WASP v1.25 released

WASP v1.25 is now approved at addons.mozilla.org and had been available from WebAnalyticsSolutionProfiler.com for a couple of days.

Another round of bug fixes and minor enhancements toward WASP v1.50, coming up in June.

What's new

• WASP for Analyst:
  
  • Now makes the distinction between Google Analytics (legacy Urchin code) and Google Analytics Urchin Software
• WASP Pro:
  
  • Bug: First install now sets default database correctly.
  • The crawler now logs special WebTrends meta-tags (WT.*)
  • Fixed condition where detection rule optimization was failing (fixed performance issue)
  • Crawl report now handles on-click to filter rows correctly
  • Crawl report now open in current window instead of popup
    
• WASP for Market Research:
  
  • Fixed escaping of values when custom tags are found
    
• New/updated tools:
  
  • Mediaplex
  • Facebook Connect 
  • Bango Analytics
  • HubSpot
  • Chartbeat
  • AT Internet Xiti
    
• Enhanced:
  
  • Now supports Firefox v3.5.*

Please take 2 minutes to submit a review at addons.mozilla.org and visit the UserVoice page to suggest improvements and cast your vote.

Web Analytics Association Leadership & Technical Excellence Recognition (WAALTER)

I was humbled and honored to receive this prestigious prize at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. The WAALTER award "recognizes companies and individuals who are leaders and innovators in the field of web analytics. The objective is to encourage creative and innovative projects or initiatives that embody the web analytics industry’s best practices."

Get WASP v1.25 update now!

WASP v1.08 released

WASP v1.08 is now available through the official Mozilla extensions site at addons.mozilla.org

This version fixes an annoying bug that was introduced in v1.07... In order to get approval on the Mozilla site I had to tighten the security around the core detection module. In doing so I broke the detection for some tools...

As always, you can get the latest version from WebAnalyticsSolutionProfiler.com or in Firefox, simply do Tools/Addons and click on the "Find Updates" button.

Interesting posts about WASP on immeria

The very first post about WASP was on September 12th 2006: Web Analytics Solution Profiler - WASP!

Tag auditing, using WASP for Analyst and WASP Pro sidebar and crawler:

• WASP case study: WebTrends tag audit 
• WASP case study: SiteCatalyst hierarchies
  
• Quality assurance of web analytics tags implementation
• Yahoo! Web Analytics and WASP
• WASP: a good tool to audit site tags
• Web Analytics implementation Quality Assurance
• The challenges of JavaScript Tagging
  

Market research:

• Top 500 Online Retail Sites 
• Behind the scene of the Top 500 Retail Sites study 
• What are the top retailers using? 
• UK Universities 
• Web Analytics on European automotive sites
• Web Analytics vendors market shares
• Web Analytics market analytics

Other articles where WASP was mentionned:

• Whitehouse.gov: snafu around a web bug 
• Switching Web Analytics solution: a case study 
• Live from eMetrics: got interviewed by Robert Scoble

Rants and praises

I'm receiving tons of feedback about WASP. Some of it comes through email, bloggers and well known analysts reference it, vendors includes WASP in their training and use it as a support and implementation tool. Here are a couple of interesting posts that are related or talking about WASP:

• WASP ver 1.x Inauguration - for Google Analytics and 124 other solutions, by Brian Katz, VKI Studios
  
• "7 Deadly Sins of Web Analytics", by Bryan Eisenberg, United States. Sin #1 is "Improper implementation"
• "The Ultimate Web Analytics Data Reconciliation Checklist", by Avinash Kaushik, also in the US.
• "Google Analytics Lag Time woes? - Get immediate gratification with WASP", from VKI Studios, in Canada.
  
• "Troubleshooting Tools for Web Analytics", from Brian Clifton blog, UK. Brian says "I highly recommend this to anyone that needs to quickly check what web analytics tracking code is present on their pages"
• "7 must use firefox addons for web analyst", from Web Analytics India Blog. Anil says "WASP needs no special mention, iam sure it’s used by most of web analyst."
• "WASP - Webanalyse Firefox Plugin", from Patrick Ludolph, Germany.
  
