Those of us who are building web apps and services inevitably ask ourselves “if I build in the cloud, which one performs the best?”.  In this scenario, the word “best” is a misnomer – what we really mean is “what cloud can perform better given the particular needs of my app?”.  Well, Alistair set out to find those answers.

Along with Webmetrics, he published research that quantifies web application performance on Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Rackspace and Terremark.  Instead of using a “one size fits all” methodology, he compared service response, network performance, CPU, and internal I/O for each cloud provider.

Here’s a quick summary of the results; you can download the full study — complete with detailed conclusions, test methodology, and even agent code –for free from Webmetrics.

No study like this has been done before – and I hope that many people will take the code, improve it, and run tests of their own.  Oh, and it’s all free.  Here’s the original post on the topic.

Enjoy :)

No related posts.

Alistair and I can’t wait for our Applied Communilytics session tomorrow at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.  We have an all-star lineup speaking with us during the day.

We’ll hear from 5 guests in “blitz-sessions”; 15 minutes interviews.

• John Lovett, principal at Web Analytics Demystified will speak to us about the report he just released with the Altimeter group entitled “Social Marketing Analytics”
• Chris Slowe, lead developer at Reddit will speak to us about tracking and growing a community
• Kevin Weil from the analytics group at Twitter will speak to us about Twitter and the future of social measurement
• Hiten Shah, CEO of KISSmetrics will speak to us about social media metrics and optimization
• Dave McClure of Founders Fund will talk about AARRR, and separate fantasy from reality in social media measurement

We’ll also have a panel with some brilliant folks that are working to support social media analytics practitioners.  We’ll talk about the present and future of social media, concentrating on “quick wins” for analytics geeks.  The panelists include:

• Ryan Kuder, VP of Marketing at Biz360
• Erin Hunter, EVP at comScore
• Eric Feinberg, Industry Director at ForeSee Results
• Ryan Holmes, CEO at HootSuite
• Matt Langie, Sr Dir of Product Marketing at Omniture

The schedule for our day is as follows:

You still have time to register! Here’s a 25% off discount code if you’d like to attend: websf10ac25

We hope to see you there!

No related posts.

Disclaimer: I’m one of the nominees for the WAA board of directors. Shouldn’t really matter, but consider yourself warned.

This year, 21 nominees are running as nominees for five board of director positions – 1 in Europe and 4 in North America.

I’m running for three major reasons:

• Social Media Measurement: Let’s make sense out of them.  I co-wrote a book on the subject in 2009 with Alistair Croll. I’ve talked to hundreds (thousands?) of practitioners / enthusiasts about the subject. The WAA needs to pursue it’s standardization, advocacy and education in the field.  Yep. I can help that.
• Lean Startup Analytics: It’s time we give more love to the massive startup ecosystem. Startups have completely different needs than companies in the enterprise space. By appealing to them, we can grow our membership base considerably and help educate those that will turn into the mammoth companies of tomorrow.  Think of it as “educating our young”.
• Non-Profit Analytics: Much of the efforts put into strengthening the startup base can equally help non-profits.  By passing along educational material targeted to non-profits, we can empowering them with stronger abilities to  understand where their efforts are successful, and where they’re not.

During the day time, I, eat, poop and sleep data convergence.  We need to be more inclusive of non-traditional streams of measurement. This will ultimately help us grow our member base, and make the organization more relevant in today’s “big data” environment.  This is the central thesis in Complete Web Monitoring.

There are 12 people on the board of directors and the WAA has over 1500 members (updated number from 5000, thanks Eric Peterson).  We have the resources, collective intelligence and drive to make strides in each of these areas.  We simply need a bit of support, encouragement, and direction to make these a reality.  Aaaaand, that’s why I came to the party :).

But frankly, as far as the vote is concerned, I’m confused. It isn’t how I imagined things being. I never imagined that there would be as many existing board members running as there are positions.  The people I’m “running against” aren’t people I want to run against.  I’m supposed to be running against Jim Sterne, the founder of the WAA?

A big part of me wants to give Alex, Dennis, Jim, June and Vicky a second BoD term. Jim puts it so eloquently:

“Aside from being a major cheerleader for the cause, I bring the organizational memory which will help the next Board and our new Executive Director understand why certain decisions were made in the past.”

