InsideMicrosoft

Help Advise The Microsoft “Gatineau” Analytics Team

Ian Thomas, who heads the team working on code-name “Gatineau”, the free Microsoft analytics project we can hope to see sometime later this year, is soliciting a poll from readers of his blog on what they look for in an analytics product. Since the more feedback, the better job the product team can get, I’m sharing his poll here with you:

If I had to give specific feedback to the folks on Gatineau, having not seen the product yet, it would be two annoyances from some of the competing products that I would hate to see replicated by Microsoft:

• Don’t show me part of anything - If you ever, ever show me a top 10 list, don’t even dare do it without a way for me to see the rest of it. Often, the top 10 or 20 of anything is useless, since I would already know that by knowing instinctively how my site works. I want to learn something new, and anytime you limit what I can see, you hurt my ability to benefit from your product.
• Don’t use terms I don’t understand - Google Analytics’ usability could triple if they just rewrote the sidebar to make it more intuitive, or just dumped it for a better system. “Marketing Optimization”? “Web Design Parameters”? “Visitor Segment Performance”? As a general rule, it it’s in Google Analytics’ Sidebar, don’t use it.

A killer feature I’d love:

• Prove to me that you know my site - Show me that the analytics can analyze my site, see what is normal day-to-day stuff, and give me a page that show me just what is different. I want to know when something is out of the ordinary, like when an old page gets a ton of new visitors, when I get an unusually good link, or when something goes really, really bad. I don’t want to see the same stuff, I want alerts when something new happens.

And two more bits of advice:

• Track my RSS feed usage - I have no clue how many subscribers I have, but clearly Feedburner has a way of figuring it out. Build that into your product, and you become a must-have for blogs (and thus influencers) who don’t use Feedburner, like myself.
• Look pretty - The blogosphere isn’t a beauty contest, but some jerks are going to knock you for not looking as good as Google Analytics. The solution? Look good, of course! If you can’t make the whole product look good without sacrificing too much, just make the home page a dizzying array of pretty graphs and pie charts. It’ll shut up a lot of critics.

Anybody got any others? Don’t forget to vote in the poll!

January 21st, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General | one comment