Are you having any luck trying to get people to stop using the term “web analytics”?

Not really! The term “web analytics” is fairly engrained in most organisations. It’s a shame as it positions an industry around the data as opposed to what can be done with the data. But I hold out hope as a few years ago in the offline world companies had Market Research departments but now they have Consumer Insight teams.

What is the number one difference between Europe and North America when it comes to adoption of e-business insights (yeah, I’m a good boy)?

I think the main difference is probably one of scale. It’s possibly easier in the US to put together the business case for investment, not necessarily in the tools themselves but in the resources needed to support the tools, drive value from the tools and some of the additional technologies and processes such as multivariate testing, behavioural targeting, data integration services and so on.

I think another difference is where Europe is on the adoption curve relative to the US. This ties in to the first point as well. My impression is that US companies have in general moved beyond the position of putting in their performance tracking systems and are now primarily focussed on process optimisation. In general terms what we see in Europe is that many companies are still putting in place the core systems so that they can “count the things that count” and “get the right numbers right”. That isn’t to say that there aren’t companies out there doing smart things with their data, there are. However, there are far more organisations looking to get to the stage where they can measure their businesses properly.

You’re a strong advocate of looking at both quantitative and qualitative data. Have organizations become better at combining insights from different sources such as clickstream data, surveys, competitive intelligence, usability studies, focus groups, CRM systems etc.?

Yes I am. I don’t believe you can track and optimise your online business processes just by knowing what page was looked at and when it was looked at. You also have to know who was looking at it and why they were looking at it, what they thought about it, what they did or didn’t do as a result of looking at it and so on.

I think that still too often organisations have their data in silos and don’t extract the benefit from the type of data integration you describe. The situation is getting better though as more of the tools make it easy to integrate data from different data sources. However, though there may be the ability technically to integrate data organisations still will need people who can understand, interpret and drive insights from the various data sources.

What is your number one advice to companies wanting to stay ahead of the game in 2007?

Recruit! If you haven’t already got one, recruit someone to drive value from the investments you have already made in technology and data and to ensure that you continue to get a return on those investments in the future.

Neil Mason is the co-founder of Applied Insights. He started his career at ACNielsen and moved to the client side when he became Chief Knowledge Officer, and later Chief Marketing Officer, for QXL. For them he implemented a customer data warehouse and a web analytics solution across twelve European markets. Neil has a BA in Engineering from Cambridge University, and an MBA and a Postgraduate Diploma in Business and Economic Forecasting.

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Dan Zambonini is the Technical Director for Box UK, the company that brought us clickdensity.

How do you position clickdensity on the market? What does your target audience look like?

We’ve always been careful to position ourselves away from standard web analytics, and more towards usability and information architecture. We prioritize features that aren’t available in existing products, and especially those that give insight into how users interact with the page.

Whereas most analytics packages are used to reactively analyze basic success metrics, clickdensity users tend to use the system to pro-actively evaluate and refine their websites. This is very much our direction and vision, we want clickdensity to become the first port-of-call for organizations that want to assess their existing web presence, and then be given concise, visual feedback on how and where to make improvements. With this grand vision in mind, we’ll be expanding our current feature-set quite broadly, so as to not just cover usability and IA, but also have visual means for assessing online marketing, SEO, buzz, accessibility, and other factors that are important to a modern website. Within each of these areas, we’ll be bringing something unique, innovative, and easy to use.

Our current audience is made up largely of commercial organizations of all sizes, from niches to multinational brands, across the world. Within these organizations, we’ve largely been targeting the marketing and IT users. However, with some of our upcoming features, we’re hoping to expand our reach, and get more interest from the online geeks (such as me), bloggers, developers and people who shape the web.

What is your advantage to competing solutions?

We’ve actually recently put a page on our website about this, as we don’t talk enough about how sophisticated our product is, in comparison to our nearest competitors. Basically, I think if you’re interested in performing any kind of real analysis of your site (rather than just using these products as some kind of one-off ‘
“novelty”), clickdensity is the only real option (I say this with utmost honesty and sincerity!).

With that in mind, I fully encourage your readers to try all the available options on the market (like ours, most of them are quick to set-up and try out). It should quickly become obvious that if you want to get down to the really useful information, across your entire site, then ours is the only system of its type that offers the kind of filtering and reporting tools you need. Apart from the feature-set we currently offer (including our unique click-time graphs and integrated A/B testing suite), we also update our product with useful new features more often than any other competitor.

