Neuralitic: mobile analytics got money!

Disclaimer: I'm on the product advisory board of Neuralitic.

Yesterday, Neuralitic Systems, the mobile analytics startup located in Montréal, announced another round of financing, raising $7 Million with Vertex Venture Capital, BDC Venture Capital and Go Capital Fund.



I've seen Neuralitic technology at work and it is nothing like the basic information traditional web analytics vendors provide about mobile visitors. The comment from Robert Genieser, Managing Partner, Vertex Venture Capital, is right on the spot: "There is a tremendous need for carriers to better understand their customers' usage of wireless data services. Neuralitic's solution provides real time feedback on what the subscriber wants, allowing the carrier to tailor specific services to meet the subscriber's needs. This is a very powerful platform that will be used to increase customer satisfaction, reduce churn and allow carriers to deploy new revenue generating services, as they can now easily measure results."



I think not only will carriers get very interested in this technology, traditional web analytics vendors could offer much more powerful mobile analytics integration. Basically, Neuralitic is not about mobile visitors viewing your website, it's about how mobile users are using their mobile device. This includes knowing about which applications are being used: emails, SMS, games, and yes, phone calls too. Knowing about communication methods, frequency, point-to-point location and geomapping, demographics and even the possibility for mobile carriers to hook that information directly with the client account.



For more information, check out the press release and the Neuralitic site.

WASP Market Research: what are the top resellers using?

Update: this post has been updated on 2008-09-22 based on new information about eBay.

For some time now, the good folks at GrokDotCom, the Futurenow blog, have been publishing monthly stats and their opinion about the Top 10 Retailers by Conversion rate. Let's use WASP Market Research feature to check what are the top performers using when it comes to web analytics.

Top US Retailers Web Analytics usage

US eCommerce Site	Tool
1. ProFlowers	Omniture SiteCatalyst
2. 1800flowers.com	Coremetrics Google Analytics
3. QVC	Coremetrics
4. Blair.com	Coremetrics
5. L.L. Bean	Omniture SiteCatalyst
6. Lane Bryant Catalog	Omniture SiteCatalyst
7. Roamans	Omniture SiteCatalyst
8. The Sportsman's Guide	None
9. Office Depot	Coremetrics
10. eBay	Omniture SiteCatalyst*

In the US, Coremetrics and Omniture SiteCatalyst are pretty much head to head. However, while SiteCatalyst is often more widely used then Coremetrics in other verticals, the fact they are so strong in retail might be a good indication of features specifically well geared for this market. Based on my personal experience with both products and independent evaluations, Coremetrics is often cited as "being strong in retail".

eBay has been using Omniture for a while - you have to be in the measured sample to see that they are.  It is roughly 1 in 100 that are sampled into the analytics grouping.

Top Canadian Retails Web Analytics usage

Canadian eCommerce Site	Tool
1. eBay	Omniture SiteCatalyst*
2. Apple Inc.	Omniture SiteCatalyst
3. Amazon	None
4. Shopzilla.com	None
5. Best Buy	Omniture SiteCatalyst Google Analytics
6. American Greetings Properties	Omniture SiteCatalyst
7. Wal-Mart	Omniture SiteCatalyst Google Analytics
8. Sears.ca	Omniture SiteCatalyst Google Analytics
9. Bell.ca	Omniture SiteCatalyst
10. CanadianTire.ca	Omniture SiteCatalyst

At first glance, I'm surprised by this ranking. While some of those entries are clearly Canadian, what is Shopzilla.com doing in there? To my knowledge, it is not even a retailer site per say, but a comparison engine. Sales are not conducted there since users are redirected to Shopzilla partners. Furthermore, Shopzilla isn't even a site specifically doing business in Canada!

The other surprising things are the absence of Coremetrics and the number of sites using both SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics. While it seems Amazon might not be using any of the popular web analytics tools, the fact of the matter is that they are using proprietary solutions (unless someone can confirm otherwise).

My take

Looking at ten sites in two regions is interesting, revealing some some interesting information. If I was responsible for a retail site this would give me some good cues. However, for more in depth analysis, vendors and market analysts can use WASP to analyze tens of thousands of sites at once.

WASP Market research: UK Universities

From a blog post entitled  "Analytics use by UK Universities" at All things Analytical:

I have just trawled through all the Universities in the UK as listed on the Wikipedia page - List of UK universities by size and record what Analytics packages that they are using.

WASP Market Research feature

This quick study was conducted manually for 167 UK Universities, but WASP Market Research feature is more powerful. For some of the private market research I've been conducting, I've done checks for 10,000 different websites picked off a file containing one entry per line. This demonstrates you can aim for a very narrow vertical market or pick a much larger sample, maybe for a specific region or vertical, and let WASP do the job for you.

Interesting comment from the author of the post, David Mackland:

While I am not surprised that Google Analytics scores so high I am surprised that there are only 8 different solutions being used.  It is also noted that some institutions run 2 solutions in parallel.  The majority of those institutions that are running multiple packages are running both Google Analytics and Nedstat.  We do that at Abertay so we have analytics to view should we decide to change our provider.  Of the 37 institutions who don’t have detectable analytics packages one would hope that the majority of these institutions are performing analytics on their web logs.  What also surprises me is the lack of use of Woopra across other institutions.  Is anybody else trying this out on their University web sites?  Have you seen it yet?

A note about Woopra

Woopra looks like a great open-source e-learning platform. Starting this fall, the Web Analytics Award of Achievement at the University of British Columbia will now be offered on this platform. Being a tutor for some of those courses, I had a demo and I played with it for a bit. As a student myself, I used other platforms such as WebCT which, according to Wikipedia, was developed by a faculty member of the UBC a while back! Woopra appears to be much more of its age, with more collaborative features, a slicker interface and a lot easier to use for students and tutors. I wouldn't be surprised if other Universities around the world also embrace this platform.