June Dershewitz on Web Analytics

10 Must-Have Analytics Tools for Small Business: June's Picks

I was recently one of several people interviewed for an Inc.com story about Web analytics tools for small business.  My fellow contributors included industry thought leaders such as Bryan Eisenberg and Eric Peterson. The resulting article provided an excellent summary of our collective opinion. I’ve chosen to publish my personal top 10 list here so you can see the full range of my own recommendations.

Taken together, the tools on my personal list cover the full palette of Web analytics: quantitative, qualitative, optimization and competitive analysis. I've also thrown in a couple of tools you can use to measure emerging media such as social and mobile.

Every tool on my list is either low-cost or free.  Think of them as starter tools for each type of measurement category. 

If you’re having trouble getting funding for expensive-but-important tools, try this approach: use low-cost tools to showcase some early successes with limited budget, then win over management and use that as leverage to get funding.  (Credit goes to Avinash Kaushik on this clever solution to the budget issue.)

Without further ado, here are my top picks for broad-coverage, low-cost, high-impact analytics tools for small business.

Category: Quantitative

1) Google Analytics
See where your visitors come from, what they do on your site, and how often they come back. Setting up goals allows you to perform the essential analysis function of tying behavior to outcomes.

2) Crazy Egg
Generate heatmaps that show you exactly where your visitors are clicking.

Category: Qualitative

3) 4Q Survey
A simple 4 question survey that allows you to monitor online task completion.

Category: Optimization

4) Google Website Optimizer
Multivariate and A/B testing tool. Run different versions of content live on your site to determine which one produces the highest conversion rate.

Category:  Competitive

5) Compete
Compare your own site traffic alongside your competitors.

6) Google Insights for Search
Compare search volume trends within your industry.

Category: Emerging Media

7) Bitly
Shorten and share URLs through social media platforms, then track traffic volume over time. Adding a "+" to the end of any bitly URL will allow you to see stats for that link - so you can use it as a competitive tool, too.

8) Facebook Insights
Dashboard that shows usage and demographic info for your Facebook Page.

9) Percent Mobile
Simple tool that allows you to see the percent of visitors to your Web site who use mobile devices.

Bonus Addition

10) Brain Power
You won't get anywhere with these tools unless you actually have someone to use them and interpret results - so make sure you have a dedicated analyst who can feed recommendations back to your business.

Book Review: Click by Bill Tancer

I love data. No, no, I mean it. When I saw Bill Tancer speak at a conference a little over a year ago he closed with that sentence, in fact a clever plug for his corporate blog: ilovedata.com. I gladly took the bait. Recently, when I heard that Tancer had published a book about his beloved data, I snapped that up, too.

The book is Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters. It is, chapter by chapter, a collection of analyses focused on a single data set, namely the search and clickstream behavior of 10 million US-based internet users. 

On the surface Click has genuine pop culture appeal, with coverage of topics like porn and fashion and phobias and rock bands. In that respect it's readable by anyone who uses the internet and wonders what we - the collective "we" - are doing online. At the same time I believe there's extra value for those of us who work with web activity data for a living. 

As an analyst there is nothing quite so satisfying as taking some data, asking and refining and asking questions, turning the data over and over until interesting observations pop out. Tancer writes about his observations, but he also writes about the processes leading up to his observations. In no way is Click meant to be an instruction manual for data analysts, and yet it does a pretty good job of describing the act of analysis. If you want to know what it's like to be a data analyst, read this book.

Some reviews I've read assert that Click is a plug for Hitwise and its own slice of competitive intelligence data. I disagree. Taking a step back, I think that smart analysts can draw from the book and relate it to whatever data they happen to have at hand. In particular, site-side web analytics data from tools like Omniture and Google Analytics, while offering a fundamentally different view of the internet, can still be used effectively to uncover trends in search behavior a la Tancer's approach. Simply ask and refine and ask questions, then present your observations with the same enthusiasm that Tancer does in Click.

Now that I've written this review I can hand off the book to my fellow Semphonic data analysts.  There's a waiting list. We all love data.

Movie Review: Untraceable

Last week San Francisco Web Analytics Wednesday took a trip to the movies.  Just how often do we get to see a blockbuster film about web analytics?  Well, if Untraceable is the best Hollywood can do, let's hope it never happens again.

Fact: 60% of all Untraceable audience members were Web Analytics Wednesday attendees, but only because our theater was nearly empty.  At least this made it easier for us to heckle without worrying that we were disrupting anyone else's experience.