Another part of me wants to encourage voters to pass the torch on to new candidates armed with fresh ideas and new perspectives.

• John Lovett, analyst extraordinaire, brings an understanding and tenure in the web analytics industry that few nominees can rival.  I encourage the WAA to take the opportunity to work with him closely over the next two years.
• Brendan Hart brings executive metrics knowledge from National Geographic that can greatly benefit our organization from a practitioner point-of-view.
• Eric Feinberg never ceases to amaze me with his candor, knowledge and ability in the field.  He is a great person to talk and work with and would be a big asset to the WAA.
• Steve Jackson, who wrote the book Cult of Analytics, and pushes hard for awareness of the WAA outside of North America.
• And . . . well . . . I’m running and all. :)

I’m not sure which way to go. No matter what, I feel like the Web Analytics Association will gain some great directors, and lose some great candidates.

I’ll probably end up voting for a mix of organizational memory and fresh meat. Either way, the decision will be very hard.

For all of you planning to vote (and even those that aren’t!), I’d love hear your thoughts – either here or on your own blog (if you blog about it, let me know – I’ll add all WAA related posts to the end of this one). By encouraging discussion, I hope that it will help us all come to a conclusion that’s best for the association.

See you on the ballot.

PS: You can see a nominees in action on Twitter by following the Twitter list or finding their individual accounts here.

Here’s a list of blog posts related to the Web Analytics Association Board of Directors vote:

• Vote in the Web Analytics Association Election! by Larry Freed on FREEDyourMind
• WAA Elections: Accountability, Inclusion, and Value by Eric T Peterson on Web Analytics Demystified
• Vote Lovett for the WAA Board of Directors by John Lovett on Web Analytics Demystified
• Big Election Day in Web Analytics Citizenship by Jacques Warren on WAO Marketing

Related posts:

1. Web Analytics Association Board of Director Nominee Twitter List
2. Beth Kanter and Non-Profit Analytics

If you haven’t heard yet, the Web Analytics Association is an organization that’s promoting web analytics.  It does so by passing on information to the public, by providing access to best practices, and ultimately connecting individuals, vendors, practitioners and consultants in the field.  This year, the WAA received nominations for their board of directors.  It is accepting 5 positions – 4 based in North America and 1 based in Europe to compliment their existing board.

I’ve put together a Twitter list of all nominees running for the 5 Web Analytics Association board of director positions.  To follow the nominees, simply click on this link, and hit the “Follow this list” button.  Even better, simply add this list if you use Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, CoTweet, HootSuite or any other Twitter application.

If you’re interested in following the nominees individually, I’ve included their Twitter accounts below.  Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on the 2010 Web Analytics Association Board of Directors Vote
2. Beth Kanter and Non-Profit Analytics

Beth Kanter’s 53rd birthday is today.  Of the many reasons why we’re big fans of Beth, she’s pioneering the concepts of web-based analytics for the non-profit / charity sector.  If you haven’t seen her blog before and you want to deep dive in her thoughts on metrics, start here.

To celebrate her 53rd birthday, she’s using social media to incite change in the world by sending 53 Cambodian children to school.  Here’s the full description of her birthday wish.  Have a few bucks laying around?  Help her out here.  It’ll help kids go to school in Cambodia!  How cool is that :).

It gets better.  She’ll write about the lessons she learned during the campaign (just like we did for the Beers for Canada), and share insights on the metrics and measurement tactics she used to determine what worked and what didn’t.

As always, Beth continues to be a rock solid voice in the world of non-profits & web.  She’s on our A-list.

Happy birthday Beth!

No related posts.

There’s been alot of talk lately on the idea of prototyping and demonstrating a product to solicit feedback.  The catch?  The product isn’t actually built.  This goes hand in hand with the MVP concept practiced by lean startups.

I was on BackType today, and I just witnessed an awesome example of this concept in action.

BackType is a search engine that indexes millions of comments across social media platforms and lets you query for particular topics that interest you.  Cool, right?  I performed a search query for “analytics”, and the resulting page had a small tab called “Trends”.

