This month we introduced Flash and Ajax tracking to nextSTAT so I figured that was a good topic for the latest Tech Tip segment. I just finished watching the final cut, and besides wondering if that’s what I REALLY sound like, I was thoroughly annoyed at my excessive mouse clicking. If I inadvertently send anyone into an epileptic seizure while watching this tech tip, please accept my most sincere apologies. Next month I’ll do my best to keep the clicks to a minimum and I’ll disable the “clicky-click” sound effect.

Gratuitous clicks aside, I think you’ll enjoy this month’s Tech Tip. It shows you several practical examples about how to use the new tracking mechanism to log flash events, ajax events and even link clicks. Give it a listen and let us know what you think!

Today we discovered a bug whereby some downloaded files and exit links were not being tracked properly. There were actually two potential causes for this:

1. Your code tags may not have been placed at the very end of your page. In this case, only links that appeared before the code tags would be tracked correctly.
2. Your download files may have had “.” (periods) in the name (not including the file extension) IE: file-10.25.2007.mp3. In this case our software did not correctly identify the actual file type/extension and would not log the download. (Note: By default, nextSTAT will track the following file extensions as downloaded files: exe, pdf, zip, wav, mp3, mov, mpg, avi, wmv, doc, xls, wpd, ppt, swf, mpeg, gif, jpg, tar, gz, wvx. If your situation requires you to track additional file extension please contact support and we can configure that for you)

We have implemented a fix for both issues and the new code has been pushed live. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

We have rolled out a new feature in nextSTAT that will allow you to track events in Flash, JavaScript (AJAX) and other Rich Internet Application environments. The cornerstone of this functionality is a new JavaScript function called NS_LogEvent that can be invoked from your Flash or Ajax applications.

To track an event in nextSTAT call the NS_LogEvent JavaScript function passing in an event name. The event name can by any string you wish and will appear in your nextSTAT reports as Page Views. It is recommended that you employ a consistent naming convention for your events that will easily denote the type of event that occured. A common approach is to name your event hierarchy as if they were directories on your web server. For example, to track flash button clicks you may want to name the events:

/flashevents/button1/click
/flashevents/button2/click
etc.

Similarly for Ajax events you could use something like:

/ajaxevents/page1/view
/ajaxevents/page2/view
etc.

To invoke the NS_LogEvent JavaScript function from within a Flash application you can use the getURL ActionScript method:

on (release) {
getURL("javascript:NS_LogEvent('/flashevents/button1/click')");
}

Likewise, in your Ajax application you can make calls to NS_LogEvent anytime you wish to record an event in nextSTAT:

function ajaxPage(page) {
NS_LogEvent('/ajaxevents/'+page+'/view');
...
}

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments about this new feature. You can request help in the nextSTAT Forums or send us an email to support@nextstat.com.

by Judah Phillips 

SELECTING A WEB ANALYTICS TOOL is never an easy decision.  There is no standard, scientific way to do so — it’s a bit of an art.  The decision is full of compromises — no one tool or fancy family of tools from one brand will be able to do everything you think or want them to be able to do.  Nor will any one tool have all the bells and whistles you want. 
Lots of resources exist for helping you select a web analytics tool and vendor - from Marketing Sherpa to CMS Watch to a whole slew of consultants.   Even with good resources and the best consultants, it’s still tough to narrow down the selection and really identify what’s important to your business.  The first thing I’d recommend before beginning the due diligence process is asking yourself or your boss the following (relatively) simple questions:

·    How much money can I spend?

·    What resources do I have?

·    Do I have the organizational capability and maturity to run an in-house software solution?

·    Do I prefer to eliminate overhead and technology expense by delegating control of my Web analytics technology and infrastructure to a hosted solution run out of a vendor’s data center?  

·    Do I want to integrate Web analytics data with data from offline systems? If so, what systems and what methods (i.e. web services)?

You’ll have a short list of potential vendors rather quickly.  I would recommend framing your vendor evaluation across these dimensions in the context of how they are relevant to your business needs and goals:
1.    Company and Technology
2.    Product and/or Services
3.    Features
4.    Vendor Organization
5.    Strategic Fit
6.    Cost

Create a matrix so that the attributes presented below are on the left axis and the companies you are selecting are on the top axis.  Fill in the cells with your custom information evaluating a vendor:

Useful attributes for beginning your evaluation of a potential company and technology for Web analytics include:

·    Company Description. Describe the company using publicly available sources.  How long has the company existed?  How solvent is it?  What do customers say about the company?

