VisiStat’s iPhone Web App Supercharges Business Analytics
by Bill French on 21/07/09 at 7:38 pm
Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.
I know so little about web analytics, but I know a good business report when I see it. If you’re a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), VP of Sales, CEO, or you wear the analyst hat as web manager for your marketing department, you need help understanding what’s happening. You need reports that interpret the data and provide insight without requiring a lot of digging. Eward Tufte has spent his career helping businesses and governments make sense of data – there’s a delicate balance that must be struck to transform data into actionable information. Visual Explanations is an excellent book that will help you gain a respect for smartly designed business reports.
Shaping raw web analytics data to help business people understand what’s happening, is a slightly different (but emerging) segment compared to your average analytics tools such as Google Analytics and WebTrends. Tools like VisiStat elevate the science of web tracking to provide business intelligence. Frankly, I’m surprised that they haven’t realized they’re in the BI (business intelligence) business; competing with Google on on the analytics grid-iron is nuts, especially in light of the fact that VisiStat is on a very different level.
VisiStat Mobile™
Mobile access to interpretations is also a key business requirement since most conversations involving online marketing performance tend to occur away from your office and away from large monitors. I can’t count the number of times web performance questions have arisen in the context of a phone call, a casual business meeting, or a fleeting moment when you suddenly need to know what’s happening with your site.
VisiStat, a leading provider of “business” web analytics has recognized the ad-hoc nature of site performance review and provided a simple but effective iPhone application (VisiStat Mobile™). It allows you to drill into key performance indicators for your web site. While this is not a native iPhone app, it provides a simple, yet rich presentation of the important metrics you typically want to access while away from the office. With iPhone (using Safari of course) you can also browse the deeper intelligence and visual displays provided by VisiStat’s dashboards which are web-based.
Personally I prefer native apps for building rich business intelligence presentations. We’ve written about Roambi recently, it’s a clear example of iPhone’s ability to transform data into compelling knowledge assets and where (I believe) VisiStat needs to take their own mobile strategy. Lacking this, it’s possible to integrate Roambi with VisiStat using the VisiStat developers’ API or data export features.
I don’t enjoy criticizing companies that have many bigger things on their plate besides iPhone support, but the nature of their business and the innovative and visual features of their service, are under-leveraged by homogenizing the mobile interface across multiple platforms with an LCD (lowest common denominator) strategy. I would happily fork over hard cash for an iPhone-optimized interface.
VisiStat also provides unique services which embrace the new realities of doing business online. Touch Mapping™ provides a [visual] way to watch where visitors are actually clicking. This feature records the exact locations where visitors click on a page to reveal the most common areas where they interact with your content. This can be very insightful and especially useful in assessing how people react to your social media content. This is also extremely useful in usability testing for site architecture – again, this is business intelligence, not simply web analytics.
You’ll want to check out other features and upgrade options as well including their ad campaign system, real-time visitor tracking, and integrated page alarm features. I’m also aware there’s a new enterprise-class lead identifying technology in beta. This is likely to be a success – identifying visitors with a “caller-ID” precision could provide a huge advantage for sales and marketing organizations.
