LiveClicks: Exposing the short comings of Google Analytics

If I was to tell you that the most advanced, feature rich, and reputed website analytics program in the world has a serious flaw in it; would you believe me?

Well, its a big challenge to point the finger at someone as big and mighty as Google but to tell you the truth, I believe Google already knows about this flaw and has chosen to ignore it to avoid any disruption in profits from their cash cow – Google AdWords.

So here goes -

We all know that website analytics programs such as Google Analytics track the number of page views, visitors, page loads, unique visitors, entry points, exit points etc.

We also know that these numbers have become a generally accepted standard in terms of reporting the performance of a website. Just the other day I had someone in our board room telling me that their website gets “3 million Hits per month” – Sure.

Now I am going to present a real case study in front of you and you tell me if what Google Analytics and all the other fancy, expensive, and feature rich website statistics programs tell you whether or not your website is making you money or losing you money – Now, I am assuming you have a website because you want it to contribute to your revenue stream (somehow) and that you are interested in the bottom line – your ROI.

Website A on analytics shows the following picture:

From the outset, this looks like a website with reasonable amount of traffic. For the non-technical person, this is a good traffic report showing that the website in question is receiving over 40,000 visits per month.

Now we started running LiveClicks on the same website to see if we can find something different. LiveClicks as you know is a heat map based website analytics program that has just one aim – simplification of website analytics.

Now based on the above analytics report from Google the average visitor count for 1 day is 1,396 visitors.

According to Live clicks its no more than 432 per day. Now this was shocking for us. Immediately we thought, “how could it be that our product was so inaccurate compared to Google” – Until we started digging deeper.

Now did you know, that the 41,888 figure in the report above includes all of the following visitor types?

• Search Engine Bots scanning your page
• Other search engine spyders (doing the same)
• Internet nasties scanning your page for email addresses etc.
• People who come to your website by accident
• People who come to your website and leave without clicking on anything

Now LiveClicks only monitors traffic and click statistics for website visitors – people who come to your website, click on something, go somewhere else within your website etc.

To us, this interaction is the only true measure of someone being a “website visitor”. So none of these rubbish visitor entries are captured by LiveClicks because in the true sense of the word, you cant call Search Engine Robots website visitors – afterall, is Googlebot going to buy something off you?

LiveClicks wants to show you your return on investment from your website and any associated marketing activities supported by it. Now we do that by tracking the number of leads generated off your website and how they convert to a sale.

While Google also shows you something similar (Goal Conversion) but it ties in with their Adwords program and also relies on your estimation of how much value you put on a lead.

That model is flawed.

If I ask you how much you are prepared to pay me for a lead, you may pluck a figure out of thin air and tell me that. But does it mean anything? What did you base it upon. Does this “guess” define your ROI?

But LiveClicks is asking you how much you have spent on your website (A quantifiable, definitive figure) and its associated marketing activities – you then specify the landing page where you capture leads from (much like Google’s goal conversion), we then tell you the

• Cost per visitor
• Cost per lead
• Cost per sale

All of this put together gives you the ROI you need.

Google aint got it! More so, while being the most sophisticated analytics engine ever built, its capturing everything, but based on a fundamentally flawed concept – the definition of a website visitor.

Now I am aware that something like LiveClicks is going to make some of the marketing managers around look like a bunch of “you know what”. After spending 25 days out of 30 to figure out the ROI of their online marketing spend – they still dont have the right figure. Why?

Because they depend on a fundamentally flawed statistics engine to give them fundamentally flawed reports, leading to a fundamentally flawed ROI calculation.

Can you see how little some people know about the internet? And then there are some who know everything about the internet but arent obligated to tell you the truth – why, because it makes you look good.

Have a think about what I have said above – I have to go now for an urgent Skype conversation but will make another blog post from Brisbane next week.

Comments welcome.

Genesis Interactive Monthly Flip Mag

Finally.