·    General Technology Description. Explain the technology and how it works. If technology uses OLAP, what happens to the confidence level and confidence interval (i.e. margin of error) when drilling down on the data?  Can I report on every dimension and attribute of available data about a segment or is the reporting limited?  How about when exporting?  

·    Product and Service Capabilities. Assess the overall ability of the vendor’s technology and services organization when compared to the industry.  What percentage of the company’s customers successfully deploys tags and gets complete tag coverage across every page from day one?  Or successfully transfers and correctly parses customized log files from day one?

·    Product(s) Required for Solution. List the product or products required to support the full solution.  Can I run identical queries and get identical answers across all company technologies?

·    Ease of Use. Indicate the complexity of interacting with and navigating through the interface and reports.   Assess the user experience of the GUI from usability and information architecture perspectives. Can I simply find the data I need to gain analytic momentum?

·    Product Updates and Difficulty. Indicate difficulty of product updates and general migration path for upgrades. Does taking advantage of new functionality in a release usually require upgrading the code throughout my Web site? 

·    Real-time reporting latency. Identify the delay or lag in availability of the data within the technology.  Continuous processing?  Batch?

·    Time to Implementation.  Indicate the time to deploy the baseline, out-of-the-box solution. What percentage of the company’s customers have successfully tagged all site pages and/or processed logs within one month after beginning? Three month? Six months? 

·    Ease of Implementation. Indicate the difficulty level of implementing the technology. What percentage of the company’s application can I use if no changes are made to the javascript page tag?

·    Data Collection Model. Identify data collection methods.  Does the company’s data schema simply roll up and report “unique” counts across time periods and delete the underlying data (even if I don’t buy an additional product)?  Does it cost more money to retain full, unsummarized visitor data for 12 months? 24? Longer?

·    Data Retention and Ownership. Indicate if I retain ownership of my data.  If so, for how long and at what level of granularity? For what duration does the company retain visitor data?  Is that the same across all applications (not just a data warehousing component)?

 ·    Integration. Identify features and methods for integration with external systems.  API? Web services? Summary extracts?  Just Excel?

·    Innovation. Indicate the level of innovation perceived by looking into the company when compared to industry competitors.  What do the analysts say?  How large is the company’s engineering organization?  What percentage of overall expense does the company spend on R&D?  Partnerships?

 ·    Security. Identify the security model. Does the tool support integration with Active Directory or LDAP?  What is cost per seat or license?

·    Segmentation.  Identify the flexibility and ease of segmenting data.  What is the total, maximum number of segments available for use “out of the box”? How much more does it cost if I want to increase segments or filters?

More attributes exist.  More questions should be asked.  Truly understanding a Web analytics technology means asking hard questions and assessing the way a company answers those questions to frame your subsequent analysis and guide your selection.

Typical for any business to do some web data analysis is a must do. Web analysis is used to determine sales, profit, loss rate, conversion rates and market interest. However, establishing a strong e-presence for your website niche, there is one tool that you could used in order to collect necessary data that you would need to promote your site.Web analytics has been gaining steady popularity among websites, blogs and portals. It is used to analyze market trends and to identify website users or visitors.
It is also used to determine the behavior of website users. It is a great tool to determine your latest website trends and your visitors or users preferences in terms of site features. Here are the benefits of web analytics.

Web analytics is the process of measuring site statistics and analyzing traffic behavior. Here are there of the main benefits of web analytics.

Number 1: Monitor your visitors and users

With web analytics, you would know how long your visitor stayed in your website, who they are and where they came from. You will be able to know their clickstreams, the keywords they used, and how they came to be in your website (referrer pages, search engines, etc). You would be able to determine how many times a user or a visitor returned to your website and which pages were given preference.

In fact, a web analytics tool would tell you your website usage down to the last specifics. It would tell you about your visitor s nationality and language. It can even pinpoint the city of origin. Of course, it will tell you the IP addresses and the host used for access. Further analysis would reveal if your visitors were there to actually check out your site or if they were mere strays. Most certainly, you will know how many visitors you get daily.

