measuring things on web sites
My friends know I’m a fan of using the scientific method to improve web sites: iterate fast, disprove invalid assumptions quickly, etc. I believe making web products that work great for the people who use them and the people who fund them is like being a Tin Pan Alley songwriter: crank out 100 songs a week and maybe one of them is a hit. Replace “songs” with “hypotheses about what’ll work for a web site” (for conversion, user acquisition, etc) and that’s what I mean. The Tin Pan Alley guys instrumented their experiments via their old grey whistle test (sidebar: that happens to be the title of one of my all-time favorite DVDs). Web product peeps have other, more scientific options available. Having just spent a long time at Yahoo! (which had its own internal analytics stuff), I hadn’t been as versed on the market, so I sent out a quick request to some friends on facebook and twitter to see what suggestions they might have about alternatives to Google Analytics and Omniture, and got some helpful responses. I promised I’d aggregate them into a blog post, and then talk about which ones seemed to be the best for what I want to do with them. For starters, here’s the list of recommendations I got:
WebSideStory (now owned by Omniture)
Adchemy (not really analytics, but in the realm of user acquisition)
Hat tip to Monifa, Joe, Rob, Andrew, and Hiten for the leads. Thanks! 
More to come in a later post.
No Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
