Moneyspyder continues aggressive growth

This year has been incredibly busy so far. We are continuing are great relationships with existing clients by further growing their online businesses, launching new sites (3 so far this year - CandleCandles.com, Plantstuff.com and CoxAndCox.co.uk) and growing our team:

Seyd Razavi has joined the development team to further increase our strength an depth in Ruby on Rails. Already a strong Rails ninja, Seyed is working on some really exciting additions to our product offering. These projects are a heady mixture of commercial and open source. We will be publishing more OSS this year.

As you can see on the left hand side we have a new Partnership with Google - more on this soon!

Marc Winn has joined Moneyspyder as a stakeholder. Already running a great online business (Beautifulpure.com) with Moneyspyder was never enough for Marc. Marc joins the already strong Moneyspyder team bringing excellent insight and experience from over a decade in the online retail and catalogue industry.

A quick intro into site search analytics

We really strongly encourage clients who have on site search to plugin Google Analytics site search tracking. The value that is yielded is huge. We've seen how crucial site search is to some clients in terms of the percentage of total revenue generated throuh site search. We've seen how seasonal product demand escalates at certain times of the year. We've seen myriad keywords that customers think of before clients do - great terms to bid on in paid search.

Take a look at this quick video to see some more great examples:



Having trouble hooking up your site search to Google Analytics? Give us a call.

9 steps to becoming an Google Analytics God (not our definition but no far off)

Hmmm, it seems that according to Avinash Kaushik's latest blog post we are already Google Analytics Gods!

I think there is more that qualifies true god-like status though:

- Get the basics right first of all
- that means profiles and filters
- that means clean data in GA: precision is essential
- that means : understand what you need to know about your site performance before going deep into GA
- Regularly refine and refactor your KPIs
- Keep focused on what you need to know rather than what is 'cool'
- TEST TEST TEST! And log the test results in GA

Okay, so we do those things too...

Finish a great year, start an awesome year!

I've just finished running through our uptime stats from last year and I'm really pleased to see over 99.9% uptime across all our clients - 99.92% to be exact.

There was some unplanned downtime in amongst the planned downtime. This was due to infrastructure issues that thankfully were resolved quickly. I can say with a high degree of certainty that EngineYard did not feature in this unplanned downtime.

Success, of course, is never final. How can we get closer to or achieve 100%? We will continue to use EngineYard and make sure any clients who are not yet EY users, become EY users.

We continue to refine our processes and procedures. The product matures as do all the technologies we use (Ruby on Rails, Sphinx, etc.). We make no room for compromise when it comes to the safety and reliability of our client's online businesses. Really it's quite simple: we strive not to be s**t!

Don't get lost in Google Analytics - here's the map

It should be pretty obvious that we think Google Analytics is neat. Neat as in essential to your business! It qualifies as one of those technologies that is clever, cool and seriously useful. The inherent risk using clever, cool and useful tech is that one can get awfully lost in the clever and cool without gaining any value.

For example, I have been guilty of spending many an interesting hour building and rebuilding custom reports - a great new feature in the GA beta interface. I had to catch myself though - were these reports relevant? Were they useful? Were they aligned with our clients' Key Performance Indicators?

I undertook an exercise to rationalise the custom segments and custom reports we had available to our GA account.

The general profiles and filters that we set up in the last blog post are exactly that - general. Sufficiently generic so as to be useful to 90% of GA users...probably. Anyway - custom reports and custom segments should be developed so as to be aligned with business Key Performance Indicators.

Think about it: Why would a board member be so interested in the bounce rate on the website broken down by OS, browser type and browser version? Would a developer really be 'bovvered' by relative marketing campaign keyword performance? Probably not. So, as we created profiles to capture filtered data, we can also create profiles to present data.

Let's say we created a developer specific profile - this doesn't mean to say other users can't view the data but it is a profile focused on the preserntation of data that a developer would want to see. Any report - even a custom report can be added to the dashboard for the profile that you are currently viewing:



And here is the report added at the bottom of the dashboard:



Remove the 'clutter' from the report for the given profile by hitting the X in the top right of each report overview in the dash board.

Now you can have a dashboard for each business function tuned to specific needs, custom segments and reports that are relevant and useful!