The much awaited Genesis Interactive Flip Mag has arrived. This is a monthly publication produced in-house by the team at Genesis Interactive, packed with valuable industry information, new product launch informations, updates on our experiments at the Lab and some other fun stuff.

Checkout October’s Mag here

We would love to hear your feedback about this mag

The unknown public liabilities of Web 2.0

As an industry and as users of the modern Internet we have gone from our Internet childhood of Web 1.0, full of data innocence, data discretion, and truly permission-based advertising.  With the recent growth of personal data incidents we increasingly appear to be living during Internet adolescence, awash in personal data excess and advertising over-indulgence.

In many ways Web 2.0 is not a perfect progression of Web 1.0 aspirations.  Social networking users, for example, appear too willing to give up something of value to them today (their highly personal attributes of social, commerce, and professional dimensions) for what feels right at the moment, but without consideration for its potential privacy and reputation costs down the road.  Though Governor Palin was not a known or active social media user, her personal emails illustrated dimensions of her persona that impacted her social reputation, for better or worse.

The original concept of One to One Marketing was executed within Web 1.0 (albeit not to completion) under the mutual expectation that a user would judiciously share their personal profile with a company for better products and services, and that the company would honor its intimacy with that user.  One to One Marketing was a major technology-enabled advancement but it appeared to be practiced with prevailing business ethics for privacy respect and advertising restraint.  Words such as data transparency, privacy, and identity controls still made their way into coding decisions and advertising techniques.  Put in a more simplistic context, the company still considered the data of the user the property of the user and not the property of the company.  Personal data was parked in the company server, not surrendered for Internet eternity.  Today, this distinction is significant in politics, business, and Life.

A concerning transition has occurred over the last few years as Web 2.0 – the hungrier, more ad-driven web – has taken hold.  People on the Web are infinitely more willing to put it all out there about who they are and companies are far too hungry to make money from it, mainly in the form of the biggest online advertising spend in history.  Last year, over $19.5 B was spent on online advertising, up 110% from 2004.  It’s the gold rush of personal data mining, reaping windfall gains for those companies that can quickly collect it, package it sell it, and windfall losses of personal privacy for those users that too quickly give it up.

Though Governor Palin’s email breach occurred in the context of political sport, future data breaches will become even more personal as Web 2.0 users continue to trust a social web that has yet to be truly tested for privacy protection and data restraint. Until social norms and business laws for personal data governance are more advanced, the liability of personal data infringements will be felt dearly by users and businesses alike.  Who knows what the future holds for the data candidates of the next Presidential race.

Simplifying Website Analytics – For the common man

Easy to Implement: LiveClicks can start tracking your website’s statistics in real time by just inserting one line of code directly onto your website.
Easy to understand: Unlike most website analytics programs, LiveClicks does not bombard you with information that is not only hard to understand but quite often more than you could utilise. LiveClicks provides you with easy to understand, simple, visual reports to show you.

• Where your website visitors are clicking (Heat Map)
• Average time taken for a visitor to click on a link on your website
• Where your website visitors come from (Country and City)
• How many people visiting your website (No more confusion over hits and visits)
• What kind of web browsers are your website visitors using?
• Compare analytics between up to 3 separate date ranges.

Visual Reporting: Instead of showing your website statistics using dull and boring tabular data, using LiveClicks you will find understanding web analytics a joyful experience. Click here to see a sample Heat map and a Lolly Scramble report.

Easy to manage: With a simple control panel you can manage your analytics to exclude certain IP addresses, pages on your website etc. to ensure more accurate reporting.

Flexible pricing options: With various options to choose from, LiveClicks is easy on your budget and guarantees a positive return on your investment.
Why use LiveClicks

LiveClicks is not designed as a replacement for something like Google Analytics. On the contrary, LiveClicks compliments the amazing analytics produced by a comprehensive web analytics program such as Google Analytics.

We find web analytics to be quite intense and require special understanding to make proper use of them. Hence, LiveClicks is our solution for simplifying website statistics so that any business owner, regardless of the amount of technical understanding can make use of website analytics.