Do you have any particularly exciting case study you could tell us about?

Ah, good question! We’re currently working on two incredibly interesting case studies with existing clients (that can’t be named as of yet!). These case studies are really interesting because the clients in question spend a lot of money on their websites, on focus groups, usability studies, surveys, and high-end analytics packages. Even with all of this money invested and previous work, we managed to identify simple, quick, valuable refinements within minutes of putting clickdensity on the sites! We’ll be publishing these case studies in the next month or so (once they’ve gone through the relevant sign-off procedures).

All I can tell you at the moment is that customers already benefitting from clickdensity include multi-national banks, global charities, national newspapers, and some of the largest retailers in the world. Even though this is quite an impressive list, what excites me most is that we also have small, independent websites also benefiting from clickdensity, as they have access to exactly the same tool as multi-billion dollar companies, which levels the playing-field somewhat!

Do you have any new features planned that you can tell us about?

We try to keep as much secrecy as we can around our upcoming features. We’ve noticed that some of our past improvements, like differentiating non-linked clicks in our click graphs, or introducing click-time recording seem to suspiciously appear (albeit in reduced form) in competing solutions a few months later.

I’ve just taken a look at our internal road-map, which is divided into short, medium and long-term goals. In the short-to-medium term (3 months), we have sixteen planned additional features, and that will probably increase as we think of new ways to maximize the value of the datasets we’re building.

Within the next month, we hope to launch (or at least begin beta testing with customers) our API, which will be something of a first for our industry. This will also allow us to create other new features, such as a browser toolbar that gives you access to your reports whilst browsing your website (without needing to visit the central reporting website). We’ll also start to introduce some new features that take us into the online marketing/SEO/buzz analysis market, like RSS feeds for various metrics (such as a feed for new referrers). We’re certainly not going to be bored any time soon!

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Syntesio, another company that created a chat solution, built a web analytics tool to support chat. Is that how you view your web analytics as well, as merely a means of measuring chat?

Most Web analytics applications only measure web statistics. Most chat applications bundle web analytics. ChatStat not only produces statistics based on website traffic, but also on live interaction activity as well. For chats and calls we supply all normal web stats as well as sales productivity graphs, top sales person, top selling item, top category, top product and top customer. We measure operator productivity in terms of minutes worked per hour, minutes idle per hour, breaks per hour, mouse travel per minute, keys typed per minute, number of calls in, number of calls out, total number of calls and operator popularity based on an exit poll.

So as you can see the primary difference between us and other stat programs is driven by the fact that we offer a full breadth of web analytics. No one else offers this as well as the mash-up of IM and VOIP all in one solution.

How does your web analytics solution differ from other solutions?

ChatStat uses a patent pending technology called MovingGraph.

MovingGraph allows your graphs to move. This means that you can search through your data in a whole new completely unique approach, spotting trends that were never before visible using the old, still graph, technology. Gone are the days of entering a start and ending date, and waiting for a graph to be produced! MovingGraph includes zoom, scroll, pan, extrapolate, and explore modes. You can instantly view vast amounts of data in a graph that updates 30 times per second. Using the left and right mouse buttons you can zoom in and out, and dragging your mouse outside of the graph area allows you to quickly pan left and right. Our unique interactive drag and drop time span selector bar is also far better than the clunky calendars our competitors use. Over 40 high speed MovingGraph graphs for site statistics can tell you just about everything you would ever want to know about your website traffic. It will tell you were your traffic is coming from, how long they stayed, what path they took through your site, what page they left and much more! There is also a complete set of graphs to help you with search engines.

It is also important to remember that these graphs are presented using MovingGraph technology. What this means is that you can easily determine the top results by simply dragging, zooming, panning, and exploring. Spotting trends will become simple and intuitive for the first time! This will be accomplished by using a combination of data acquired by analyzing actual invoice and client data from within a shopping cart system, and then presenting it with MovingGraph technology.

Who do you think can benefit the most from your solutions?

1) Any small to medium Size (5 - 200 employees) companies with websites.

2) For sales these would be companies that promote products and services on a website. Particularly attractive are those products which have a high value (cars, motorcycles, homes, boats, jewellery, etc) where the consumer wants to have the confidence and service level of human interaction.

3) For customer service and support. Anyone who wants to offer instant interaction for customers or prospects that visit their site.

What share of your customers/users are located in Europe?

Approximately 40%. We have a unique on-the-fly language translation solution that is particularly interesting for European and Latin based businesses.

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