Even more Web Analytics Dashboards Fun in Excel 2007!

Update 2010-05-07: If you want to use this dashboard with Google Analytics data, check out "Tatvic enhances immeria's Excel web analytics dashboard".

Attention Internet Explorer users (MSIE)! When clicking on the link to download the .xlsx template, MSIE wrongly try to save it as a .zip file, which it's not. Make sure to rename the file with the proper .xlsx extension (or better yet, switch to Firefox!)

A couple of weeks ago I published "Web Analytics Dashboards: fun with Excel 2007", it got on Stumbled  and became one of the most visited article. A while back I also published Box plots and whisker plots in Excel 2007 and it consistently receives a lot of views.

So here's an update of Web Analytics Dashboard Fun with Excel 2007!

What is it?

I'm glad to release "Web Analytics Dashboard Fun" (Microsoft Excel 2007, 85KB .xlsx), a free Microsoft Excel 2007 template for web analytics professionals. It can be used for learning web analytics, Excel in general or as the basis for more elaborate dashboards. The goal is to use only Excel 2007 features and ease customization of the template and update of the data.

Why Excel?

As a teacher of web analytics and a web analyst myself, I noticed people often struggle to define KPIs and get going with dashboards. My clients use different web analytics tools, be it Omniture, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Xiti or others. Although some of the tools offer very advanced dashboarding and analysis capabilities, there are a number of reasons why you would want to use Excel:

• Control the information being distributed
• Publish the information in a format people are used to (either Excel or PDF)
  
• Avoid granting access to the web analytics tool itself
  
• Include other sources of data
  
• Ease "month to month" and "year to year" analysis
• Ease analysis of major segments (such as two countries, two sites, etc.)
  
• Include the analyst comments and evaluation

Get Web Analytics Dashbaord Fun!

Based on the feedback I got, and some further tweaking to make the dashboard more generic and easier to modify for your needs, I'm releasing "Web Analytics Dashboard Fun with Excel 2007 v1.1". To get started there are just a few steps:

1. >>> Get the template <<< (Microsoft Excel 2007, 85KB .xlsx)
   (Get the Excel 2003 version - with some features disabled)
   
2. Right-click on the S1 and S2 radio button and "Edit Text" to your licking
   
3. Change "Success Event 1" through "Success Event 3" in all worksheets
4. Update the data in WebDataS1 and WebDataS2
5. Voilà!

Once you are comfortable with the spreadsheet, you can modify the dashboard to add/remove/modify KPIs to your liking. Although this step requires more work, it should become fairly easy once you understand the general pattern of the spreadsheet.

Feedback, comments and contribution

One of the goal of immeria.net is to "make it easy to do web analytics" by providing educational ressources, documented processes and tools that are both easy to use and non-specific to a vendor ("product agnostic"). You are free to use this template, modify it and even redistribute it as long as its not for profit.


Web Analytics Dashboard Fun by immeria.net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

WASP v0.50: Launched on a 4th of July

Another step toward the Web Analytics Solution Profiler/Debugger (WASP for short!) v1.0 milestone. This interim version includes some great enhancements!

• Did you know support teams, implementation specialists and trainers working for the web analytics market leaders are using WASP? Vendors: read on for specific details on how to get involved!
• Top consulting agencies from all around the world are also using WASP! Agencies: I'm looking for case studies, contact me to get involved!

In the coming days I will provide short feature/training videos explaining how to get the most of WASP.

Enhancements, new and fixed

• Multi-tool tabs: some people complained the sidebar was becoming un-usable when multiple tools were found on a single page. Now the sidebar shows a two-level tabbing interface, the first one being the tool category, the second the specific tool. Check out Avinash Kaushik blog to see it in action, I think he has the most tools I have ever seen on a site!
  
  
• Site crawling: the crawling feature, introduced in the previous release, now use a sophisticated wizard that makes it easy to crawl from any web page, a sitemap or use a list of URLs from a file. You can set the crawl depth and max pages, follow robots exclusion rules and even include/exclude specific pages. A status bar shows progress and you can pause/resume the crawling process. Important: the crawling is limited to 100 pages in this version.
• Self-disclosure when crawling: WASP will report itself by modifying the user-agent string. WASP also makes it easy to exclude crawling trafic by showing the exact IP address being used.
  
