Web Analytics Program Enhancements Seen at the Emetrics Summit

Web Analytics Packages for SMEs

Web analytics packages have been around for years and are constantly improving. Several vendors at the Emetrics Summit focus on enterprise size companies -- WebSideStory (www.websidestory.com), Coremetrics (www.coremetrics.com), WebTrends (www.webtrends.com), and the like. However, the packages available for smaller businesses are improving, too.

Google Analytics

It's not news to report that a couple of years ago Google acquired the excellent Urchin software, improved it, renamed it Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/), and gave it away free -- first to AdWords clients and now to all takers. Their primary motive was to assist their AdWords clients in maximizing their AdWords campaigns by making available good data.

As I talked to people at the Emetrics Summit I kept asking: How good is Google Analytics? The answers were:

• "Good."
• "Quite adequate."
• "Great until you outgrow it."

I spoke to John Marshall, president and CEO of ClickTracks (www.clicktracks.com) who offers great web analytics software to SMEs -- software that I use on my own sites.

"John," I said, "I understand that Google Analytics is really good software. They're giving it away free. How can you compete with that?"

His answer, I think, was telling: "They do a great job of reporting what's happening your website," he said. "We provide tools to help you analyze why it is happening." Putting aside for a moment his natural bias towards the superiority of his own product, I think he's right. ClickTracks has built their reputation on a method of tagging and segmenting traffic to a site based on customer behavior -- entering at a certain point, visiting a page, making a transaction, a certain minimum time on site, etc. or a combination of factors. By tagging and studying each segment, you learn things you wouldn't have seen otherwise.

I came away from the Emetrics Summit with a substantially increased respect for Google Analytics. By reason of its free price tag and its overall excellence, it has surely captured the lion's share of the SME market. The task for many who are current Google Analytics users is to learn to get the very most out of this product. It certainly won't do everything. But if you have a business that uses AdWords campaigns heavily, it is a natural to help you improve both your AdWords campaigns as well as your site's overall efficiency.

Scheduled e-mailing of reports

One feature that seems to be appearing in more and more analytics programs is schedule e-mailing of reports.

This is how it works: (a) You set up what you want the report to give you each day/week/month. This might be Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as number of unique visitors, e-commerce sales totals, top performing keywords, average time on site -- or whatever you desire. Then (b) you receive the report via e-mail regularly. This is vital for SME managers and owners. Instead of paying someone to do the grunt work of compiling the KPIs that are important for each company, they will automatically be generated and put in your inbox.

The upside is big -- regular reports to monitor your site's performance. The downside is more subtle. Monitoring is a maintenance activity. If regular automatic reporting means that no one from your company is regularly looking at your stats from inside the software, it could spell disaster, since no one is looking for opportunities to test and improve. My recommendation isn't to take this freed up time and reassign it. Rather, take the freed up time and have your person use it to study analytics, learn better analysis techniques, etc. That's the way forward.

Scheduled e-mailing of reports is available from Google Analytics, ClickTracks, and Indextools, as well as most of the larger analytics firms.

Three Ways to Gather Data

Until this week I believe that there were essentially two ways to capture data about what's happening on a website:

1. Traffic log analysis that uses software on your own webserver or desktop that directly number-crunches the log files on your site that record every time a visitor visits a webpage and calls to see the text and graphics on that page.
2. Page tags that feed information to a third party vendor that analyzes that data for you but stores the raw data on their site.

   But I learned of a third approach:

3. Passive monitoring and capture of data as it goes to and from your company's webservers. This generally requires some kind of separate computer "box" alongside the webserver. Such systems can be quite selective, so the data files accumulated don't become bloated with all the data possible, just the selected pieces of data needed for the particular purpose. Advantages of this approach include: (a) It is less work than page tags or log file analysis. (b) It can track data that isn't easily accessible to page tag or log file analysis, such as order tags and other specialized data. (c) It can be scaled relatively easily. (d) It is fail safe. Since it doesn't intercept your data but only observes it, the program doesn't run the risk of messing up and shutting down the website. It can also work alongside page tag and log file analysis systems to capture data that they don't capture. Two companies that offer this (that I noticed) are Metronone Labs and Webnibbler from CC Media.

Some newer faces

I met several companies for the first time at this year's Emetrics Summit:

• Maxamine (www.maxamine.com) offers analytics to a number of large clients, such as Wal-Mart, Oracle, and several federal agencies.
• Unica NetTracker (www.unica.com) is designed for SMEs. Affinium NetInsight is Unica's enterprise-class solution.
• Indextools Web Analytics 9.0 (www.indextools.com), has offices in New York and development in Budapest. They provide a small business solution for about $50 per month per 100,000 pageviews. They also offer e-mail alerts as well as e-mailing regular reports.
• Webnibbler from CCMedia (www.ccmedia.com), with offices in Seoul, Korea; Beijing, China; and Taipei, Taiwan, has offered web analytics services to Asian companies since 2000. Now they are expanding to the US market with a new office in San Jose, California. Rather than log analysis or tagging, most of their data comes from "Gatherer" which "is like a radar or wiretap" installed inside the client's webserver. It also uses cookies to detect returning visitors.
• Metronome Labs LLC (www.metronomelabs.com) provides passive monitoring and capture of data, designed primarily for large scale, enterprise level sites.

Cookies vs. Other Methods of Returnee Detection

I also learned that cookies aren't the only way to detect those who return to the website. Metronome Labs, for example, doesn't use cookies. To identify returnees they profile every user using eight pieces of information in a complex algorithm, such as browser type, geolocation, etc. The system records those eight pieces of information so when it sees them again it can rather accurately identify the same user again. How accurately? Though accuracy is difficult to measure, apparently accuracy is quite good using this kind of 8-point "fingerprint."

Douglas Watt, Vice President of Product Management for Metronome Labs had a unique insight into cookie deletion. Since his company is called upon to use their passive capture system alongside systems that use cookies, he is able to see data both from his system and others. I quoted to him industry reports of 11% of users deleting cookies weekly. He told me he doesn't see anywhere near that level of cookie deletion in the data he's examined. Hmmm. Maybe some of the data obtained by cookies isn't so suspect after all!