analytics Archive

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. 

Continue reading “Clicky Launches Powerful Integrated URL Shortener” »

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.

Whether serious or for fun, there are times when you need quick A/B feedback. For example: Do you prefer plain bagels or poppy seed?; Do you use Twitter?; or Is design A or I better for posting scraped content?.

PickFu is a new website that offers a quick way to get A/B feedback. You setup a question (an example of Mac or PC is displayed below) and then the PickFu community replies to the question. You can either make a question public and have the community respond/listing in the question directory or make it private where you must share a link with those people who you want to see the results.

They offer a page with the current demographics of their responders which seems pretty diverse. The only question that’s missing is location – I’d want to know where the responders are when testing an application. The responders answer the questions via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Each question posted on PickFu costs $5 for 50 responses. What would be great is to be able to select the audience that will see the question in cases where you want to test against a specific audience (e.g. people over 60 with no college degree, women under 21 in Australia). Perhaps an extra fee gets you audience targeting.

Continue reading “PickFu – Quick A/B Feedback for $5” »

We’ve reviewed a number of web usage analysis services including ClickTale, RobotReplay and CrazyEgg. We’ve also written about an analysis service named TapeFailure which was closed over a year ago. This week TapeFailure founder Joshua Gross has launched his new web analysis service named Vistrac which is a complete rewrite of TapeFailure plus more functionality and analysis.

Joshua notes, “This service (Vistrac) will analyze everything from where users click, to where they pay attention when scrolling. It takes the concept of sites like UserFly one step further and breaks down the data for you.”

The features page is worth a look for detailed info on what Vistrac provides. There are reports on browser type, OS, screen resolution and browser size. I’ve never seen browser size on a report before but it’s pretty interesting – this is where a user is using their browser at a size other than fullscreen. Other reports include link tracking, heat maps, scroll metrics and form metrics. For a startup, form analysis can mean more signups and more paying customers.

There’s also a Superfunnel report  which provides a map for each user and how they navigate through your website or application.

Vistrac pricing ranges from free to $149/month for a corporate plan. Most of the web analysis services offer a free trial. My suggestion is to give each of them a try on the same website, compare the results and move forward with the services you find beneficial.

Web measurement company Quantcast has announced the launch of the “Quantcast Media Program” today. Quantcast describes the media program as, “connect(ing) Marketers and Publishers using consistent, actionable and accurate data applied at the impression level.”

From the release, “The Quantcast solution applies marketers’ unique customer interaction data from their media campaigns, search activity and brand website visitation to discover the distinctive audience characteristics of their most valuable consumer segments. Lookalike models then identify larger, similar consumer groups across the web. Marketers connect with publisher inventory to purchase these audience definitions, in real time, at scale. Quantcast Media Program maximizes marketer budgets by consistently reaching the right audience and expands the range of advertisers for which publishers can successfully deliver audiences.”

The Media Program is part of the Quantcast Marketer program which launched in April.

It appears that the program has been in a private status through today. The signup page notes that if you work with an agency, you will get fast track access.

Earlier today Digg announced the launch of their new "DiggBar". Basically the new version of a toolbar from the early 90s, the idea is to provide an easy way to see if someone has submitted the story to Digg along with related stats and stories from other publishers via Digg. Lots of other tech journalists covered the story including Michael Arrington, Frederic Lardinois and MG Siegler. I hadn’t planned on covering this story but after reviewing the code behind the toolbar, there are some very important points that these journalists seem to have missed that I thought were worth sharing.

Tracking

From checking the code, Digg is running (at least) two sets of analytics within the toolbar. One appears to come from Microsoft and the other comes from Quantcast. The Quantcast code is identical to the main site – just how will that play into Digg’s monthly numbers on Quantcast? It sure looks like each DiggBar load will also increment the counter for Quantcast 1-for-1. Should they be credited on a toolbar load as if it was a full page load? Of course not – I have an email into Quantcast to verify how these toolbars will be counted. Toolbar and widget counts and analytics are the most difficult today because of the way they load and are handled – this was a part of my discussion with ShareThis last week.

Ad Serving

As MG noted, there are ads inside of the toolbar… how do those ads load? While they only "appear" when a tab is selected, are they actually loaded upon initial DiggBar load? I will need to confirm but it does appear that the ads are all loaded into the page when the DiggBar is loaded. It’s a pretty damn interesting question – not just for Digg but for any site that hides ads on pageloads.

Double Pageviews

Since Digg has changed their entire site to use this new DiggBar, sites that hit the Digg frontpage may benefit from massive double pageviews. Why? For users who click the big X to eliminate the toolbar, Digg is then forced to reload the exact same webpage again. Should advertisers be paying for this double pageview? If I was an advertiser on x or y site, this would certainly be something for me to consider. Of course the favorite Digg sites will love the bonus pageviews. I think there were some actions around this double pageview ad behavior in the mid-90s.

Also, Digg gets a double pageview when stories are clicked from Digg.com. You view a story on Digg and click a link (say Ars Technica). Digg loads up the bar with full goodness and grabs a second pageview from the bar load. Interesting…

Page Load Times

The DiggBar is nearly 100k in size – what does that do to page load times, especially when browsing from a mobile?

I will leave the topic of URL stealers (similar to conversation stealers) for another post as the issue is wider than just the DiggBar.

I would be careful to put DiggBar in the same category as other URL shorteners like MooURL, TinyURL or even Bitly. This is much more of a Digg play than an actual URL shortener.