We are thinking about a Free version – what do you think?

Website Analytics using Heat Maps

Google Analytics has made understanding website analytics incredibly complex. For the average punter, most of the information provided by Google Analytics is too much to handle.

Since most SMEs are interested in finding how basic stats such as the number of people visiting their website, their activity around the website, Geographical spread etc. we have decided to put together a unique and powerful web analytics system.

LiveClicks (as it is going to be called) is a Heat Map based web statistics engine that overlays the stats on your website in real time -

In my next post I will show you a screen shot of what this tool looks like -
Watch this space.

New Zealand Software as a Service Company with a winning business model

No one can underestimate the potential of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Depending on how they are defined, it is estimated that there are between 35 million and 100 million SMBs worldwide.

They are more nimble than big enterprises, respond faster to their customers’ needs and have a greater growth potential overall.

Like big enterprises, SMBs can also benefit from IT. The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application, for example LiveCRM, can help them maintain their customer bases.

However, SMBs differ from big enterprises in their financial capability and in their ability to absorb losses when an IT implementation fails. Therefore, SMBs have to be extra careful in their IT spending.

In addition, unlike big enterprises, they do not normally have the resources to take care of their IT infrastructure. But, because they exist in such a large number, it is not surprising that a lot of software companies have developed solutions for this huge segment of IT users.

One way to make the software available to SMBs without draining their financial resources is to deliver the software as a service. Thus, a new software delivery model has emerged called “Software as a Service“, or SaaS.

The new model is intended to lower the cost barrier for SMBs. Instead of having to invest in their own servers and software, SMBs would be able to spread their IT costs over a longer period by buying the services that would help them grow and compete against their competitors. The concept of cloud computing explains this well

The SaaS concept is not a novel one. It has been around for some time. A number of companies, including Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) like Genesis Interactive, have been making it available to SMBs.

Now Microsoft has come up with a new wave of SaaS that it calls “Software plus Services”, or S+S.

The basic tenet of both SaaS and S+S is that the software is run and managed by third-party providers. With the S+S, however, some of the software still resides on servers and desktop PCs located on the SMBs’ premises.

Being a software creator, Microsoft naturally wants to perpetuate the need for end customers to buy their software. Come to think of that, although the services can be made available and accessed through the Internet, every user will still need the operating system and a browser on their computer. So, to me, the distinction between SaaS and S+S is not as significant as it may seem.

Three models of S+S will soon be available: An end customer would have all the software on their own server, but a Microsoft business partner would help run and manage it for them.

There will be no need for the SMB to hire a high-salaried IT manager or build their own data center, and therefore they will be able to keep their overhead costs down. Or, the business partner can host the software and deliver the needed services to the SMB. Another option is that the hosting is provided by Microsoft.

Flexibility in delivering the services is necessary, because in some countries there are regulations that prohibit storing and managing a company’s data in an off-site data center.

HTML email standards – what a joke

We are frustrated at the lack of support for some of the most common CSS properties inside HTML emails for certain mail clients. The problem is highly pronounced for mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook 2007 (can somebody please sue them?), Gmail and to some extent Lotus Notes.

While searching the web for an answer we came across a rather interesting website that has decided to take on the battle regarding email standards – www.email-standards.org

The site presents some stuning comparisons of how a simple HTML page is rendered inside various mail clients using a simple ACID test based on 17 CSS properties

The Acid test was performed based on the following CSS properties

Following is a list of what we would like to see every email client support:

• Background-image
• Background-position
• Background-position a:hover
• Border
• Color/background-color
• Descendant-selectors
• Float/clear
• Font family/size/weight/style
• Font-family names with quotes
• Font inheritance
• Line-height
• List-style-image
• Margin
• Padding
• Varying link-colors
• Width/height

We are interested to know your experiences when dealing with HTML content in various mail clients. What are some of the measures you take to avoid poor rendering of content.