@andrewchen - Latest Comments in The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Poornima — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:20:48 -0000

I just finished implementing an internal tool to help with analytics, and its hella slow, and yes I'm querying slaves, but its the production db. I'm going to think about your suggestion to move it into another data driven db for analytics. Thanks!

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Leila Boujnane — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:53:56 -0000

Bloody awesome blog post Andrew. I am sitting between step 2 and 3 for one of our products so this was amazingly timely. Thanks!

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Andrew Chen — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:11:08 -0000

spam

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Korf — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:52:23 -0000

Thanks for excellent clear concise post. Really helpful and valuable for those of working on starting something.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Andrew Chen — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:43:41 -0000

all in house, unfortunately... I agree that GA sucks ;-)

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Pete Mauro — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:33:16 -0000

When I suggested this post I had not idea you were gonna blow it out like this. Awesome work Andrew!

Regarding #3 User flows: I would love some more detail about collecting and reporting data as it pertains to user flows. GA does a decent job with funnels but I have found it limiting. How do you approach collection and reporting and what tools do you use?

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Engago team — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:03:59 -0000

You're quite right: one needs to measure in order to know.
Still metrics about traffic are not leads. One can have traffic that don't convert to leads.
It is leads you need to make sales in B2B.
Get the company names of your website visitors. These "warm" companies you can call.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

daveschappell — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:02:46 -0000

Andrew -- this was fantastic -- I got it from a Dave McClure tweet, and it's one of the rare posts that I've actually read top-to-bottom in weeks! Your flow was precise, and has mirrored our progress almost perfectly -- we're trapped right now in a little bit of step 4-5 madness.

Thanks,

Dave (Founder and CEO - TeachStreet)

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Ed Baker — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:23:30 -0000

awesome post, andrew!!!

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:59:26 -0000

I generally invest zero time into cute visualizations and graphs, and prefer to read the key numbers.

I don't know about "cute," but I think this is a mistake. Good visualizations are hard to make, but they remove unwanted detail and clearly reveal the nature of the underlying data in a way that's easy to understand.

Doing it for every little report is wasted effort, but not for key metrics -- especially metrics you might want to show to other people some day (say, investors).

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Andrew Chen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:31:43 -0000

My inclination on this stuff, especially in the early product stages, is to keep things as simple as possible and make sure you're spending the bulk of your attention on product with analytics as a important 2nd priority. So I tend to architect initial analytics systems very simplistically.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

davemc500hats — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:31:42 -0000

wow, andrew...

in the infamous words of Wayne & Garth:

"WE'RE NOT WORTHY! WE'RE NOT WORTHY!"

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Andrew Chen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:30:31 -0000

Yep, you definitely want to capture both the source as well as potentially referrer URL - great idea.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Andrew Chen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:29:56 -0000

yeah, I think it just depends on what phase of the business you're at. Early on, I think that you want to optimize for easy investigation of ideas, which is why I prefer SQL. If the tables get large, you can always just rename the table and start writing into a new one (believe it or not this works fine and we did it with multi-million row tables). Later on, I agree that some of the more exotic technologies can work - but you want to make sure you're not prematurely optimizing.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Jeff Lawson — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:57:34 -0000

Good ideas Andrew. WRT your mysql table, I've found that storing raw data (for later analysis) can potentially become an application bottleneck, as that table will grow large and probably be abused in ad-hoc reporting. That's why we're using Amazon's SimpleDB to throw lots of data at. We can pull it back down later into optimized table formats, or write reports direcly from their API, but we'll never worry about the growth and scale of that database, and we'll be free to over-log, instead of losing data.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

spanky — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:54:27 -0000

On top of that, generally the first thing I do from an acquisition standpoint is to set up a landing page system - where you can dynamically create new landing pages that write to a field in the database called acquired_by. For all traffic landing on that page, you can easily calculate CPA on each campaign by querying the database against each unique acquired_by. Then over time you can add reports that will give you the CPA, activation rate, viral rates, retention rates, etc. against each acquired_by source.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:47:48 -0000

Very interesting roadmap to building a robust web analytics capability.

Regarding step 6 about data overload, have you looked into CEP (complex event processing) to filter out the noise and process relevant data in real time? It is also useful not only for reporting but also to take advantage of a real time feedback loop.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Andrew Chen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:18:24 -0000

splunk is neat since it's somewhere in-between writing your own log parsing and buying off-the-shelf reporting. Comes with a nice query language, etc.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Andrew Chen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:17:39 -0000

yeah, splunk is really rad...

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

dmourati — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:04:38 -0000

Bangin! Checked out Splunk?

http://www.splunk.com