
AnalyticsRock - insightful reports for Google Analytics users (alpha) - ColinWright
http://analyticsrock.com/
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ig1
AnalyticsRock is my side-project, so if you have any
questions/comments/suggestions/etc I'd love to hear them.

I originally built it for personal use because I was fed up with having to use
Excel to do the kind of traffic analysis that I needed for my own startup. But
I figured other people might find it useful as well, so here it is!

If you want to get an idea of what it does:

* Shows user behaviour (visits,bounces,pages viewed) by time of day, day of week, number of visits and interval between visits

* Gives you rank-table view of keyword & referrer showing how your traffic from various sources has changed over time.

* Visitor browser breakdown that sensibly merges together versions of browsers that don't have significant differences in terms of features.

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moconnor
Why not list these on the landing page? There's not much on there to convince
someone to share their data with you at the moment.

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ig1
Done.

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Sembiance
So I tried it out and have a few comments.

First, the 'Search Terms' report does not appear to be working right. The
terms appear, but it lists '10' for the number of visitors for all terms, yet
Analytics shows these search terms bringing in thousands and thousands of
visitors. Also the vast majority of terms show no 'Previously' value and those
all show 'NaN' in the Diff field.

Second, the 'Referring Sites' page has a bug where it shows 'Search Term
Analysis' as the header when your on the page. Also, this Referring Sites
report would be cool if it had a line graph. The top 10 referring sites, each
represented as a line. The X axis is time, the Y axis is number of visitors.
Go 12 months back, each month getting a data point. Also, being able to sort
this table by 'Diff' would be nice.

Third, the 'Browsers' report has a minor bug in the labels can overlap each
other. For example here is my report and I'm guessing the green is IE 6, but I
can't read it: <http://telparia.com/ringbug.png>

Lastly, you should strongly consider using some more interactive charting
library. I highly recommend Highcharts: <http://www.highcharts.com/>

Overall, it was pretty nice. I liked the time of day analysis report the best.
I've already un-linked my account, as I didn't see any disclaimers that you
won't use my data elsewhere or get data when I'm not viewing the site. You may
want to add a notice somewhere that the data you get from analytics is never
saved in your database or shared with anyone else.

Note: I may sign back up again in the future, once you've had some time to add
more reports and grow a bit :) Good luck :)

One more thing: I did not see any way to contact you on the site. No e-mail
address, or feedback form. So I had to post my bug report and comments here :)

One more bug: The browsers report showed 335,107 IE visitors. Google analytics
for the same time period says 1.8 million visits by IE users.

~~~
ig1
Did you have more than a 1000 search terms ? - if so I think I figured out the
bug, and it should be fixed now (as is the title bug).

Unfortunately none of my sites have more than 1000 search terms (that's Google
API's default for the max number of results returned) so I wasn't able to test
that scenario.

All the others suggestions are good too, I'll add them to my todo list.

The difference in numbers might be because my report is showing unique
visitors as opposed to GA which shows visits, if you switch to visitors in GA
it should hopefully give you a closer number.

As per privacy: I'm not saving any data (although I might in future for
caching purposes to speed up performance), although I am storing the oauth key
so you don't have to give permission every-time you visit the site. I won't
share the data with anyone and I won't use the data for any purpose other than
for producing the reports. I'll write up a proper privacy policy and link it
from the site.

I'm also bound by Google's API policy which legally prevents me from doing
anything evil with the data without permission and is probably much more
enforceable than a website privacy policy!

The website actually only went live last night, so it's still got kinks I'm
working on ironing out :)

~~~
Sembiance
So I just tried to re-register with your site and got an Application Error.
Tried to log in again, then it worked.

I did indeed have more than 1000 search terms, and you have indeed fixed it.

Nice job :)

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sudonim
Awesome work Colin! I've been wanting to do something like this with analytics
for a while. In terms of stuff to add, look at making the reports actionable.

Like for example on the browser report, what percent of users are coming to
the site on a "mobile" device? If it's x %, then you should have a mobile
optimized site.

Also, think about use cases. If I'm a blog site, I probably want to know "What
are my most popular articles?". If I run a SAAS site, I probably want to see
something like cohort metrics about my customers.

I wouldn't recommend letting users add their own reports for the short to
medium term. I would come up with a few views of GA data that people are
willing to pay for.

~~~
ColinWright
Disclaimer: I didn't write it, I just submitted the link. The real author has
contributed elsewhere in this discussion.

I'd really appreciate it if you'd take the time to edit your comment for
correctness of attribution while you have time. You have about 85 minutes from
now ...

 _Added in edit: I looked to contact you separately about this, but you don't
have contact information in your profile. You now have 65 minutes remaining
..._

~~~
sudonim
Sorry. I missed the deadline.

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mijnpc
Hi Colinwright,

Amazing tool :D

It's really handy.

One of the reason that I use Clicky a lot, is because I don't have to search
for the data, I already have, as is the case with GA.

You always have to dig a lot before you find all the relevant information.

One suggestion:

\+ in the Search terms section, is there a way if you could implment the
search engine -- filter by search engine? I get traffic from www.google.com
but also from www.google.nl

In either case, have fun and good luck

~~~
ColinWright
Just to be clear, if you read elsewhere in this thread it should be obvious
that I didn't write it.

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tm65atcolumbia
Simple to use, clear and useful reports. Like the others have said, more
reports would be nice. I'd want those about the users, time spent, country of
origin, etc.

As of now, if you could make my specified time range stick, such that it is
automatically applied when I switch to another report without reverting back
to the default 30-day range, it would be immensely helpful.

Thanks for the good work.

~~~
ig1
That's doable, the pages already accept parameters that can override the data
period, I'm just not using them at the moment. I'll add it to my todo list.

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michael_dorfman
Very nice. I tried it out, and liked it.

I'd pay for it, if you added other useful reports.

One small thing: on the Search Term Analysis, keywords that did not appear
last month show a blank instead of a zero, which makes the "Diff" field show
up as NaN. Not a problem, exactly, but I think it would be more useful to show
0, and the difference from zero.

~~~
ig1
Any suggestions for the type of reports you'd find useful ?

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michael_dorfman
Nope, I'm afraid not. If I knew what reports would be useful, I'd probably
make them myself.

I'd love to know how I rank for the keywords that bring me traffic, but I'm
not sure if there is an easy way to get that from Google.

~~~
ig1
You can't get it from analytics, but if you signup for Google Webmaster Tools
it'll tell you your keyword rankings.

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biaxident
Really like the idea. Google Analytics tracks loads of information, but it
always takes me forever to actually find the information that I want.

Creating these types of reports is really useful. However, if I was to pay for
it I'd like to have more reports and some flexibility in creating them.

~~~
ig1
The tricky thing would be to have flexibility without complexity.

What sort of reports would you like to be able to create ?

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neilkod
Tom Kyte fan, by chance?

[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Aasktom.oracle.com+%22analytics+rock%22)

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mrclark411
Does the time of day report take into account the user's time zone (by
location)?

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ig1
No, time of day is based upon the timezone of your profile (shown when you
pick your profile).

I looked at doing it by time-zone but Google just doesn't have enough
information, it doesn't store user timezone and the location data isn't good
enough. The US alone has nine timezones with some states having multiple time
zones. Trying to adjust for timezones accurately would require a huge amount
of work.

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tmcneal
This is really cool and super simple to install... Nice work!

