

Web Analytics & Startups - destraynor
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/the-future-of-analytics-products/

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matthiaswh
I had hoped they mentioned the two leading open source Analytics options as GA
alternatives:

<http://piwik.org/>

<http://www.openwebanalytics.com/>

Regardless, GA works in _most_ situations at present and will continue to
dominate the market. It is due for some much needed upgrades though.

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destraynor
I've added your two OSS solutions.

Re: G.A. Yeah, free will carry them for quite a while.

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bane
In other news, web analytics software is a very crowded marketplace, the
competition is stiff. Best not to enter it unless you have something really
new and interesting to offer.

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keeptrying
Actually it looks like the market may become a very segmented marketplace with
a lot of competitors. This is usually a good thing and its a good place to be
for a startup. And its obviously a very big pain that needs to be solved with
lots of customers available.

<http://www.ericsink.com/Choose_Your_Competition.html>

A worse situation is a winner-take-all market with only a few large companies
taking 80% of the market: PC-market (Lenovo,Dell), Social Networking
(Facebook,Twitter) etc. Here its much harder to gain a foothold but there are
companies that do it eg: AlienWare in the highend PC-Gamer market.

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bryanh
I've been thinking about building an analytics package geared towards SaaS.
I've found it very difficult to track different types of users and their
associated revenue in tradition analytics packages (GA, GetClicky, even
MixPanel). I've always envisioned a simple analytics package based entirely on
user types. Think visitor, free/demo account, paid account 1st level, paid
account 2nd level, etc...

I think this is an important missing functionality in many of the existing
solutions and I would definitely pay for something that made it dead simple,
would HN agree with me?

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suhail
We're working on it. Trust me. - Mixpanel =)

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bryanh
I used to be a paid Mixpanel user with several accounts. I liked it but it
bothers me that you guys don't break the mold any more than traditional
analytics did.

Why can't I just choose any random set of events as a funnel and view the
breakdown that way? I want to mix and match events on the fly and see how they
perform based on past data. I don't always guess the user path correctly, why
not help me?

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suhail
The scaling complexities are great and challenging and require new
infrastructure.

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dtran
Des has very aptly compiled a list of the leading analytics tools and we’re
honored to be included in this list alongside so many great tools (We use and
love Chartio and Mixpanel).

I also definitely agree that it would be rather difficult for a single
umbrella tool to cover everything, so segmenting the field into traditional
web analytics, event-driven analytics, and social analytics makes a lot of
sense. We hope to become the industry leader in the rapidly growing social
analytics space, but our vision goes beyond that - like you said, Google
Analytics primarily drives Adwords sales, whereas with social analytics, there
are so many more actionable things you can do. Crowdbooster hopes to guide its
users towards that end with our data-driven insights and actionable
recommendations, such as telling you the best times to send out content (and
giving you an easy way to schedule that content for delivery).

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sinaiman
Hummingbird's premise seems like it kind of misses the ball, it certainly
would be cool to see a real-time stream of analytics, but what would you
actually do with that feature? Seems kind of gimmicky, but I agree with the
author in that it could find a home in some other analytics package.

Definitely a solid list of interesting options in the analytics space, thanks
for the share.

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mnutt
As the author of Hummingbird I'm happy to see it get exposure, but it doesn't
serve the same purpose as most of the other packages on the list. It doesn't
tell you where you should optimize your site to get the best conversions.

The purpose of Hummingbird is mostly just emotional--it feels really cool to
watch your site go from 2 pageviews / second to 400 pageviews / second.

At Gilt Groupe, this happened daily and on an order of magnitude larger scale.

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destraynor
Hey Mnutt - that's really cool of you to reply. It's a really impressive piece
of technology.

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tjmaxal
I've often wondered why someone doesn't combine analytics with more
traditional executive dashboarding, ie show me revenue per click, per visitor,
etc. There is more to most businesses than can be measured in just a website.

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michael_dorfman
The E-Commerce functionality of Google Analytics does that pretty well-- or
did you mean something else?

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acgourley
Wow, great to see that round-up on one page.

Question for HN - does anyone value real time analytics for anything other
than a physical LCD dashboard? Personally, I guess it's nice to have, but I
wouldn't pay more for it.

~~~
matthiaswh
Analytics data is only useful if you intend on reacting to it. The same goes
for real time Analytics. Its only useful if you intend on reacting to it _in
real time_.

The usage scenario most people fall back on when I have asked them about it is
a blog post or something going viral. They don't want to wait the couple hours
that Google Analytics sometimes takes to update. Great, you know something is
getting a lot of traction with social media or maybe gathering some links...
what do you do with that?

If you don't have a plan for how to react in real time, there's no sense
knowing your Analytics real time.

( _The other usage case often brought up is knowing when there is an issue
with your website. In my opinion, this isn't the job of an Analytics package
to detect._ )

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mnutt
It's often tough to justify from a ROI perspective, but it turns out that
there is quite a bit of emotional reaction to real time analytics.

Sort of like fear of flying vs. fear of driving, people like to feel in
control.

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tpiddy
you've completely left off mobile analytics!

i'm not sure startup analytics are so different than larger company analytics
(i work for a large ecommerce site doing analytics).

might just be my opinion, sitecatalyst can be overly complicated/difficult to
implement but it really does have some unique strengths also. it is also one
of the more expensive tools though.

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destraynor
Hey TPiddy - Yes, I did. I couldn't cover everything. I might do mobile as a
separate post.

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gshannon
Woopra is missing from this list. It is very solid.

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destraynor
Added

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jayliew
KISSMetrics is missing from this list

