http://www.analytics20.org/tools/microsoft-gatineu-review-first-part/

with regards to privacy concerns on personal information

http://www.analytics20.org/web-analytics/the-importance-of-a-good-information-source/

Cheers,

Very interesting post. Context and intelligent reporting are too often missed out from analytics reports and researching trends becomes a chore.

This is especially true for small businesses who cannot afford the big value packages or analytics staff.

I have just tried to address these issues with a new product at getbasil.com . Your review and feedback will be much appreciated.

With this said, I am very curious to test this new platform out.

Tyler

I was thinking that the other piece of functionality I would wish for is good scenario analysis. The kind of thing that allows users to create scenarios that individually display multiple pages or groups of page at each level; the kind of thing that I think Visual Science has or what CT Pro offers.

I love to experiment with those scenarios.

Hugh

I watched your webinar yesterday and throughly enjoyed the whole affair. You brought up a lot of good basic points that i will be passing on to my client in the future. I was wondering if you had a copy of that presentation or a contact at Click Tracks that I could pester.

Reading your blog and listening to your webinar has created in me an interest in the world of analytics that i never thought I had. I look forward to your future posts and hope I will be able to give back as much as you have given me.

Thank you

Demographic data to help build personas and customer profiles would be bonus, but I don’t see how they would offer that unless they used data from their adlabs.

This morning at the ClickTracks seminar I had mentioned that there are two types of segmentation that I usually use:

1) Segmentation by source, i.e segment groups of visitors from each sources as in search campaigns, organic branded key words, from affiliates, direct marketing campaigns etc.

2) Segmentation by customer behavior, i.e. segment groups of customers who exhibit a common behavior on your site, as in spent x minutes on the site, saw y pages, added to cart and left, submitted a lead or purchased something, came to get the tech support number etc.

The most delightful analysis starts / ends with either of these two segmentation exercises and happens to be so darn unique to the company (or relevant to the time period when analysis is being done).

My wish was sourced from wanting tools to enable both of these to be done “easily”, make it dumb to do this. Some of these can be pre-canned (built in) into to the tool and that is ok. But given the unique nature of each business it can’t all be pre-cooked for the users.

Of course as you can imagine it gets a lot of fun when you combine segments in #1 with segments in #2, can you feel me going giddy at the analytical and insights possibilities? :)

Thanks for a excellent question Bruce, hope my answer was atleast some what relevant.

-Avinash.

Can you elaborate on what good/easy segmentation tools would do?

I would also like to see any ability to upload user data (demographic and others) and then provide an ability to segment based on both web analytics and user data.

I would also like to see an ability to extract the cookies for these segments so that when I find a segment that I am interested in, I build a list of visitors I want and can take actions on them e.g. behavioral targeting.

Being a great fan of Microsoft products for the kind of simplicity and usability it brings to its users. I would like to add the following.

# 1: I hope that with Gatineau Microsoft figures out exactly who their target audience is and then delivers a tool exactly and specifically just for that audience.

I feel this is the core strength of Microsoft, and it handled this well in their existing products with a Wizard kind of interface, by asking the relevant questions upfront to the users in order to show the relevant features for them. You would have come across the same if u have used Microsoft Money or configured MS SQL server for that matter. I guess Microsoft will adopt the same strategy, if not better in this product.

# 4: Ok maybe I will ask for a reporting feature. I hope that all the reports will show one extra time period by default.

Just an extension of your thought, probably Microsoft should look at two different types of reports apart from the regular report. The two reports should be the benchmark report and trend report. The beckmark report could have variables like Same day last week (SDLW), Same day last month(SDLM), Same day last quarter(SDLQ), Same day last year(SDLY) etc for the daywise reporting and change it similarly for different periods like week, month, quarter etc. This could also be activity driven like difference in traffic pattern for current homepage redesign versus last homepage redesign etc

Finally, I would like the tool to be

a. intelligent enough to suggest relevant metrics to measure based on the questions asked like business objective, website objective, marketing objective etc

b. the tool should focus more on asking relevant questions to the marketers/ business users and metrics to be tracked rather than on configuration, implementation and reporting.

cheers
Sivanesan

Great post - I find myself agreeing with you on the Microsoft Gatineau front. The key for them is going to be to balance ease of use and usefulness of reporting.

That also is the same challenge for the established vendors; the more powerful their tools, the more complex they become. What good is a Cadillac, if I can’t get it out of the garage? Many of our clients have bought these tools only to find out later that they’re overkill for their purposes…

What has somewhat surprised me is that to date none of the traditional BI vendors seem to have taken up the gauntlet of the analytics vendors. With sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis capabilities, I’d love to see OLAP-like features in some of the higher end stuff to understand which factors really drive activities (since most times, it’s more than just one thing…)

I’m looking forward to your book!

Keep up the great job - I’m amazed you find time to sleep.

Chris
Ottawa, Canada

the ‘8 day’ suggestion is great: simple, easy to add to a product, yet so useful & valuable.

Looking forward to reading the book,

daniel

I think you wish list seems quite good. In addition to that I can think of the following:

1> Ability to track customers behavior for returning customers with easy segmentation based on week,month etc. eg. Allowing us to segment users into groups like - Those who visited the site last month but didnt purchase , but came back this month and purchased.

2> Allow a lot of custom calculations as metric definitions differ from one company to the other. Visual Sciences allows this but would like to see more functionality for the same.

And at the top of my wish list would be (Though a little unrelated) that business users realize that no tool will give perfect data; But we can still make good decisions from data that may not be 100% accurate due to the complexities involved in capturing online data.

Thanks,
Ashutosh

Your suggestions are very interesting and represent features that would be really useful. I think that it is hard to find vendors that sell a tool that fits like a glove, and integrating WA tools are so frustrating! Most IT departments are so good at blocking us…

As for Jeff’s interview, good questions and good answers; you are probably working quite a lot, with so many interviews, speeches, podcasts, blog, and book. Ah, and a full time job :-) As popular wisdom goes: “A tightened wheel spins better”

Congratulations for your book’s website, it looks nice!

Have a great week.
Daniel

Thanks for your thoughts - those are some interesting ideas. And no, it’s never too late to throw out what you’d like to see in the product.

Cheers,
Ian