AnalyticsRock - insightful reports for Google Analytics users (alpha)

by ColinWright • 15 years ago

39 24 15 years ago

ig19• 15 years ago

AnalyticsRock is my side-project, so if you have any questions/comments/suggestions/etc I'd love to hear them.

I originally built it for personal use because I was fed up with having to use Excel to do the kind of traffic analysis that I needed for my own startup. But I figured other people might find it useful as well, so here it is!

If you want to get an idea of what it does:

* Shows user behaviour (visits,bounces,pages viewed) by time of day, day of week, number of visits and interval between visits

* Gives you rank-table view of keyword & referrer showing how your traffic from various sources has changed over time.

* Visitor browser breakdown that sensibly merges together versions of browsers that don't have significant differences in terms of features.

moconnor• 15 years ago

Why not list these on the landing page? There's not much on there to convince someone to share their data with you at the moment.

ig19• 15 years ago

Done.

biaxident• 15 years ago

Really like the idea. Google Analytics tracks loads of information, but it always takes me forever to actually find the information that I want.

Creating these types of reports is really useful. However, if I was to pay for it I'd like to have more reports and some flexibility in creating them.

ig19• 15 years ago

The tricky thing would be to have flexibility without complexity.

What sort of reports would you like to be able to create ?

michael_dorfman2• 15 years ago

Very nice. I tried it out, and liked it.

I'd pay for it, if you added other useful reports.

One small thing: on the Search Term Analysis, keywords that did not appear last month show a blank instead of a zero, which makes the "Diff" field show up as NaN. Not a problem, exactly, but I think it would be more useful to show 0, and the difference from zero.

ig19• 15 years ago

Any suggestions for the type of reports you'd find useful ?

michael_dorfman2• 15 years ago

Nope, I'm afraid not. If I knew what reports would be useful, I'd probably make them myself.

I'd love to know how I rank for the keywords that bring me traffic, but I'm not sure if there is an easy way to get that from Google.

sudonim2• 15 years ago

Awesome work Colin! I've been wanting to do something like this with analytics for a while. In terms of stuff to add, look at making the reports actionable.

Like for example on the browser report, what percent of users are coming to the site on a "mobile" device? If it's x %, then you should have a mobile optimized site.

Also, think about use cases. If I'm a blog site, I probably want to know "What are my most popular articles?". If I run a SAAS site, I probably want to see something like cohort metrics about my customers.

I wouldn't recommend letting users add their own reports for the short to medium term. I would come up with a few views of GA data that people are willing to pay for.

ColinWright2• 15 years ago

Disclaimer: I didn't write it, I just submitted the link. The real author has contributed elsewhere in this discussion.

I'd really appreciate it if you'd take the time to edit your comment for correctness of attribution while you have time. You have about 85 minutes from now ...

Added in edit: I looked to contact you separately about this, but you don't have contact information in your profile. You now have 65 minutes remaining ...

sudonim2• 15 years ago

Sorry. I missed the deadline.

ig19• 15 years ago

I'm the creator, Colin was just kind enough to see me mention my project on Twitter and post it here :)

Thanks for the feedback, having a mobile device percentage definitely makes sense !

tmcneal• 15 years ago

This is really cool and super simple to install... Nice work!

Sembiance2• 15 years ago

So I tried it out and have a few comments.

First, the 'Search Terms' report does not appear to be working right. The terms appear, but it lists '10' for the number of visitors for all terms, yet Analytics shows these search terms bringing in thousands and thousands of visitors. Also the vast majority of terms show no 'Previously' value and those all show 'NaN' in the Diff field.

Second, the 'Referring Sites' page has a bug where it shows 'Search Term Analysis' as the header when your on the page. Also, this Referring Sites report would be cool if it had a line graph. The top 10 referring sites, each represented as a line. The X axis is time, the Y axis is number of visitors. Go 12 months back, each month getting a data point. Also, being able to sort this table by 'Diff' would be nice.

Third, the 'Browsers' report has a minor bug in the labels can overlap each other. For example here is my report and I'm guessing the green is IE 6, but I can't read it: http://telparia.com/ringbug.png

Lastly, you should strongly consider using some more interactive charting library. I highly recommend Highcharts: http://www.highcharts.com/

Overall, it was pretty nice. I liked the time of day analysis report the best. I've already un-linked my account, as I didn't see any disclaimers that you won't use my data elsewhere or get data when I'm not viewing the site. You may want to add a notice somewhere that the data you get from analytics is never saved in your database or shared with anyone else.

Note: I may sign back up again in the future, once you've had some time to add more reports and grow a bit :) Good luck :)

One more thing: I did not see any way to contact you on the site. No e-mail address, or feedback form. So I had to post my bug report and comments here :)

One more bug: The browsers report showed 335,107 IE visitors. Google analytics for the same time period says 1.8 million visits by IE users.

ig19• 15 years ago

Did you have more than a 1000 search terms ? - if so I think I figured out the bug, and it should be fixed now (as is the title bug).

Unfortunately none of my sites have more than 1000 search terms (that's Google API's default for the max number of results returned) so I wasn't able to test that scenario.

All the others suggestions are good too, I'll add them to my todo list.

The difference in numbers might be because my report is showing unique visitors as opposed to GA which shows visits, if you switch to visitors in GA it should hopefully give you a closer number.

As per privacy: I'm not saving any data (although I might in future for caching purposes to speed up performance), although I am storing the oauth key so you don't have to give permission every-time you visit the site. I won't share the data with anyone and I won't use the data for any purpose other than for producing the reports. I'll write up a proper privacy policy and link it from the site.

I'm also bound by Google's API policy which legally prevents me from doing anything evil with the data without permission and is probably much more enforceable than a website privacy policy!

The website actually only went live last night, so it's still got kinks I'm working on ironing out :)

Sembiance2• 15 years ago

So I just tried to re-register with your site and got an Application Error. Tried to log in again, then it worked.

I did indeed have more than 1000 search terms, and you have indeed fixed it.

Nice job :)

mrclark411• 15 years ago

Does the time of day report take into account the user's time zone (by location)?

ig19• 15 years ago

No, time of day is based upon the timezone of your profile (shown when you pick your profile).

I looked at doing it by time-zone but Google just doesn't have enough information, it doesn't store user timezone and the location data isn't good enough. The US alone has nine timezones with some states having multiple time zones. Trying to adjust for timezones accurately would require a huge amount of work.

tm65atcolumbia• 15 years ago

Simple to use, clear and useful reports. Like the others have said, more reports would be nice. I'd want those about the users, time spent, country of origin, etc.

As of now, if you could make my specified time range stick, such that it is automatically applied when I switch to another report without reverting back to the default 30-day range, it would be immensely helpful.

Thanks for the good work.

ig19• 15 years ago

That's doable, the pages already accept parameters that can override the data period, I'm just not using them at the moment. I'll add it to my todo list.

neilkod• 15 years ago

Tom Kyte fan, by chance?

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

mijnpc• 15 years ago

Hi Colinwright,

Amazing tool :D

It's really handy.

One of the reason that I use Clicky a lot, is because I don't have to search for the data, I already have, as is the case with GA.

You always have to dig a lot before you find all the relevant information.

One suggestion:

+ in the Search terms section, is there a way if you could implment the search engine -- filter by search engine? I get traffic from www.google.com but also from www.google.nl

In either case, have fun and good luck

ColinWright2• 15 years ago

Just to be clear, if you read elsewhere in this thread it should be obvious that I didn't write it.

AnalyticsRock - insightful reports for Google Analytics users (alpha)

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