

Ask HN: What would be the perfect web analytics tool for your startup? - rokhrastnik

Imagine the best possible (well, perfect:) web analytics tool for your startup. What would it be? What key features? What approach to serving you insights? What key insights would you want from it? What key questions should it answer and how?
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ig1
One that treated my website as a business as opposed to a collection of
webpages.

For example I run a job board, the metrics I care about are how often
candidates come back to look for new jobs, how many candidates look at each
job, how many apply to each job, how this is related to the skill sets for
that job, etc.

Technically I can (and do) get this data out of google analytics using a
combination of regexes, custom variable and custom segments and a little
voodoo. But it's essentially a hack.

Google Analytics feels like I'm using Atari Basic where page urls are line
numbers, when in actuality I want to be writing in Python and be talking about
business objects.

I want a web analytic system where I can tell it about my business objects. If
a user goes to a job page I want to be able to stick some javascript in my
page which goes analytics(object="job", action="view", id="232") and then lets
me do sophisticated analysis on user behaviour.

I don't want web analytics, I want business intelligence for the web.

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ig1
In fact what would be totally amazing would be a web analytics tool for Ruby-
on-Rails that did the kind of analytics I mentioned above automatically based
upon the models you've setup in Rails.

It could even hook directly into your database allowing you to merge your
business object data with your usage data.

~~~
rokhrastnik
Amazing feedback. Thank you very much. Gave me some interesting food for
thought:)

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staunch
Mixpanel and KISSMetrics are both on to the right idea I think, but neither of
them are hitting it out of the park as far as I'm concerned.

I've used both, but just rolled my own system.