Setting:  Scenic Portland, Oregon.  Familiar territory for me because I grew up there, it's also the noted home base of WebTrends and Web Analytics Demystified.  The only office shown in the movie, however, was the FBI's cybercrime unit.  In terms of product placement, the good guys were using Windows, the bad guy didn't use any recognizable software.  FBI bookshelves contained only plain white binders, none of the web analytics books we know and love. 

Gore: A sick and twisted individual builds torture contraptions to kill his victims by way of a web site.  The more viewers he gets watching the live webcam, the faster his victims die.  He's even thoughtful enough to install an LCD readout in the torture chamber in order to track real-time viewership.  As news spreads, the killer's site grows in popularity and the carnage accelerates; it's word-of-mouth marketing gone very, very wrong.  Nasty bloody scenes feature high-wattage light bulbs, battery acid and one very sharp rototiller.  I hid behind my popcorn bag the whole time.

Plot: Completely transparent!  One astute viewer among us correctly guessed the whole plot halfway through the movie.  A title like "Untraceable" would suggest the bad guy had a knack for covering his tracks, which he did, but there were still some major holes in the plot.  We spent the entire show devising ways to isolate the perp based on his actions.

Bottom line: Worth Netflixing, I suppose, if you can tolerate a serious bloodbath.  But honestly, get The Silence of the Lambs instead.  Untraceable stole everything from Lambs, right down to the movie poster.  Granted the original doesn't have anything to do with web analytics, but as far as the genre goes it's light-years better.

Rants and Raves about WebTrends Visitor Intelligence

Three weeks ago I attended the WebTrends Engage conference; not long thereafter I wrote this chatty post about the great party, my penthouse suite, and then a little about one of the new WebTrends products, Score.  Here it is, 3 weeks later, and the commercial web analytics vendor world has undergone a major upset - WebTrends has given 4 top execs the boot in the wake of Omniture's acquisition of Visual Sciences.  It will take a while for the dust to settle.

Current drama aside, I'd like to share my thoughts on WebTrends Visitor Intelligence (VI).  At Engage I sat through a couple of hours of live demos as well as a small-group private session.  Overheard while I was there: 

"Most marketers wouldn't know what OLAP was if it jumped up and bit'em in the butt."

Is that so, marketers?

VI is an OLAP tool.  More precisely it's a browser-based drag-n-drop reporting interface for visitor-level web activity data stored in a relational database, aka WebTrends Marketing Warehouse. 

If you choose to integrate external customer-level data into Marketing Warehouse you can pull attributes like gender and income and age - and whatever else you know about your customers - into VI.  Can you imagine being able to easily drag gender or income or age into any web activity report, either as a dimension or as a filter?  Can you imagine being able to easily drill all the way down to the visitor level on any report?  Isn't this flexibility something we all want?

The VI and Score live demos at Engage were packed to capacity, even at the end of a busy conference day in a city full of recreational distractions.  Based on that observation I'd say, yes, there's considerable interest in a) WebTrends' new products, and b) visitor-level web activity data in general.

Queryable visitor-level web activity data is nothing new.  As an industry we've been doing this for years, but it's been the exception rather than the rule.  If there's any hope of bringing visitor-level detail into mainstream use, I think WebTrends has made a valiant effort with VI.  If, it turns out, it's simply too expensive and too cumbersome to ever gain traction, why on earth do we keep trying?  When are we ever going to get it right? Answer me that, vendors (when you're not busy cannibalizing each other).

Although I don't want to go too deep into the nitty-gritty details of VI, I do want to mention a few likes/dislikes:   

Like

• Available as both on-site and hosted solutions.  If you've got privacy concerns, great, get the on-site solution.  If you lack IT resources, great, get the hosted solution.
• Relational database back end, making external data integration possible.
• Simple Excel export from VI - no SmartReports.  Right on.  SmartReports aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

Dislike

• WebTrends Analytics will continue to exist in parallel with VI.  There are some reports you can only get in VI and some reports you can only get in Analytics.   Sounds confusing.
• I don't believe VI will meet complex segmentation needs, especially when it comes to path-based questions like, "Give me the visitors who did x and then later did y."
• SDC page-tagging is a requirement for VI - so VI is not an option if you use logs as your data source.

VI is a great start; I would love to see it get adopted and successfully used.  My fellow bloggers Jacques Warren and Anil Batra also attended Engage and have posted their reviews of VI.   Aaron Gray and OX2 have both mentioned involvement in VI proof-of-concept projects; I look forward to hearing more about their experiences.