Web analytics tools have seen little improvement ever since Google bought Urchin in March 2005 and turned it into Google Analytics. With no real time option and a large paying user base, Omniture’s SiteCatalyst (now Adobe) web analytics solution did not face much competition and hence had no incentive to improve its usability. Both solutions were initially created by engineers not marketeers and are heavily focused on technical aspects of websites, most of which do not provide any value in optimizing the site for sales or marketing purposes.
If you are looking for actionable web analytics that are real time, I suggest that you check out Clicky. It features a very simple to use user interface that lets anybody set up goals and alerts in a Minute. It also does not hurt that is has a cool iPhone app and is super cheap: for $59/year you basically get the same functionality that Google is trying to sell at $150,000 (the Analytics Premium package). You can check it out here.
In the interest of full disclosure: I am a Clicky client as well as affiliate and make a few bucks when you subscribe to the service coming from my link. But I would not endorse it if I did not use it myself 🙂
Category: Search |
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Check out DAR.FM my friend Michael Robertson’s new Internet Radio Recorder. Users can go to DAR.fm to search the programming schedules of more than 600 music and talk-radio stations around the country and schedule the site to record any radio broadcast. The recordings, complete with ads and DJ chatter that users can fast-forward through, are then stored at user’s password-protected account that can be accessed from any computer or smartphone.
Category: Search |
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Recently I came across a little frequented page on Google’s corporate website: Google’s Philospohy Page and read one paragraph that struck me: “Democracy on the web works. Google works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. Google assesses the importance of every web page using a variety of techniques, including its patented PageRank algorithm which analyzes which sites have been “voted” the best sources of information by other pages across the web. This technique actually improves as the web gets bigger, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted.”
Where this might be a nice thought but the truth is that this paradigm is inherently flawed. As with the currently practiced version of US democracy this system is actually more likely to promote mediocrity and populism than value. Just as political system claiming to be democratically tend to promote schemers that learn to game the system than putting the most qualified subject matter expert in position of power. Moreover, though Google likes to position itself as close if not within the camp of open source proponents it inherently has a profit-driven motivation forced on to it by its status as a publicly-traded for-profit corporation with fiscal duties towards its shareholders (not its users).
Consequently top ten SERPs are still mostly dominated by tolerated Search Engine Spam, arbitrage pages and of course marketing messages generated by SEO experts. Nothing will change until the paradigm changes, which is unlikely to happen soon (see my outline for a better search engine).
Category: Search |
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Web analytics tools have seen little improvement ever since Google bought Urchin in March 2005 and turned it into Google Analytics. With no real time option and a large paying user base, Omniture’s SiteCatalyst (now Adobe) web analytics solution did not face much competition and hence had no incentive to improve its usability. Both solutions were initially created by engineers not marketeers and are heavily focused on technical aspects of websites, most of which do not provide any value in optimizing the site for sales or marketing purposes.