Curious, I clicked on it and was brought to this page:

Drat, it’s not released yet!

Brilliant!  BackType has given me an excuse to come back and check to see if the tab is active.  Even better – they were able to collect my expectations before the feature has even been released (or built!).

This is product management crowdsourcing at its finest.

Well done, team BackType.

Related posts:

1. Guest Post: How much is enough when it comes to Voice of Customer?

A real time analytics solution lets you see who is currently visiting your website.   You get granular session-level detail (IP addresses, technographic information, geolocation, and sometimes even a username).  They differ from tools like Webtrends, AT Internet and Google Analytics in that they’re not well equipped to deal with trending and goal tracking.

If you run a website, we strongly suggest that you install a real time analytics solution.

Here’s why:

Monitor campaign vitriol/praise spread

Real time tools let you immediately identify where you’re being talked about by giving you up-to-the-second referral reports.  When a piece of your brand reaches escape velocity, understanding who is a part of the escape can be very valuable.

When our article to TechCrunch50 finalists first appeared on the Internet, it started getting featured heavily on news.ycombinator.com.  Without a real-time analytics tool, I never would have thought to check this particular social news aggregator.  But with real-time dashboard in hand, we were easily able to navigate through different sites and blogs, commenting in a timely manner when relevant.  Note that we could also have used a social media listening platform, but there is one key difference:

A social media listening platform (SMLP) looks at social computing sites for a particular keyword and rolls it up to your dashboard when one is found.  A real-time analytics tool looks at your own website and tells you where inbound links are coming from.  In other words, an SMLP will show you where people are talking about you (but not necessarily visiting you), whereas a real-time analytics platform will show you who is visiting you (but not necessarily talking about you).  Complimentary technologies, not mutually exclusive.

In times of community backlash (see this list for examples), real-time tools are indispensable in helping to mitigate social vitriol, by being able to identify and target communities that are talking about your brand.

Track influencers

With referrers in hand, you can drill down a little bit deeper to find individuals that are talking about you.  This can help you tame viral spread by timing when certain press releases or notifications go out.

In our case, we emailed influencers and let them break the news first (ie – Jason Calacanis, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure, Hiten Shah, Eric Ries and a few others).  Once they had picked up the post, we advised TechCrunch that we’d written something that may be of interest to them.  We used a combination of prospective search on twitter with our real-time analytics dashboard to make sure that we had a handle on who had already covered us, and not.  Though the blog post speaks for itself, its credibility was strengthened by having leading entrepreneurs give a headnod in our direction, which ultimately led to our TechCrunch coverage.

Be creepy and spy on your visitors; solicit feedback

An unrelated, creepy, but nonetheless applicable case is using a real-time analytics tools’ ability to inject itself in a user session.  I used Woopra’s “Spy + Chat” functionality for this example:

Though very intrusive, it can be used as a time intensive, but rich voice-of-the-customer tool.

Examples of vendors in the space: GetClicky, Woopra, VisiStat and Site Meter.   Note that GetClicky has given us a free “Pro” account and that we hold a trial VisiStat account, but no company sponsored (or even suggested that we write) this post.  As always, the opinions are ours, and ours alone.

Any other reasons why real time is useful?

Related posts:

1. [Web Analytics] My, How Things Have Changed
2. Google Analytics Alerts: the start of a complete view?
3. Beth Kanter and Non-Profit Analytics

For Alistair Croll’s take on the Omniture – Adobe acquisition, click here.

Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture dramatically strengthens Adobe’s ability to optimize and monetize its clients, and Omniture’s ability to pierce real time streaming and online video markets.  Overall,  sentiment for Omniture’s will increase as it is integrated in a strong brand with a proven record of successful acquisition integrations.  The attached picture from the social media listening platform Sysomos shows blog sentiment for Omniture over the last four quarters (Thank to team Sysomos for providing the screenshot).

Expect to see:

Innovation in the RIA client

Integrated analytics and optimization in Rich Internet Applications has been painful, its adoption slow.  We will see a large increase in the ability of Flex and RIA developers to track the core functions of their applications.  This will lead to an increase in monetization strategies in desktop top clients, including pay-as-you-go services and PPC ad based revenue.

