An interview with Żaneta Tarnowska, Managing Director of stat24.

Your website is available in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Latvian and Czech. Is your web analytics solution fully supported in all of those languages?

We support our customers in Polish, English, Russian and Lithuanian. We can also provide support in Czech if necessary. Most of the questions are asked in Polish, Russian and English.

Are you planning on expanding your language support?

At the moment it is not necessary to expand our language support, but when our website and web analytics are available in German and there is enough interest from customers we will offer support in German. We will also offer more support in Czech.

What share of your customers are in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and the Czech Republic?

Most of the accounts are registered in Poland followed by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (customers using the Russian version of stat24).

Then there’s Latvia and the Czech Republic. We also have customers from UK, USA, Estonia, Hungary etc. They use the English interface.

What does your typical customer look like? What industry are they in and what size are they?

It depends on which solution you’re asking about. We offer a free version as well as four different paid versions. Our customers include corporations, product and service sales organizations, interactive agencies, portals etc. The free version is recomended for blogs, personal and hobby sites.

Who are your main competitors?

Generally I would say that Google Analytics is our main competitor. It is, however, important to know that stat24 offers not only web analytics, but also web counters, website promotion (stat24 ranking) and a click map. We deliver tools that help increase website usability.

You operate from Warsaw, which is the biggest challenge for web analytics in Poland?

The main challenge for us is to increase our reach, improve our offer and think globally about web stats. We use feedback from customers to make our product satisfactory and userfriendly for all customers regardless of origin.

How difficult is it to convince businesses there that they need analysis and not just reports?

The most important thing is to show customers that analysis is more useful than monthly reports and counters. For Internet campaigns the data is continuously changing. It is very important to know what is happening and react on time. That could for instance mean adjusting a banner if it’s not producing results.

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An interview with German Herebia, regional sales director for the online division of Fox International Channels. He also writes for The Digital Marketing Blog.

How mature do you think the market for web analytics is in Argentina?

It’s not as mature as we’d like it to be, but that fact gives us an opportunity to add value to our services and keep our jobs!

Since 2000 a couple of companies have been selling web analytics services. Certifica.com from Chile and WebSideStory were companies that were used to measure the most important sites: Clarin.com, Bumeran.com, UOL.com, Ambitoweb.com etc.

When the dot-com bubble crashed many sites went belly-up and the survivors decided to save money on premium ASP services and went back to log file analysis using WebTrends or free services such as NetStats.

Which is the biggest challenge for web analytics in Argentina?

The biggest challenge is getting on the CEOs and CMOs agenda. It’s mainly IT departments that are aware of the benefits of these kinds of services, marketing and management frequently aren’t.

There are only a few people who worry about what happen after the click.

All over Latin America we are suffering from a huge disconnect between Internet ad inventory and Internet ad revenues because marketers are only investing 2% of their budgets online.

When we reach the tipping point the need for ROI measurement will impact web analytics usage.

Which are the three most popular web analytics vendors in Argentina?

Certifica.com is big here because IAB in Chile and Argentina selected them in order to make the market more transparent. They hoped to grow the market for online ads that way.

Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore are not offering their panel services here yet.

Agencies can look for stats for the most popular sites on Certifica.com.

On the other hand you have Google Analytics. Since Google opened their Latin American headquarters in Buenos Aires not only webmasters are using their tool.

WebTrends still have a high penetration and some companies like inZearch.com are testing Omniture.

If web analytics companies want to do business in our region, I highly recommend coming here.

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Stone Temple Consulting has done head-to-head comparisons of different web analytics solutions and documented the differences in visitor, unique visitor and page view counts.

Raw unique visitor data

Web Sites
AMD = AdvancedMD
CTI = City Town Info
HP = Home Portfolio
TPD = Tool Parts Direct

Max Differential Per Site - Unique Visitors

Some of the factors that may influence counts:

• Where the JavaScript code is pasted on the page
• Cookie blocking
• Spyware blocking
• Data collection server down time
• Network problems

Read the report

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