Urchin 6 Review : New Features Available
Monte: Right. So what’s on the horizon for Urchin? What are some of the new products? I mean, obviously, once you break down analytics on the website, where does the R&D go into and the innovation from this point, since you have software that basically helps people be better at, you know--
Brett: Yeah.
Monte: --better at optimizing their site through, you know, learning from information from the people that are hitting the website. What’s on the horizon?
Brett: Absolutely. Well, the first thing is we’re gonna be releasing the Urchin 6 software and we have a huge pent up demand for that, so.
Monte: And what does it do that 5 doesn’t do, Version 5?
Brett: It does a lot of the visualization of the data, beyond just pie charts and stuff like that. We’re showing you, you know, funnel analysis and--which, you know, it looks like a funnel, you know, you’ve got several steps in your funnel process, and it--you know, if it’s shaped like an hourglass, you know something’s odd, it should typically look like a funnel. So things like that, the site overlay, the geo-targeting site overlay being the one that, you know, we show your website with the metrics on top, geo-targeting, where we show, you know, map it--
Monte: Where people are coming from.
Brett: --where all your traffic’s coming from.
Monte: Right.
Brett: That sort of thing. We also have rearranged the navigation a little bit to help you think--we believe it helps you think through the business process of marketing optimization, how are you getting people to the site, content optimization, what are people doing once they’re on your site. So, you know, don’t just blame the keyword, look beyond that, where--if the keyword isn’t working for you, maybe it’s because you’re sending them to a bad landing page, maybe it’s--
Monte: Right.
Brett: --because, you know, you’re driving them to--you know , your third step of the funnel is just not effective for the things that these people are looking for.
Monte: Right, to close them. Right.
Brett: Exactly. So we’re saying, you know, look beyond that, and we’ve really designed this product to help, beyond just the quantity information, and like I said, look at the quality information of the site. So but as far as the other future things coming out, some of the big picture things are like you said, you know, trying to take--you’ll never get rid of the human element, you’re always gonna have people that need to dig down and analyze this data and be familiar with the site to know what to do, but one of the things that we are hoping to do in the future is provide some sort of ticklers, so that we say hey here’s an anomaly, here’s an abnormality, here’s something that’s different, did you expect this change, and so people can quickly--
Monte: Be proactive.
Brett: --identify--right. Well, they can--
Monte: Instead of reactive, be proactive.
Brett: Exactly, be a little bit proactive and right when something’s happening, it may be that we’re saying hey, you’re getting a huge jump in traffic from your, you know, paid keywords in Google, and you say, yeah, that’s expected because I just dumped in another $10,000 this month.
Monte: Right.
Brett: You know, that’s fine.
Monte: Right.
Brett: But we want to like alert people to the things that are happening on--
Monte: On the adverse side, if you dump $10,000 into Google this month and everything goes way down--
Brett: It goes way down.
Monte: --you have another problem.
Brett: Exactly. Or, you know, you have--we’ve added things like a bounce report, and that is when people just come into your site, hit one page and leave, and so if that number starts to jump dramatically, so--
Monte: Could indicate a problem, yes.
Brett: Right. So that’s one thing. Another really big thing, industry-wide that we’ve been looking at, is data silos, and what we’re--you know, information silos, and what we’re talking about here are trying to bridge the gap between CRM [ph], web analytics, e-mail marketing, paid search, organic search, you know, etcetera, internal site search, all these different pieces of data points, where you’re collecting information about your users. And you’d like to do the correlation between that stuff, it’s--but it becomes very difficult, and so that’s an industry-wide challenge, and, you know, we’re obviously in the mix and in the process of being a part of that. One way we’re doing it is not just on the product side, but also reaching out to other organizations through associations like the Web Analytics Association, that was recently launched.
Monte: Right, yeah.
Brett: I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.
Monte: I don’t know the specifics of it, but I do know--
Brett: Jim Sternum [ph]--
Monte: Right.
Brett: --Brian Eisenberg [ph] put this together, big, heavy hitters in the industry.
Monte: Right.
Brett: And we’re a founding member of that organization with a bunch of the other, you know, big guys in our space, and a big goal of this organization is actually to come up with standards and to help, you know, not just ourselves have standards internally, such as, you know, how you tag keywords and stuff like that, so that they’re recognized, and if you decide to change products you have to go retag everything, that’s one thing, who knows if that’ll ever get done.
Monte: Right.
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