Web Analytics, Feedback & Web Interaction Analytics Now Draggable Into Flash/Flex.

Omniture’s Genesis program ensures that external analytics partners will be provided with a framework to integrate their core strengths into RIA / Flex applications.  Flex developers will no longer need to rely on external tools like GetSatisfaction to understand how their users navigate their applications.

Omniture Becomes The Defacto Platform For Streaming Media & Video

In May 2008, according to comScore, viewers watched 12 billion videos online, while viewership on traditional television is falling.  Online video is expected to grow at nearly 40% annually through 2011 (see this Wikipedia article).

Adobe will seek to strengthen its position as the defacto platform for real-time streaming and video analytics.  Omniture’s current lackluster offering will get a considerable amount of focus and attention.  Startups in the video analytics space may become prime acquisition targets.

Adobe A Strong Candidate For Microsoft Acquisition

Adobe continues on its path to compliment Microsoft’s library of application by extending their reach into the new, rich internet.  Microsoft will be eager to get its hands on this complimentary market and integrate it in its existing go-to market web strategy.

Congratulations to Josh & team for this stellar win-win acquisition.

Related posts:

1. The Adobe and Omniture Acquisition: What It Means

I had a good conversation yesterday about the shift from traditional marketing to an interactive market (and all the things involved in getting “traditional marketers” up to speed).  I think the “deer-in-a-headlight” syndrome that companies face when establishing interactive marketing strategies can be mitiged with good goal setting and a complete measurement strategy.

Baseline Your World

Imagine living in this world, but stripped of your five senses:

Not so fun, is it? :)

The same notion exists online, and most of us are only using one or two of our sense!  With 0s and 1s, you need to make sure you watch:

• What your users did (analytics)
• How they did it (web interaction analytics)
• Why they did it (voice of the customer / survey)
• Could they do it (web performance monitoring)
• What did they say about it (social media listening)

If you make a web-based application, every employee in your company should have a strong sense of website visitors and associated analytics.

Of course, most people will pay close attention to a particular subset of metrics, but it’s crucial that the entire company be used to, and talk about metrics on a daily basis.  We’ll talk about why this is important very soon.

If you’re scratching your head trying to figure out how to do the above, read my open letter to startups for a rundown of tools that you can use.

Once you’ve got tools in place, take the time to baseline your site so that you know what’s normal and not.  Start by measuring your visitors’ entrances, places & tasks and exits.  I’ll talk about this more extensively in seperate post – but grab a copy of our book or reach out to us if you’re impatient.

KthxGoals

Once you’ve baselined, the critical step in marketing is figuring out what the heck you’re trying to achieve.  More people buying stuff?  Brand awareness?  New product launch?

It really doesn’t matter as long as it will help contribute to the following rules:

• Increase Revenue
• Decrease Costs
• Increase Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty

Avinash speaks volumes about this subject.  If you don’t have this printed on your wall yet, go for it, and make sure you use the biggest font possible! :)

So, using plain english, describe what you hope to achieve.

“We’d like 3,000 users signed up and using the product in the next 30 days.”, “We want 10 celebrity bloggers/twittererererers to mention how awesome we are over the next 7 days” or “we want a 20% reduction in people stating that we’re the worst company ever”.

Notice how there’s a number in each goal?  You’ve got to make your goal concrete, or else you won’t know how much is “enough”.  At first, you may be a little bit off when setting your expectations.  That’s ok.  Make it up, and revise your targets for the next campaign.

Go Forth And Be Markety, For Tomorrow You Die (Or Make Techmeme.com!)

You’ve got your goals set, your analytics are in place.  Now’s where you get to have fun.  If you’re a traditional marketer, starts screaming!  Maybe you’re more into the interactive thing?  Cool!  Start influencing.  The awesome part about setting up metrics and goals is that any marketing campaign is fair game as long as you measure and learn from the results.

Even if you were with Motrin and launched its ill-fated ad-campaign, by setting goals and monitoring, you could have

• noticed the fall out
• waited a strategic amount of time (any press is good press, right?)
• made reparations
• turned the negative sentiment to great success.