  
• Reporting: the CSV output has been improved and there is now a slick web-based reporting interface. The tags are now broken down by columns, making it very easy to spot pages with missing tags or invalid ones.
• Save your sitemap! Once a site crawl is completed, you can save to a file compatible with the sitemap.xml standard.
• Multivariate testing highlighter: if the sidebar is shown and a multivariate tool is found, the area will be highlighted with the distinctive WASP yellow & brown border!
• Support: I'm relying on the great "Get Satisfaction" community-based support platform. So if you have ideas, feature requests, problems or find bugs (yep! there are some), visit support.immeria.net
• New tools: Now detects 112 web analytics, voice of customer, multivariate testing, behavioral targeting and other tags (beacon).
• Of course, WASP is compatible with Firefox 3

Getting it or upgrading

Three easy ways to upgrade or get WASP:

1. Get it NOW! Easiest: Visit WebAnalyticsSolutionProfiler.com and click on the "Add to Firefox" green button
2. Upgrade: If you already have WASP, do "Tools/Add-ons" from the Firefox menu, then click on the "Find Updates" button. But be aware the version on the official Mozilla website is often updated several days later than what's on my official site.
3. Wait some time...: If you already have WASP installed, Firefox will eventually trigger an automatic update and prompt you to confirm.

Coming up next

Here's some of what remain to be done for the full v1.0 release:

• Provide a more "analyst friendly" mode
• Improve the reporting feature
• Higher limits for crawling and a "stealth" mode to avoid increasing ads impressions and web analytics page views
• Specific implementation diagnostic for select vendors
• Give the option to open WASP in a pop-up window or a bottom-bar
• Option to enable/disable specific tools
• Online purchase and licensing

Now is time to contribute!

There will always be a free, basic version of WASP available... however:

Any contribution received before the official release of v1.0 will be applied as a discount of 200% of the contribution amount.



That is, give 125$ now and get a $250 discount toward the licensing of WASP v1.0!

>>> Contribute now!

Licensing details

The more advanced features will be based on an annual license:

Edition	Cost	Max pages/report
Personal	Free	100
Analyst	250$/yr	10,000
Professional	1,000$/yr	Unlimited

The "Corporate Edition", specifically suited for vendors, agencies and market/financial analysts will include unlimited users, the "Market Research" function and other exclusive features. Please contact me for additional details.

Vendors, get involved!

WASP is the most sophisticated web analytics tag debugger available on the market. Period.

If you are a vendor, you can make it even easier for your customers by becoming a WASP partner/sponsor. In the future, WASP will offer more specific features such as implementation diagnostic, best practices audit and enhanced reporting, for participating vendors.

"Omniture and Google Analytics over-hyped" - CMS Watch

"Omniture and Google Analytics over-hyped", that's the headline of the press release from CMS Watch I got in my mail box this morning.

They go on to say that "today (they) rejected the snowball of hype suggesting that Google Analytics and Omniture are the only remaining solid choices for Web Analytics" and "CMS Watch research finds that enterprises can select from a broad selection of established vendors that work well in diverse scenarios and can scale as web site traffic grows".

CMS Watch is absolutely right that there are some great products, some of them much better suited for a particular client and situation (because of price, local presence, specific features, etc.). This seems to be especially true in Europe.

However, I don't agree that larger market share means over-hyped. Are they delivering on their promise? I think so.

Furthermore, you can't really compare Google Analytics and Omniture, they are at different positions on the large spectrum of web analytics solutions.

Google Analytics is great to start in the field and Forrester put it near the middle of their Wave: good offering, good strategy. Other products can compare advantageously to Google Analytics.

