Please hold your pointing and laughing until after the question.
A client has us bidding on doing some Very Cool Things for them. A Very Small Component of which is (are?) Web analytics. Now, we haven’t been thinking of Web analytics as inconsequential or trivial, just that among the various services we’re contemplating it’s not within our particular area of focus—it’s an area we’re planning on subcontracting to an expert.
Someone from the client’s IT department told them to ask “what kind of analytics system we’re considering using for reporting.”
Good question.
In our proposals and meetings so far, things have been kept slightly vague, especially as we don’t know what they’re using at the moment or what their problems/issues are with them. This was considered a project management/scheduling task—to be explored and researched long before a host of other deliverables. Not vague as in “well, we’ll certainly do some analytics, with–*hey look over there! * … so, that’s our presentation, thankyouverymuch,” but relatively little beyond acknowledging generic metrics and considerations of monthly reporting and a back-end admin interface.
So now we need to get them a fairly detailed description of the kind of system we’d use by midday tomorrow. We’re not complete noobs, in that we have modest PHP/MySQL/Etc skills and we’ve hit Wiki and Google for basic background, but would really appreciate some general direction in pursuing a bit more depth. Is GoogleAnalytics worthy of a large corporation or are we looking for something with more umph? Piwik? Yahoo? Egad…
I’m a web designer and I use Google Analytics. Now, I have never done a large corporation - just small companies, but I think that many large sites are using Google Analytics. The benefits are that it’s free, and hey - it’s Google, how much more awesome can you get?
However, there are probably other (paid) services out there that may be more customizable. A site like the one linked above may have more information.
It would depend on what your customer wants and what they are trying to do on their site. Are they selling something, showing, corporate presence, offering free info packets on the mail?
Simple stuff like seeing what pages are getting more views and where are those views linking from should be included in your hosting service.
Many go a bit deeper and tell you about depth of visits (how many pages a unique visitor sees), loyalty (how many times a unique visitor returns to the site or a page), details of sessions vs visits, shopping cart abandonment, et multiple cetera.
You should be able to handle this type of stuff yourself without having to learn anything, and outsourcing it might bite into your profits.
Unless you know for a fact that they want some very detailed and obscure metrics, just offer whatever your hosting offers (check their premium offers).
And yeah, Look over there! always works, specially for something you know is a minor detail. Don’t get passed on because you fumbled some irrelevant stuff.
I use Google Analytics for my (small, non-commercial, non-professional) site and it; serves me very well - I think it’s functional and feature-rich enough to be able to work for sites of almost any size - one of the other key advantages is - it’s Google - if any tracking code is going to be trusted by default, it will be theirs.
The only disadvantage I can think of (and it’s not insignificant) is that your client may perceive it as lack of effort or lack of expertise, if you choose to use it.
I’ve been a Webmaster for major companies. The issues about Web reporting are wide, deep, and…often highly contentious. So watch out. If the IT department has asked you “what kind of system you’re considering”…uh-oh. You need to get on top of this, fast. There are two ways to go, and you’ll need to do both. Which you put your energy most in depends on circumstances.
You need to find out what perception your management and IT each have about what is valid. Don’t show your cards.
You need to get cracking understanding the issues, and which you will choose to present as relevant in the situation. Ignore people who recommend only a particular software tool that’s their favorite – and go instead for sites that explain the differences between tools. E.g., http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2007/03/ultimate-web-analytics-comparison.html
Bear in mind that most people do very poorly indeed reasoning about statistics, while at the same time believing they understand them pretty well. (You could read “Judgment and Reasoning under Uncertainty” in your spare time, if you want to be genuinely shocked about professional understanding.)
In short, this is a situation you need to control, and put your spin on. Be careful not to choose a tool that doesn’t show off your work to its best advantage!
At the risk of diverting the pointing and laughing my way, I will relate that my wife works for the web analytics group of a Fortune 500 company, and that they use Omniture for most of their measurement needs. So at least one significant player in the US market is sufficiently impressed with what they offer to give them a substantial amount of money. That, however, is the extent of my knowledge on the topic, and further inquiries will be met with ignorant silence.
Google Analytics is not “free.” Sure if the pageviews per month per account are below a level specified by Google (subject to change by Google at any time) it won’t cost you a cent. However, the TOS also allows Google to use the data they collect for you for its own benefit, without compensation to you.
If the web site owner considers web metrics to be proprietary business data and does not consent to sharing that data, use of GA could land the web developer in hot water. IANAL. YMMV.
I like Urchin personally and my work uses it for our clients who don’t have their own tracking, and we can have multiple domains and servers all handled by it quite easily.
If the client and your project is relatively unsophisticated, Google Analytics is fine. One of the keys is the ease of implementation, which believe me is a big deal.
We use Web Trends, Site Catalyst, and Discover on Premises. Unless there is a compelling reason for the kind of analytics that paid products get you, don’t bother.
“Worthy of a large corporation” shouldn’t be a consideration. What should be under consideration is what you are trying to learn, and how important it is to learn it. (That is, how much are you willing to pay to learn it.) Those questions will drive what you should implement.