• "[ツール]アクセス解析に便利なFirefoxアドオン10選＋αを使って評価してみた", Japan
• "Top-5 addons de Firefox para Analítica Web", Asociación Española de Analítica Web, Spain. Victor Perez says "One word: Essential."
• WASP love! on immeria.net

I also want to reiterrate my invitation to use User Voice to suggest and vote for new features!

WebCom - Nov. 12th, Montréal

For those interested, WebCom is coming up on November 12th, in Montréal. The conference program is built around three tracks: marketing, communication and technology with a slant on social media. It's always interesting to hear local speakers, because they are often closer to our realities, and at the same time, the international speakers often bring views that stretches the envelope.

Among the sponsors there are local web agencies and large corporations, including the French web analytics vendor who recently opened offices in Montréal, AT Internet (formerly Xiti). In pure French tradition, Dennis Varganyi, Country Manager for Canada, told me they will be giving away a vintage bottle of Bordeaux wine :)

Note that Web Analytics Association members can get a 15% discount!

I had the chance to be a speaker at a previous one, this time my schedule doesn't permit me to attend, but I look forward to hear about it!

It was September WaW, sponsored by AT Internet!

Monday night was our Web Analytics Wednesday on a Monday. What a great evening we had! We were guests of AT Internet whom most of you know as XiTi, the leading France-based web analytics provider who is now venturing in the North-American territory. In terms of location, I think I can safely say the 30 guests were all pleasantly surprised by our new spot: Le Local, a trendy Old-Montreal building conveniently located in the Cité du Multimedia. You know I can't resist good food, and the "hors d'oeuvres" were simply amazing!

Back to our sponsor: AT Internet

I talked about their product, Analyzer II, couple of weeks ago, but you have to see it in action to appreciate its power and some of its pretty unique features. Of course, it has what you would expect from any web analytics tool, but there are a few features I found particularly interesting:

• Groups, Sites and Sub-Sites: Particularly well suited for multi-sites and very strong in the media vertical. The Sites and Sub-sites feature are exactly what you would expect: a hierarchical sub-categorization of your sites, so you can view reports and grant permissions on specific areas of larger sites. But the Grouping feature offer a very interesting possiblity: horizontal grouping of sites and sub-sites. For example, if a company has several sites with ecommerce enabled areas, they could all be grouped into an eCommerce vertical.
• Time selection: who decided we only wanted to view days, weeks and months? The calendar feature allows you to pick only Mondays, or maybe you prefer weekends, or consecutive weeks excluding weekends and an holiday, etc. Neat and efficient.
• Segmentation: The segmentation module is also very powerful. As you drill down into reports, it automatically creates new segments, so from that point on, all the reports are based on it. You can also pick and chose dynamically from 300 metrics to create new segments on the fly (although the limit is on 3 months of data).
• Did you say "engagement"? Analyzer II picks some relevant metrics to create a Behavioural Quotient scoring indicator, or what some would refer to as "an engagement metric". The next release will allow you to select the metrics and give them some weight to create your own aggregated metric.
• Near Real-time, rich-media, heat maps, monitoring... check out my previous article: XiTi: robust mid-range alternative for more details.

AT Internet in Montréal

AT Internet is joining other analytics related companies in Montréal: Neuralitic, iPerceptions and Coradiant. Their strong Professional Services approach has contributed to their success in France and their mission to deliver ‘On Line Intelligence’ to their clients. Head-quartered in Bordeaux, France, they also have offices in the UK, Germany, Spain, and partners in Asia. Local specialists will help with implementation, support, coaching and even conduct analysis for you if you need to. In the coming months, AT Internet will be moving to larger offices and grow a team of 10 people to help them out in Montréal.

