analytics Archive

I’ve been a fan of web analytics startup Clicky since the beginning. Last month the company announced their new video analytics functionality.  This week the company announced a beta test of a new interface to their web analytics product. I guess Twitter wasn’t the only one who launched a new Web interface this week. The new interface is available at beta.getclicky.com.

The Clicky blog explains the changes to the analytics interface which include:

• Ajax page loads which make the pages load faster and smoother
• navigation that changes based on the context of the page
• important stats for each report remain visible as you scroll

My favorite part of Clicky is the real-time spy. The spy lets you watch traffic to, and on, your website in real-time.

Continue reading “Clicky Web Analytics Launches New Interface” »

What would be your reply to the following question, “what’s your most prized possession?” UK-based online insurance company Protect Your Bubble asked 500 people on Facebook and the responses are just as expected. Unfortunately no demographic data was provided on the respondents which makes it hard to take the results seriously. Naturally if you ask wealthy youngsters what the most prized possessions are, you will get a very different set of results than if you ask a group of senior citizens.

The Apple iPod comes out on top with 12% of respondents noting that the device is their most prized possession.  All of the Apple products on the list add up to 35% of all of the responses. Interestingly dogs beat out cats which typically online only cats get any love. And sorry Apple fanboys but the Blackberry beat out the iPhone with 11.5% vs. 10% respectively.

Here are the full survey results:

• iPod 12%
• Blackberry 11.5%
• iPhone 10%
• Laptop 9%
• Dog 9%
• Games console 8%
• Macbook 7%
• iPad 6%
• Cat 5%
• Camera 5%
• Television 4.5%
• Car 4%
• Video camera 4%
• Other jewellery 4%
• Wedding ring 1%

I’ve been trying to think about what is my prized possession since I first read this press release yesterday. I guess it would have to be my worldwide transit poster and map collection including a large-scale 1960s NYC transit map. My most prized possession is certainly not my very old, refurbished iPod Nano.

Web analytics service Clicky has announced the launch of their video analytics service which is part of the overall Clicky web analytics platform. Clicky has integrated directly with video hosting company Viddler and provides the ability to track videos from YouTube and Vimeo as well.

The Viddler integration will go live sometime in August as Clicky notes that the Viddler team has some additional work on their end before the connection is made live. The Viddler integration will not require you do anything different to make sure the video stats reach Clicky.

To use the YouTube connection with Clicky, there is a bit of work involved. You can read about the changes to your blog or website that must be added on the Clicky help site. It addition, the way you embed videos is different than just copying and pasting the code directly from YouTube into your blog. The same goes for Vimeo…you would need to add some code to your templates and then change the way you insert videos into your blog or website.

Here’s an example of the stats page:

Note – we are an affiliate for Clicky but none of the links in this post are affiliate links.

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:
Continue reading “Viddler Adds Analytics” »

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?
Continue reading “Future of Web Apps Recap: Measure & Grow Your Startup” »

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.