Comments on: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

By: Poornima

Poornima — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 05:20:48 +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!

By: gargouri2001

gargouri2001 — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:53:28 +0000

Nice write up and blog , Thanks for sharing all those good info

best regards
John
http://xtupload.com

By: Leila Boujnane

Leila Boujnane — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:53:56 +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!

By: Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:11:08 +0000

spam

By: andrew korf

andrew korf — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:52:23 +0000

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

By: Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:43:41 +0000

all in house, unfortunately… I agree that GA sucks

By: Pete Mauro

Pete Mauro — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:33:16 +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?

By: Engago team

Engago team — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:03:59 +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.

By: daveschappell

daveschappell — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:02:46 +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)

By: Ed Baker

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

awesome post, andrew!!!

By: Jesse Farmer

Jesse Farmer — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:59:26 +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).

By: Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:31:43 +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.

By: dave mcclure

dave mcclure — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:31:42 +0000

wow, andrew…

in the infamous words of Wayne & Garth:

“WE'RE NOT WORTHY! WE'RE NOT WORTHY!”

By: Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:30:31 +0000

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

By: Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:29:56 +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.