And even if none of those things happened, that’s alright.  Because all companies make mistakes.  The smart ones make them faster. Some key takeaways that you may have learned boils down to common sense:

• People can talk about you.  Try and be there.
• Maybe you should go hang out and build a presence where people talked about you
• Wow, that was tons of press.  You should do that again!

And hey, if the crap hits the fan – we can help ;).  Oh, and check out Alistair’s post on rednod.com for great insight about a campaign he led.

Always Optimize

So try wacky stuff.  It doesn’t matter what kind of marketer you are and what kind of campaign it is..  Your measurement and goal setting should naturally lead to constant iterations.  Though you should expect to make mistakes, learn from them quickly and encourage open lines of communication so others can to.  Share the knowledge up and down the food chain.

The key to unlocking the potential of every type of marketer is by helping them learn from their successes and failures.  A data driven organization wins by fostering this kind of potential.

And it makes for some fun and awesome marketing campaigns too ;).

Related posts:

1. new website upgrade – goals? what goals? – part 2

Disclaimer 1: All site-related data found in this post comes from compete.com.  The company was kind enough to give us a “pro account” to help us research the O’Reilly book that we wrote called Complete Web Monitoring (thanks, you rock!).  However, compete.com did not sponsor this post (nor did any company, for that matter).  And yes, we know – compete.com numbers are simply estimates.

Disclaimer 2: I (Sean) worked for Akoha as Community Gardener while we launched at TechCrunch50 2008; but I’m now doing metrics, web analytics, performance, and social computing consulting.  The views found below are mine, and do not reflect those of Akoha in any way.  For the record, Akoha is awesome!

About us: This post was written by Sean Power with Alistair Croll.

Dear TechCrunch50 Startups,

Congratulations. You made the list. You’re finally launching, and that pent-up frustration of not being able to tell people about it for a month is almost at an end. Now, you have to live with a weekend of cold, hard fear that your demo will explode. You’ve got an interesting week ahead, and I know you’re short on sleep, so let me get to the point quickly.

You’re probably excited about the TC50 bump. I first saw the term used by Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital on the RedEye VC blog. The bump refers to the pounding your website is about to experience from TC50 attendees, readers, bloggers and their friends.  It’s not to be underestimated.  Here’s a glimpse at how the bump looked like for all TC50 startups in 2008.  If you squint a little, you’ll see Akoha somewhere in there!:

This is an unprecedented influx of attention. It may be the single biggest traffic spike you’ll ever experience. Thousands of visitors will drive by your site, stay for a minute, and leave — never to return. After the bump, you’ll feel a tremendous rush of adrenaline, then deep, soul-sucking disillusionment as your traffic dwindles back to its former levels.

Don’t waste this opportunity. If you take the right steps, you can make the most of your fifteen minutes of fame.

Being Talked About Is Nothing. Being Remembered Is Everything,

You’re probably celebrating the traffic you’ll get to your site. But you shouldn’t be, unless you capture the minds and hearts of your visitors.  The best way to do that is to target them.

On a normal day, you know very little about your site traffic. But today, you know lots. And that means you can tailor the experience to your audience. Let’s say you knew for a fact that 95% of your visitors loved the color red.  You’d probably redesign your site to make it bright red, right?  Well, next week, over 85% of your visitors will all come to you through TechCrunch somehow. Think about it. For a single week, you know exactly what kind of visitor will be visiting you.

TechCrunch50 visitors will load your site, scan quickly, and may even register (if registration isn’t broken, and is simple enough). Then they’ll leave.  In that crucial 10 seconds of play time, your job is to make sure that as many people remember your site as possible, and that you gain the ability to reconnect with them later, and to engage with them.

During TC50 2008, Robert Scoble blogged about Demo and TC50 websites as “sucking big time”. Knowing that he was an important influencer, we put his face on the front page of Akoha, with a speech bubble saying “If your name is Robert Scoble, click here!”, which brought the user to a small blog post explaining where we were going with our site design.

It worked. Scoble reciprocated in kind:

Being memorable is everything at an event like TechCrunch 50.  Find ways to be remembered by those who visit you.