I also share Forrester's opinion about Omniture: strong strategy and strong offering. Omniture SiteCatalyst goes way beyond Google Analytics in terms of segmentation, custom metrics, system integration and advanced analysis capabilities... for a price. But web analytics doesn't stop with data collection and analysis, one need to look at the larger offering and think about other complementary tools to complete the Trinity approach put forward by Avinash Kaushik: Behavior, Outcomes and Experience. This includes A/B and multivariate testing, surveys, performance analytics, etc. Should you go with best of suite or best of class?

Companies looking at spending tens of thousand of dollars annually in a multi-year contract for a tool/service, training and put their faith in such a product to take important business decisions better do their research seriously. Although expensive, I think the report might make a lot of sense for companies currently in the selection process.

The web analytics vendors market shares I have started to publish might also be a consideration in the selection process. I leave it to you to decide if going for the bigger player is a good or a bad thing.

It's still XMas time: WASP 0.3 released

What is WASP?

(if you still wonder...)
WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a free Firefox extension aimed at web analytics implementation specialists and web analysts who wants to do quality assurance and understand how their web analytics solution is implemented.

>>> Install it now! <<<

What's new

It's getting very close to v1.0, I still have one small memory leak to fix (when closing a pop up window) and I want to tweak a little bit more for Omniture and Google. Here's what's new in this release:

• Now detects 68 web analytics and ad networks solutions
• Tweaked tracking for Omniture SiteCatalyst and the recently released new Google Analytics tags
• Various bug fixes, including a memory leak and the "hanged" status bar icon bug
• Improved analytics of web analytics... that is, WASP includes it's own tags that allows me to provide web analytics vendor market shares statistics (you can opt out of this feature from the options menu).
  

Your feedback is important!

Thanks to all of you who sent me such great feedback. Companies from all around the world are contacting me to add new products that have a local focus, such as in Brazil, Spain and Italy. Your positive input is always appreciated, but constructive critics are also accepted!

If you haven't done it yet, please take a few seconds to fill out my two quick polls:

1. If a special edition of WASP had a price tag, which packaging would be most effective for you? Take this poll
2. Which features would you like to see added to WASP? Take this poll

If you are inclined to do so - or if you use WASP for professional purposes - a donation would be appreciated!

Web Analytics vendors market shares

In this second installment of my analysis of web analytics vendors market shares, 7,788 web sites were analyzed between December 4th and January 2nd.

Figures remain very similar to last month's results, which makes them even more valuable because we now have a baseline of nearly 15,000 web sites and over 300,000 page views that were collected over a period of about two months:


Remember last month I said "Google Analytics might be very widely used, it is implemented on web sites that receives, overall, less traffic than Omniture". As we see in the next chart, SiteCatalyst alone already has more depth than Google. That is, more page were viewed where Omniture's solution was found than pages with Google Analytics. What does it mean? Basically it's a confirmation that sites with high traffic implements Omniture SiteCatalyst more than anything else (maybe not such a big surprise).


Some interesting insights:

• It will be interesting to see how MS Gatineau will grow it's market share.
  
• Solutions such as TapeFailure, RobotReplay, ClickTale, CrazyEgg were found on less than 1% of the sites.
• WebTrends is a bit tricky since WASP doesn't look at log-based solutions. So in this case, WebTrends stats are only for WebTrends Live (i.e. pages with JavaScript tags).

Again, your feedback and comments are welcome.

Note: This anonymous data is collected by WASP from users who have not opted-out from sending it. WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a free Firefox extension aimed at web analytics implementation specialists, web analysts and savvy web surfers who wants to understand how their behavior is being analyzed.

Web Analytics market analytics

WASP was primarily created to ease quality assurance of web analytics solutions tagging. But as often the case with innovations, the primary idea leads to a bunch of other possibilities. I also listened to your suggestions and 20% of the 120 respondents to my little poll about future WASP features said they would like to get market stats.

How does it work?

WASP was downloaded about 30,000 times and the latest version includes it's own analytics tags. This means that I can collect anonymous and aggregate information about the tools implemented on the sites visited while WASP is active. So as you browse, you not only get info about the tags on a page, but you also contribute to a global view of the web analytics market. A bit what like Alexa does for site rating, but especially made for web analytics. Cool isn't it? (And yes, this is stated in the EULA and no personal information is collected).

