but remember I warned against that many moons ago.

Continue reading “Chartbeat, Clicky & Other Real-Time Analytics Tools Must Be Dead…Right?” »

The big news in the social media expert camp from last week was the notification that all links that are posted on Twitter, both on the website and using a third-party app, will now automatically be converted to use Twitter’s official t.co URL shortener. You can read the Twitter help post and the developer guide to learn more about t.co and how it works. Part of the conversation around the t.co rollout reminds me of some of the discussion when Digg launched the Diggbar.

Short tl:dr version: Just because a t.co url appears in your referral log, it does not mean that all the traffic to that url has come from Twitter.

Sean at the analytics service Clicky posted about how the change to use t.co will make it appear that Twitter has zero influence because the referral logs will show t.co instead of twitter.com going forward. When I initially read the post, I thought there was something wrong but couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. Yesterday Zee at the Next Web (note: they are a Twitter default user) created a post titled, “Twitter Just Got the Respect it Deserves”. He continues along the same lines as Clicky and has several key points:

• Twitter is now influential in terms of traffic from an “eyes of the media” standpoint
• Facebook and Stumbleupon better watch out because now Twitter will appear really big as a social media traffic driver
• Brands and businesses will now take note of how influential Twitter is
• You can search to find out which tweet was the influential one because you can search on a specific t.co url

Unfortunately it looks like there are issues with both the Clicky post (and the very wrong change they made to their service) and Zee’s statements.

Continue reading “Behavior Patterns of Twitter’s T.Co URL Shortener and Why Zee/Clicky Are Wrong” »

Angel investor and 500Startups founder Dave McClure took to the stage during the Lean Startup Day at SXSW — his presentation centered around startup metrics for lean startups. If you know Dave, you know that typically every third word is a curse word of some sort – my counter had him at about 3.2 words/curse word across his presentation. It was three years ago at SXSW that Dave McClure introduced the world to getting booty by using his startup metrics techniques for pirates.

My favorite part of the presentation was when Dave asked the audience, “when do you stop adding features” and someone in the audience replied, “when you get acquired”. Everyone laughed and Dave quickly noted that was not the right answer – the correct answer is to stop adding features when your users are happy with what you have. I am not sure I agree – can you name one company that has actually stopped adding features?

Here are some of my notes:

• suggests you read the book Spent
• don’t bother pitching him or emailing him – if you want into his network, you better come via a referral (see slide 41)
• the important metrics aren’t uniques or cash – but visitor engagement metrics (see slide 11 below)
• disagrees with Chris Dixon and Fred Wilson around marketing and SEO (I agree with Dave)
• gathering customer data is good, email collection is great because you can “fucking spam your users” (see Dave’s comment below – just to be clear he was joking about spamming customers)
• if your customers pay for your product, you have MVP (minimum viable product)
• hate is more gooder than love (that was my Fake Grimlock impersonation) – basically what Dave means here is that when people hate your product they will tell you specifically what to fix – if they love your product, you will probably only get an “i love your product” response
• testing is cheap, coding is expensive – Dave notes that you are better off testing up the behind before you code because it’s easy to change a test, harder to change code
• Dave featured a slide about cartoons and noted that SouthPark is a really shitty product within a niche and that’s why they won

Dave also discussed pricing – in that you are better off starting with charging for your service and possibly moving free later on than the reverse. He said that way you will get customers initially who really, really want your product. I agree with his conclusion but for a different reason – it’s very, very hard to move to paid when you start free – just look at what the backlash when this is done – but if you go from paid to free, you look like a hero.
Continue reading “SXSW Recap: Startup Metrics for Pirates 2.0” »

I’ve been a fan of web analytics startup Clicky since the beginning. This week they announced a new partnership with Olark that will allow you to chat with your customers and users in real-time. Olark is a Y-Combinator startup that offers a widget which you can place on your site to allow for chat with your customers and/or users.

In all of my years dealing with web analytics, I can’t remember ever seeing an integration like this new Clicky/Olark functionality. Clicky offers a real-time analytics monitoring service called Spy which offers you the ability to watch your traffic in real-time. It can be very addicting, especially if your blog post or startup get some good links or press.

There are plenty of companies that offer popup customer chat windows – I know when I visit the Rackspace site I try to login very quickly so I don’t get hit with a popup chat box.

The new service makes it possible to chat with your customers or users by clicking on their link in the Spy.

A simple use case for this new service is watching a potential customer move around the site and then clicking to chat with them to close the sale. Another use case would be watching a user navigate through a number of pages in your support documentation — click to chat with them to directly answer their questions and be a hero.

To use the new service, you must have a premium account with Clicky (starts at $10/month) and you must have an account with Olark. Olark has a free account which is limited to 20 conversations a month and their paid subscriptions start at $15/month.

Continue reading “Clicky Partners With Olark for Live Real-Time Customer Chat” »

Phil Gainley from FounderSpeak has put together a detailed, in-depth report regarding bootstrapped startups. As an aside, I hope one day we can get to industry accepted definitions for “bootstrapped” and “startup”. Two years ago I provided my definitions for both terms and many CN readers provided their own definitions. For example, can a company started in 2005 really still be considered a startup?

Phil’s analysis provides a lot of data points around bootstrapped startups and is well worth a read. Phil interviewed 107 startups to gather the data for the report. Phil notes, “included is a breakdown of trends in the tech space, what the lifetime and demographics of a startup looks like and where they fail and what their biggest problems are. Also it has my latest research around the tech startup space all put into a process that other tech startups can use that is around 10 pages long. This research will be part of my Aston Business School MBA.”

The survey provides data and charts on the following areas:

• Number of founders
• How do you provide monetary support for your startup
• Monthly hardware costs
• Misc. spending costs per month – marketing, networking, travel, etc.
• What phase is your startup currently in
• How long have you been working on your startup
• When do you expect to reach breakeven
• Why haven’t you reached breakeven yet
• Type of product/service

I think it would be great to be able to refine the data – for example, breakeven data for startups with 2 founders that are in business more than 18 months, etc. I believe most of the startup data in the report comes from startups based in London/UK and note that the monetary figures are in pounds not dollars.

Marketing service Hubspot has put together 100 marketing charts and graphs which you can use in your upcoming presentations. I’ve embedded the presentation of the charts and graphs below. The charts and graphs come from Hubspot’s original customer research. Data categories include: lead generation, blogging and social media, marketing budgets, and naturally Twitter and Facebook. It appears the data was posted at various times throughout the year but this presentation brings it all together in a neat and tidy slideshare presentation.
Continue reading “HubSpot Offers 100 Marketing Charts and Graphs” »