My take

Most of the time, conversations revolve around the differences between Google Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst and we forget about other alternatives that are really worth looking into. It's not a matter of tools; it's much more about the needs and the persons using the tools. With a robust web analytics platform and a clear focus on client relationship, I think AT Internet’s solution is more powerful than Google and certainly less expensive than Omniture.

Web Analytics Wednesday: Montréal, September 22nd, sponsored by Xiti

A special "back to school" Web Analytics Wednesday! sponsored by Xiti.

When: Monday, September 22nd, starting at 5:00pm
Location: the new cool place in Old Montréal, Le Local
Where: 700 William, Montréal, H3C 1P1, 514-397-7737
RSVP: >>> RSVP through WebAnalyticsDemystified service <<<
Sponsor: Xiti

AT Internet is an independent and trustworthy company that enables an integral analysis of websites, intranet and mobile sites. It has provided real time, Online Intelligence solutions since 1995.

The web analytics leader in France, AT Internet has launched its North American office right here in Montréal!
So, come and join us for aperitif as we sponsor our first Web Analytics Wednesdays event.

Our goal is to present a demo of something different in a relaxed, non-sales pitch type atmosphere.
Interested in checking us out? Please do and sign up today!

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.

XiTi: robust mid-range alternative

I met Fehmi, XiTi's local rep for Québec, a couple of months ago at a Web Analytics Wednesday I organized in Montréal. I've known XiTi as a long time web analytics player in Europe, and as my friend Jacques Warren said "The French have landed!". Last week I spent some time with Dennis Varganyi, country manager (Canada), a guy with a long term experience in web analytics who showed me what XiTi has to offer.

The base is covered, and more...

XiTi offers the full range of reports you would expect from any web analytics solution: page, visit and visitors analytics, but also external/internal search, podcasts, mobile, video, RSS and rich-media sites. Campaign management, dashboarding, custom reports, custom metrics, security, exports, are all there.

Great features

Some tidbits worth highlighting:

• Affinities: Xiti's unique capability of defining "groups of sites" into affinity reports, then sites, sections, chapters and sub-chapters, sub-sub... makes it especially well geared for media sites.
• Segmentation & filtering: XiTi is very powerful in this respect! Some competitors should look more closely at the way XiTi does it, which is much more powerful and still very easy to use than a lot of the solutions I've seen.
  
• Dashboarding and vizualisation: I recently read Stephen Few's de facto reference "Information Dashboard Design". It's clear XiTi spent a lot of time on visualization. One example of that is dial graphs: they show min/max, average, standard deviation and the actual value in a very well designed way.
  
• Campaigns: allocation, allocation, allocation... isn't it a nightmare in most cases? Which event or campaign should really get credited? Should it get 100% or just a fraction of the credit?
  
• Security is managed at the group or individual level. This level of granularity is often found only in the high-end solutions.
• Date range selection goes beyond the day/week/month/year and allows you to pick things like "All Mondays". Something I haven't seen in other tools and is especially useful if you are looking at things like day parting.
• Real time is often more of a buzzword than really usefull (my opinion), but it's there :)
• Local or server time? Another interesting concept, which I haven't seen in other solutions, is the ability to view reports based on the user's local time or the server time. Clever: if you want to know the real peak time during the day, you need to use the user's time. If you want to know when to do maintenance, you should look at your lowest trafficed server time.
• Custom variables & reports: I was surprised by the flexibility of the framework, which makes it easy to extend and customize metrics and reports.
  
• Heat maps: think of CrazyEgg integrated to your web analytics (as it should be!)
• and others!
  

Free!

We know how "Free!" is the buzzword of the week month year and Xiti has been an early adopter of the concept. You can start small with Xiti Free, which is especially suited for personal and small web sites, and grow up to Xiti Analyzer II for 395$/month (1M page views).

My take

I would consider XiTi to be a strong contender if you are looking for something with more guts than Google Anlytics without investing in a high-end suite like Omniture. If you are in Europe, you need to have Xiti on your short list. Now that Xiti has a presence in North America, it's worth to have a look before jumping to a conclusion.