Number 2: It can help you Optimize your website

Once you have carefully studied the actions of your visitors or web users, you would be able to act accordingly in order to optimize your website.
You would also have an idea about the things that need changing and the aspects of your website that may appeal more to your market. You would know which pages are most viewed and which are basically ignored. You would be able to adjust certain aspects of your website that need improvement or adjustments. You could then fix any technical problems; or you could also improve, streamline or reshape site navigation to better assist your site users or visitors.

Number 3: It can help you formulate a sales and e-marketing plan

Web analytics will be able to assist you in preparing for an e-marketing plan and course of action. This will be more effective because your plan would be based on actual facts and not mere probabilities. You would be able to really know what your market wants. By tracking the items which were highly viewed, you would learn which products received the highest response. You would also be able to enhance other programs that you have already employed like pay-per-click or PPC advertising. You would be able to get more clients, as well as monitor and keep your clients interested.

Anyone in the analytics community knows Eric Peterson.  He’s an author, blogger, consultant and general advocate for the community as a whole.  Having recently struck out as a consultant, Eric is now vendor relationship free and spreading the gospel about web analytics process and, at this particular session of eMetrics, Web Analytics 2.0. 

There was a time when the complications of an analyst were centered around more finite challenges like cookie deletion.  But in a world of user generated content, an entire web experience inside one “page view”, automated agents executing JavaScript, content distribution through XML and RSS feeds, and non traditional browsers like iPhone and Blackberry, you can see how the analyst’s life has become a bit more complex.  Eric notes that the markers of web analytics 2.0 are quantitative & qualitative, it captures multiple browsing sessions, measures content distribution, complex event tracking, data from multiple sources, focused on data analysis & optimization, and visitors are persistent as individual indefinitely.  This isn’t simple page or logfile analysis, it’s a “website optimization ecosystem”.

Within that ecosystem, web analytics 2.0 is meant to address actions and measures in both the traditional quantitative sense (web analytics, testing and targeting) and the qualitative sense (voice of the customer, personalization).  For each stakeholder, designer or blogger, programmer or marketer, it’s a lens to focus on the question, “How is my site helping or hurting my customers and prospects?”

For some businesses, web analytics 2.0 can include a measure of engagement, currently a hot topic in the analytics community.  “There is no universal measure for engagement,” says Peterson, but he did use his own company’s site to demonstrate one way to tackle the measure (originally mentioned here).  He suggests this equation:

Welcome to another edition of nextSTAT Tech Tips. We’re really excited about this Tech Tip because today we’ll be introducing a brand new feature to nextSTAT: email report subscriptions. This new feature will let you schedule daily, weekly or monthly emails that can include up to 5 nextSTAT reports per message.

Click here to watch.

We’ve heard the cries…and answered the call. The much-anticipated Calendar Summary report is now available in nextSTAT. Our WebSTAT users have had this report for several years so we thought it was only fair that we share the love with our nextSTAT users.

The new report is available in the Traffic Patterns report category and gives you a quick calendar view that shows your visitors, visits and page views for each day of the month. Enjoy!

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions. Drop us an email or swing by the forums and chat with the developers and support staff.

We are pleased to announce a new feature in nextSTAT that gives you the ability to set up email subscriptions that will deliver nextSTAT reports directly to your Inbox.  This new feature lets you set up daily, weekly or monthly email subscriptions that can deliver up to 5 nextSTAT reports per email to as many people as you want.

To get started with Email Reports, log into your nextSTAT account and click the “My Account” tab.  From there select the Manage Email Reports link then click “Schedule New Report”.  This feature is currently marked as “beta” so please let us know if you find any bugs or encounter any problems.  Please direct all feedback to beta@nextstat.com.

WebSTAT LLC is committed to the continued development of both it’s WebSTAT and nextSTAT product as evidenced by this latest addition.  We value our loyal customers and want to continue providing them with an excellent product and world-class service and support.  If you have a feature request for the engineering team, drop by the forums and let us know.

Please sit back, relax and turn up your speakers to watch our new 3 minute movie Paper Airplane…a lesson in flying outside the box. Click on this link to watch.