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Ask HN: What would be the perfect web analytics tool for your startup?
Imagine the best possible (well, perfect:) web analytics tool for your startup. What would it be? What key features? What approach to serving you insights? What key insights would you want from it? What key questions should it answer and how?
- ig1 15y agoOne that treated my website as a business as opposed to a collection of webpages. For example I run a job board, the metrics I care about are how often candidates come back to look for new jobs, how many candidates look at each job, how many apply to each job, how this is related to the skill sets for that job, etc. Technically I can (and do) get this data out of google analytics using a combination of regexes, custom variable and custom segments and a little voodoo. But it's essentially a hack. Google Analytics feels like I'm using Atari Basic where page urls are line numbers, when in actuality I want to be writing in Python and be talking about business objects. I want a web analytic system where I can tell it about my business objects. If a user goes to a job page I want to be able to stick some javascript in my page which goes analytics(object="job", action="view", id="232") and then lets me do sophisticated analysis on user behaviour. I don't want web analytics, I want business intelligence for the web.
- ig1 15y agoIn fact what would be totally amazing would be a web analytics tool for Ruby-on-Rails that did the kind of analytics I mentioned above automatically based upon the models you've setup in Rails. It could even hook directly into your database allowing you to merge your business object data with your usage data.
- rokhrastnik 15y agoAmazing feedback. Thank you very much. Gave me some interesting food for thought:)
- rokhrastnik 15y agoCould you perhaps give me a couple of top sophisticated analysis examples you'd like to do, plus perhaps a few top business questions you'd like answered?
- bo_Olean 15y agoI would love to know them too.
- petervandijck 15y agoHave you tried Mixpanel? I've started using it, and it's based on 'events', not pageviews, and you can do a lot of filtering etc.
- staunch 15y agoMixpanel and KISSMetrics are both on to the right idea I think, but neither of them are hitting it out of the park as far as I'm concerned. I've used both, but just rolled my own system.