

Ask HN: Launched Startup Project, Simple Analytics Reports, Feedback? - timme

A month ago we posted about a project, Metric Mail, that was in development at the time (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398876). Metric Mail is a service that generates simple Google Analytics reports as PDF and delivers them via email on a weekly basis. It is developed on Google App Engine in Python.<p>We just launched a first (hopefully) working version, which is exciting and scary at the same time.<p>What do you think? Any kind of feedback would be a great help for us, we'd love to hear from you.<p>http://getmetricmail.com<p>Thanks a lot in advance,
Tim &#38; Chris
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carbocation
Interesting. How is this better than doing the following one time:

(1) Login to Google Analytics.

(2) Click 'View Reports' for the site of interest.

(3) In the lefthand menu under 'My Customizations', click 'email'.

(4) If you have one setup already, click its title to edit it. Otherwise,
create one.

(5) Choose the report you want it to send you.

(6) From the Date Range/Schedule dropdown, select among Daily, Weekly,
Monthly, or Quarterly.

In other words, it appears to me that that this can all be done from within
Google Analytics. Perhaps I'm wrong though?

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timme
You're absolutely right. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the setup procedure
and style of Analytics' own report feature. Over the longer term, we will add
other data sources to enrich the information that Analytics provides. At that
point, the difference will become clearer. Also, we made the surprising
experience that even the process outlined by you can be quite challenging for
some website owners who try to avoid as much hassle as possible to get to
their data, even if it means sacrificing a bit of depth. That's the situation
we want to address by making the process as simple as possible, although
(obviously) we have some work ahead of us.

~~~
carbocation
As you or someone else mentioned, your service will probably not stop at just
GA. If so, then this will be quite valuable - creating a unified interface to
all major analytics systems. My vision was too limited when I first thought
about what you were doing. Great work!

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augustflanagan
Clickable <http://getmetricmail.com>

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timme
Cheers :)

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apgwoz
Very easy to setup, I've signed up, so I'll be able to give you a bit more
feedback once I get the first email... I do like how simple it is. Give me a
list of profiles, I select the ones I wanna see.

Edit: Got my first email. I don't like the font, otherwise this is great. None
of my sites are really so critical that I check analytics every day, so
getting this once a week is perfect for me. I'll keep it for now.

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teisho
Is there any thought about expanding this to other analytics packages? We use
Piwik instead of Google Analytics.

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herrherr
If there is enough demand for something like this, we would definitely
implement it.

In general, every tool that provides an API can be integrated.

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AmberShah
I like it. Very easy to sign up. Previously I would log in periodically but
it's easy to start getting compulsive about it.

I really really want Feedburner integration. Those are the two metrics I
check.

I would prefer to receive these every 2 weeks or every month instead of every
week.