Here are some base metrics:

• 30,000 downloads since the first version of WASP released in Feb. 2007,
  
• 8,000 installs of the latests in a month,
  
• 200,000 pages analyzed in a month,
• 10,000 sites analyzed in a month

I think we now have enough data to look at!

Web Analytics market shares

Out of 10,016 sites visited by about 8,000 users over the last month:

• Google Analytics was found on 64% of them
• Omniture SiteCatalyst on 16%
• WebSideStory/VisualSciences HBX on 8%
• WebTrends on 7%
• Coremetrics on 2%
  

But, when looking at the volume of traffic, we find this:

• Google Analytics was found on 34% of the page viewed
• Omniture SiteCatalyst on 20%
• WebSideStory/VisualSciences HBX on 15%
• WebTrends, 9%
• Coremetrics, 2%

Analysis of web analytics vendors market share

Despite Google Analytics taking the lion share of the market in terms of installation (64% of visited sites), Omniture SiteCatalyst move to purchase VisualSciences is very wise. Not only it will give it nearly 25% of the market, it will also put Omniture at par with Google in terms of reach (as shown by the 20%+15% combined page views of SiteCatalyst and HBX). Simply put, Google Analytics might be very widely used, it is implemented on web sites that receives, overall, less traffic than Omniture and VisualSciences.

With the recent tsunami of changes at WebTrends, it will be interesting to see if their market shares will erode in the future. Coremetrics getting out at 2% seems a bit low, especially considering Forrester's most recent positioning put them with the Leaders, with a stronger strategy than Omniture and show a similar market presence. But that being said, Forrester also shows WebTrends with an even stronger market presence in the same quadrant, which I find a bit odd.

I'm curious to hear you about this first analysis. Does it make sense? Considering WASP looks at actual sites being visited instead of information provided by each vendor, could it reveal a more accurate market picture or be somehow biased?

VisualSciences HBX Active Viewing Form Overlay

Someone asked on the Yahoo! Web Analytics forum about HBX Active Viewing form overlay functionality.

My experience

• The nicest thing about HBX is that whenever there are more than a couple of fields on a page, form analysis is automatically turned on. No fancy tagging, no after-the-fact missed tags, etc.
• The Form Overlay works just like the "plain" Active Viewing overlay. It will show each form field with a color tone representing it's impact on conversion, along with a bunch of useful info
• You might have trouble installing the plug-in on Vista because it requires .Net 1.1... In fact, Vista is not in the list of supported operating systems... So the latest version of Active Viewing doesn't work, but here's a hint: search for Active Viewing in their support center and you will find a link to an older version that works :)
  

Does it really work?

Absolutely! Really easy to use and quite revealing. I ran into a couple of cases where the overlay didn't work and it usually turned out to be badly built HTML pages: nested forms, invalid HTML syntax, or uses of JavaScript to alter the normal behavior of a form.

Also, if the site uses a lot of CSS layering, you might end up with the overlay behind your form fields, which is annoying but you will be able to get the results anyway.

Analysis

Here's a couple of things you might find out with the Form Overlay:

• Lots of abandonment on the first field? Might be an indication that people get scared of what they have to fill!
• Lots of abandonment on the last field? Might be an indication that people don't want to commit to the transaction (for example, in a shopping cart process, a lot of people abandon once they get the total price)
• Lots of abandonment on a specific field? Might be a badly worded question or out of context question (asking for gender to purchase a CD!)
• Gradual abandonment as you go own the list of fields? Might be an indication you have too many fields, people gradually drop off by discouragement.
  

My take

HBX's Active Viewing is by far the best I've seen, providing detailed information as you surf and the overlay feature works under almost any kind of situation: plain HTML, dynamic menus, image maps, even dynamic links, etc. (in some cases, more extensive tagging needs to be done). Although you can get similar information from the regular reports, and especially the Form Abandonment report, there's nothing better than showing the numbers "in context".