Orthogonal Thinking

Those that know me will recall I periodically rant about bone-headed features in software, especially web analytics tools. One of the things that really makes my blood boil is a funnel report. The user/analyst typically adores this report because it seems to focus all attention on the crucial problem of abandonment, ie I have a form on my website and 97% of people fail to fill out the form having arrived there.

Web analytics vendors in turn have designed their funnel reports to be incredibly pretty, and to highlight this abandonment in bright red with arrows showing the countless visitors who reached sight of the goal but jumped over the precipice instead, to be lost in the seas of competing sites like so many ecommerce lemmings. The WA vendors wisely realise that a demo of a funnel report creates a strong desire to purchase the product. All those abandoning visitors, and finally you get to see why!!! Sign me up!!!

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I recently had the opportunity to directly compare products from two of the most respected names in web analytics. Each product has distinct strengths and weaknesses, but perhaps most interesting is how much the designs share in common, as this inside look at the tools will reveal.

Accuracy

My first priority was to analyze the accuracy of each tool. In the past I have been known to dismiss accuracy as unimportant, but with the possibility to directly compare each, very close-up, I simply couldn’t resist. I carefully set out the parameters for my accuracy test, and performed the comparison under the strictest conditions possible.

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