Gathering Data

Since you’ve just launched, now is the time to start figuring out how unsolicited users react to your site. You’ve got a great lab for a few short, sweet days. Try a couple of site designs, and see which one works best.  This is where simple abtests becomes useful. Make sure you target people specifically. And turn on all the monitoring you can (without making the site slower.) It’s an excellent time to make baselines.

Google Analytics Is Not Enough

It really isn’t. For one thing, it doesn’t show you results fast enough in a flash crowd situation. Consider a more real-time analytics tool like Getclicky or Woopra, so you can see traffic as it happens — not the day after. Then find someone to watch it. While you’re on stage, or schmoozing investors, have someone back at headquarters (or whatever you call your mom’s basement) looking at the traffic.

But even if you have up-to-the-minute analytics, it’s not enough. It’s one thing to know what your users did, but chances are that you don’t even have goals set up in Google Analytics, and even if you do, you’re only measuring if people reached the goals, not why.

Measure Peoples’ Behaviors

Take a look at your site right now.  In two years, it will look completely different, because you’ll learn. What if you could speed up that clock? You can, if you measure what people do on your site and iterate rapidly.

A Web Interation Analytics tool measures where people click (or don’t), helping you figure out where your design flaws are without even asking people.  Go install CrazyEgg or ClickTale right away.  You can’t afford to miss out on this data. If you’re really serious, put Coradiant or Tealeaf in front of your site.

Ask People What They Think

People are weird. They’ll do all kinds of things you don’t expect. It’s one thing to watch what they do — but often, the real key to unlocking your business potential is to know why they did it. The simple way to find this out is to ask them. Do yourself a favor and set this up now.  Install 4Q, Kampyle, GetSatisfaction or UserVoice right away on your site.  Have the guts to ask what people like and don’t like about your site so you can fix it faster than your competitors.

And don’t just rely on tools. Be on Twitter, and be reachable. When that girl/guy in your basement isn’t watching analytics, have him or her respond to people online. When Alistair & I present at conferences, we take turns teaching and reading Twitter — fielding questions from the audience, responding to folks who couldn’t be there, and seeing if the folks in the back of the room can hear us. Do the same thing for your site.

Make Sure Your Site Can Weather The Storm

If your site is slow, people will leave.

This isn’t just a platitude: Google and Microsoft have both released empirical evidence that latency correlates with departure, and reduces conversion rates. Worse, people who had a slow experience will use the site less even when it gets faster again.

Bounce rate (the number of people that see one page and leave) may be a function of site latency. So test it! Call Keynote, Gomez, AlertSite or WebMetrics and start testing your site’s speed and availability every 5-15 minutes. Still haven’t got funding? Consider AlertFox or pingdom.  Are you at TC50, trying to load your site and it’s not working?  Not sure if it’s your computer, TC50’s Internet or your site?  Use AOL Page Test to test it remotely and find out why it’s sluggish.

Don’t forget to test the key pages and functions you want people to use, such as enrollment.

Have a Simple Call To Action

You’ll have a lot of folks on your site. Make it painfully obvious what you want them to do, whether that’s signing up, giving you permission to contact them later, trying it out, or telling friends. Don’t give them several choices — give them one. If 95% of people are just there to find out what you do, tell them. You can show them press releases or a list of your board members later. And consider tightening up your site copy, too. Less words is good.  Still not sure?  Talk to Josh Porter.  He can help.

Listen and Learn

Ultimately, you want to hear what people are saying about you elsewhere — not just on your site — and respond to the criticism and compliments.  Call ScoutLabs, TechRigy or Radian6 right away.  In most cases, all you need is a credit card and off you go.  Set up searches for keywords that matter and find conversations that concern you.  Twitter search is your friend. Google Alerts are too. There’s no better way to make a first impression than by actually being there to make a first impression.

Running The Booth?

Read this excellent post by Jason Calacanis on the subject.  It will help you avoid disillusionment when you come back from the launch party.

Learn From The Jedi Masters

Once TechCrunch50 is over, you’ll have very little time to rest on your laurels.  Chances are that your startup will die in the next year.

(Don’t die!  We don’t want you to die!)

