ClickTale Web Analytics and Social Media

I recently did some testing on ClickTale’s web analytics service.  Not only is the service interesting, but they appear to be very effective in using social media.

A few weeks ago I received an email from Tal Schwartz who is one of the co-founders of ClickTale. I can’t say for sure where they gathered my email, but the message was clearly targeted to anybody who writes about web analytics.

I thought that you might be interested in reading and writing about our latest blog post: Puzzling Web Habits Across the Globe – Part 1

In the first of this 2-part series we find that:
• Internet speed has a 6-fold effect on the time surfers spend in-page. This means that for every added second it takes to load a page, a web surfer spends an extra 6 seconds browsing it.
• Dutch and Israeli surfers outsurf all other countries, with extremely fast Internet speeds and short times in-page. They spend 1/3rd as much time as the Chinese do in browsing a typical web page.
• The Chinese experience the slowest Internet speed, which is 5 times slower than that of the Dutch.

I encourage you to read this blog story, add your own comments and share it with your readers.

The last sentence makes it clear that they hope I will write about them.  While I did not do so right away, obviously I am today.  ClickTale did a great job sharing some information in a positive way to somebody who cares about the product/topic.

I just added some information on ClickTales to the Web Analytcis section on this site:

ClickTale uses a different approach to website analysis and optimization. While the traditional web analytics providers shown above provide aggregated visitor data across web pages, they provide movies of browsing sessions.  Similar to the panel software below, ClickTale is best used for sampling.  Trying to watch movies of 1 million visitors would be a bit tiresome.  Typically, just several hundred user sessions are “recorded” to allow you to see exactly how these visitors behaved – mouse click, by mouse click.

ClickTale, in my mind, won’t replace an Omniture or Google Analytics – but it will make a very valuable supplement to those tools.

Basics on Web Analytics Choices

I occasionally answer some questions on LinkedIn and this AM I decided to answer a question on the best Web Analytics tools to use.  I put together the following introductory outline to web analytics.

There are three main ways to track web visitors – each with its advantages:

1. Software as a Service (Saas) Adding a snippet of javascript to every page on your web site and all the visitor information is saved on the vendor’s servers. You access all your data via a web based interface to the vendor’s servers.
2. Enterprise software – Saving visitor logs on your servers and parsing the data to analyze the log files
3. Panel Software – Data is collected from Internet Service Provider (ISP) routers and may also be collected from panels where users agree to have all their Internet usage tracked. This is essentially a large survey of data – not an actual tracking of visitors.

To give you an understanding of my perspective, my experience is based on using web logs from 1997-2000 and using SaaS from 2000-today.

• Is privacy an issue – some companies have rules against external hosting of data. If so – then you need Enterprise software
• Are you concerned about minimizing your internal IT time – SaaS is a HUGE value here
• Are you most interested in comparisons to other sites – than Panel software is of value
• Do you want reporting and analytic s tools – SaaS products have, by far, built in better reporting tools
• Log files will give you a 99-100% sample of visitors, SaaS tools will give you a 95-998% plus sample of visitors and panel tools will give you a 1-5% sample of visitors. In a short answer I can’t give all the details on this – you will need to do some googling / more research
• Do you want integration of statistics with other e-commerce and analytical data – like outbound email campaigns and search engine marketing.  Some of the SaaS vendors have integration with these other vendors and more vendors are adding this integration.
• Do you plan on doing A/B testing of your site and search engine optimization – again the SaaS vendors will have more support/options than the Enterprise logfile
• Do you plan on year over year comparisons – if so consider the IT requirements of enterprise logfiles versus SaaS.
• How quickly do you need to see visitor counts?  – Some of the systems can provide data in real time, some are on a few hour delay and some aggregate and deliver the next day.

The following is a list of some major (not all) vendors

Leading SaaS Vendors

• Omniture – www.omniture.com
  Leading enterprise level vendor – particularly with the acquisition of WebSideStory and Visual Sciences.   They have a large user community and growing integration with their Genesis plaform.
• Coremetrics – www.coremetrics.com
• Google – www.googleanalytics.com (FREE)
  Leading vendor in terms of number of users, but mostly tiny sites (blogs) to small/medium web sites.
• Lyris HQ ClickTracks  -www.lyris.com
  A product I was unfamiliar with till writing this summary.  Looks to have great integration with the Lyris family of products which include email and search marketing tools.   A real strong contendor if you are looking for a suite of products.
• Webtrends – www.webtrends.com
  They have their roots as a Enterpise log application (which they still offer) but branched into the hosted option as well.  Solid product – but the company has had a rough history.  They survived an acquisition by a company that nearly put them out of business.  More recently much of the senior team departed en masse.
• IndexTools – www.indextools.com
  Bought by Yahoo, in limbo right now as to paid/free future.

Leading Enterprise Software Vendors

• AWstats – awstats.sourceforge.net
• Webalizer – www.mrunix.net/webalizer

Panel Software

• Hitwise – www.hitwise.com
• Comscore – www.comscore.com

Offline still works!

I went offline today, attending a seminar on Monitoring Social Media & Responding To Its Messages
in downtown DC.  The seminar was well attended and very well run.

• The majority of the speaker’s time was spent sharing data not telling us about their company’s history.  Instead by sharing data and knowledge the speakers provided solid examples of why a business would want to work with their products/services.
• The seminar included an optional lunch which provided some great opportunities for networking.  The folks I sat with shared some great insights and I have some great ideas for widgets – both for business use and on my personal site.
• The seminar was not oversold – so there was room to stand-up and talk both before and after the session.

One of the things that intrigued me, and I guess it reflects on human nature in general, is that many of the “best” examples of uses of social media by organizations are how they responded to negative social media.  Since my company, Carfax, deals with a similar fear factor of people wanting to avoid a purchase of a bad car, I guess I should not be all that surprised. 

The seminar also reminded me, as I talked to Web Analytics guru Phil Kemelor, of how much data is available in a typical Web Analytics package like Omniture, Google etc.  Lots of nuggets on social media links to your business are in the analytics – but as with any database you need the time and the expertise to pull those nuggets out.