Review: AT Internet NX

Last week at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington D.C. there was a big buzz around the new Google Analytics features. But really, Google might win a prize for biggest industry shakedown (close to Adobe purchase of Omniture), but AT Internet would be a good contender for innovation in the field of web analytics. The France headquartered company has been pushing the web analytics envelope for a long time. Very strong in Europe, AT Internet was an early adopter of the freemium model with the Xiti solution launched in 1996!

Here comes NX!

The latest release, dubbed AT Internet Digital Workspace^NX, has nothing to envy to the leading players in the industry. Here's a summary of the new features:

Dashboard:

• Multiple dashboards
• Flexible dashboard layouts
• Cool dashboard widget: monthly objectives

Advanced visualization:

• Multi-metric and multi-time period diagrams
• Multi-metric lines & bars graphs
  
• Heatmaps (not merely click maps)
  
• Radars graphs

Filtering:

• Slice & dice from any element using a contextual menu available for each item in a table
• Build custom filters using multiple metrics and operators
• Merge several elements into one group
• Easily compare metrics in pop up

Segmentation:

• Create segments using a drag & drop interface, and a variety of operators
  
• Create new segments derived from existing ones

Specific features:

•  Live alerts
• ClickZone & Scrollview (not new but still unrivaled)
• Custom data collection
  

Vision

AT Internet is, in my opinion, one of the most underestimated, yet most sophisticated web analytics platform out there. Their product offers a 360 degree view of online analytics:

• Clickstream data, both tags (and log-based coming in the near future)
  
• Server monitoring: if your site is poorly performing or simply down... guess what: your conversion will suffer! Yet, few vendors offer integrated server monitoring
• Social media monitoring: now unavoidable
• Both way API to integrate with custom data
  
• Technological partnerships to extend the platform

Beyond all those nice features, AT Internet approach is very different from other vendors. Their services can go as far as handling your analytics by providing dedicated analysts. This is one way of going beyond the tool and empowering their clients despite limited budgets and resources availability.

Launch event

AT Internet is doing a Montréal launch event for the NX version, along with the book launch of Nicolas Malo and Jacques Warren.

When: Wednesday, November 4th, starting at 5:00pm
Location: Hotel InterContinental
>>> RSVP to Alexandre Metier: alexandre(dot)metier(at)atinternet.com <<<
(places are limited)

I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge AT Internet great corporate citizenship: they are a corporate member of the Web Analytics Association and they frequently sponsor or present at local networking activities. Would be great if more vendors and agencies would get involved locally, as they do wherever they have offices.

Full disclosure: AT Internet kindly offered a free account to test Digital Workspace^NX, has sponsored Web Analytics Wednesdays in Montreal and offered occasional dinner, no money or other types of retributions were involved in exchange for this post.

Book review: Web Analytics by Malo & Warren

My friends Nicolas Malo, from France, and Jacques Warren from Montréal, have just published the first web analytics book originally authored in French. Entitled "Web Analytics : mesurer le succès et maximiser les profits de votre site Web", the book is clearly aimed at non-initiated marketing managers.

Organized around three main sections covering the basics of measuring online business success, outcome analysis and site optimization, the book offers a solution agnostic, easy to read and rich in examples overview of the underlying concepts of online analytics. They are not going into too much details, just the right balance, which is perfect for busy managers who just need enough understanding to "get it" :)

My only negative comment is the price... 50$ CDN seems a bit high for an introductory book by first time authors (compared to $30 for the latest Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity by Avinash Kaushik).

There will be a special book launch in Montreal, November 4th, at the InterContinental hotel. This launch will be done jointly with AT Internet brand new NX offering (more to come on this). If you would like to attend, please RSVP to Alexandre Metier (Alexandre(dot)Metier(at)atinternet.com)

Smarter 404 with embeded Google Search Widget

When I posted on the Yahoo! Web Analytics forum to announce the availability of the free Web Analytics Maturity Model paper, the post included this text: "the paper at http://immeria.net/wamm." (notice the dot). The link was broken because of the way Yahoo! parses text to automatically build links.

Step 1: Use custom 404 page

The first step to improve broken links handling (404 errors) is to modify your web server configuration to point to a custom page handler instead of the default, very technical and dull error. For example, doing this on an Apache-based web server is as simple as adding the line "ErrorDocument 404 /http404.htm" to a file named .htaccess in the root folder of the site.

The specifics of your server configuration isn't the goal of this post. Contact your IT department or search for "custom 404 page" and similar keywords for additional help.

Step 2: Make a smarter 404 page

The custom 404 page handler is just another HTML page, so it can include your site navigation, brand and useful content. Often, the 404 page will have a de-dramatizing tone and some people have gone to great extent to make funny 404 pages.

Beyond trying to be fun, you want your visitors to get to your content. Two things are invaluable in this context: the referrer and the landing page URL. The next step is to make your visitors life easier by providing a path to the right page, or at least try... To do so, you can add a smart Google Search Widget:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    google.load('search', '1', {"nooldnames": true});
    function OnLoad(){
        var searchControl = new google.search.SearchControl();
        var siteSearch = new google.search.WebSearch();
        siteSearch.setUserDefinedClassSuffix("siteSearch");
        siteSearch.setSiteRestriction("yoursite.com");
        searchControl.addSearcher(siteSearch);
        searchControl.draw(document.getElementById("searchcontrol"));
        searchControl.execute(location.pathname.replace(/\//g, ' '));
    }
    google.setOnLoadCallback(OnLoad, true);
</script>
<div id="searchcontrol"/>

The important elements are:

• setSiteRestriction("yoursite.com"): forces the search to be contained within your site (change it to your own site domain)
  
• location.pathname.replace(/\//g,' '): replace the landing URL slashes with spaces so you can have a more meaningful search keyphrase
• You might want to add a stylesheet element to your page so the Google Search Widget is larger (something like ".gsc-control{width:480px !important}")
  

The rest of the code simply handles and render the Google Search widget. In most cases, the automated search will offer some meaningful links destinations. In the worse case, the visitor has a neat search box and the site navigation to find their way around.

Feel free to visit http://immeria.net/custom/404page to get an example. Do a "view source" to see how I made mine.

Step 3: Analyze & Improve

Don't forget to put web analytics tags on that page so you can collect information about broken links. For Google Analytics, this is as simple as doing "_trackPageview('/404/'+location.pathname)" instead of the default "_trackPageView()" call. Create a custom segment to view all reports for broken links pages, look at the Content/Content Drilldown report, understand the source of traffic, what your visitors were looking for, and how you can further improve your site based this information:

• If lots of traffic comes from a couple of sources, you might be able to ask them to fix their links
• If those errors are the result of a site redesign, you might want to use redirections to map the old page URLs to their corresponding locations

Comments, additional ideas and any feedback is welcomed!