

Want to know your users better? Run your own analytics - d2ncal
http://blog.theicebreak.com/blog/2011/9/29/want-to-know-your-users-better-run-your-own-analytics.html

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intev
Nice example, but a major pain point I see is dev time. There is going to be
significant amount of time being spent making the analytics platform, and then
scaling it. It might be better spent on the product itself until it takes off.

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d2ncal
We had a simple dashboard for tracking key metrics, but soon needed reports
like retention breakdown by user.

It literally took is 1.5 days to get this whole thing up and running, and
saved countless amount of time in the future trying to analyze the usage.

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DanielRibeiro
Really? Mixpanel[1] is really nice for doing it, doing it realtime, doing it
across platforms (not just web), and adding the cohort analysis[2] (which
yields the most important non-vanity metrics).

[1] <http://mixpanel.com/>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2986186>

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badclient
mixpanel's got a _long_ way to go. As the main dev leading mixpanel at my
company, it is a pain inserting a line to track every event some person may
need at the organization.

This really holds back an organization where product and dev teams are
separate.

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DanielRibeiro
In my experience, whenever product and dev teams are separate these kind of
skirmishes happen. Let it be tracking or any other kind of features.

Unfortunately bridging this gap is the only way to solve it.

 _Behind every technical problem there is actually a human problem that needs
to be fixed_ [1]

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/scobleizer#p/search/1/1p3vcRhsYGo>

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danfitch
I fully agree. We track millions of events per day and I use hive and hadoop
to do my analysis. Not as user friendly but putting the data into a pivot
table helps alot.

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superjared
The thing about analytics is that it's BIG data. A single user event can
cascade into multiple datapoints that you either have to keep normalized (like
in the SQL example) or denormalize into something more manageable. The latter
of which is really the only way to handle TBs of data, and it's not trivial.
It's a fun job, but it's full time.

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rednaught
Nice to see an article on this subject. I'm of the thought that basic
analytics are an extension of an app's/site's dashboard. You do have a
dashboard don't you?