Learn with the masters instead.  Follow Eric Ries, Dave McClure and Avinash Kaushik religiously.

Come And See Us In November (Or Call Us Before)

It’s awesome that you’ve come this far. Hopefully something in this list will help you learn from the storm, and turn the bump into a ramp. Whatever the case, once the dust settles you’ll have a lot of data to dig through. We’d love to help.

If you’re a finalist at TechCrunch50, we’re impressed that you’ve read all the way up to here.  Thanks!  We know you have so many things to do this weekend, and we appreciate that you’ve given us a few minutes of your time.

We feel for startups, we love ‘em!  So we’d like to make you an offer.  Once the next couple of weeks are done, give us a call.  We’ll spend an hour with you on the phone or online, gratis, and see if we can help you sort out your data, no strings attached.  You can reach Alistair and myself on Twitter, or simply email me directly – sean at httpd dot org.

We’ll also be doing an eight hour bootcamp called “Communilytics” at Web2Expo in New York in November on the subject of community metrics; if you’re coming, let us know.

Good luck out there, and knock ‘em dead!

- Alistair & Sean

ps; For those of you curious to know what sort of traffic the TechCrunch 08 attendees received, you’ll find the result of our findings below.

The Bump By The Numbers

When analyzing the TC50 08 finalist sites, the numbers from compete.com can be misleading.  For most sites, the traffic volume is relatively low, and therefore more prone to inaccuracies due to small sample size.  Consider that a disclaimer.  Averages were calculated between the months of October 08 and August 09 in order to avoid skewing the data as a result of the TechCrunch Bump.

It would be useless to lump all the sites in one bucket.  Grouping transaction and collaboration sites side by side is like admiring the similarities of hippopotamuses and cream puffs.

To get better insight, we must segment into the four types of sites found on the Internet.

Executive Summary

• Media sites showed relatively large traffic volumes, with unique visitor count often going up and to the right.
• Collaboration sites showed consistent traffic patterns from the month of October to august, but had no month to month average growth.
• The TechCrunch bump for transaction sites represented a small portion (8%) of the total unique visitor count they would receive for the next 11 months.
• The TechCrunch bump for SaaS portal on average represented roughly the total amount of traffic they would receive for the next 11 months.

Media Sites

These sites offer content that attracts and retains an audience. They make money from that content through sponsorship, advertising, or affiliate referrals. Search engines, AdWords-backed sites, newspapers, and well-known bloggers are media properties.

Between the months of OCT 08 (one month after TechCrunch50 ‘08) and August 09 (one month before TechCrunch50 ‘09), media site finalists:

• received, on average, 1,340,000 unique visitors (860,000 unique visitors with outliers removed (MIN and MAX)).
• showed peaks with a 41% increase in unique visitors, a positive influx of 148,000 unique visitors for that month.
• showed valleys with a %29 decrease in unique visitors, a loss of 171,700 unique visitors for that month. (ouch!)
• with the highest unique visitor count (MAX) showed an average monthly growth of 21.33% from 84,600 unique visitors totaling 3,530,000 unique visitors.
  
• with the lowest unique visitor count (MIN) showed an average monthly growth of 2.57% from 16,800 unique visitors totaling 99,600 unique visitors.

On average, the TechCrunch bump brought 57,900 unique visitors (55,300 unique visitors with outliers removed) for the month of September 08 and represented 8.55% of the total traffic they would receive in the following 11 months (8.17% with outliers removed).

Transaction Sites

A site that wants visitors to complete a transaction—normally a purchase—is transactional. There’s an “ideal path” through the site that its designers intended, resulting in a goal or outcome of some kind. The goal isn’t always a purchase; it can also be enrollment (signing up for email) or lead generation (asking salespeople to contact them), and that goal can be achieved either online or off.

Between the months of OCT 08 (one month after TechCrunch50 ‘08) and August 09 (one month before TechCrunch50 ‘09), transaction site finalists:

• received, on average, 272,000 unique visitors (124,000 unique visitors with outliers removed (MIN and MAX)).
• showed peaks with a 700% increase in unique visitors, a positive influx of 65,700 unique visitors for that month.
• showed valleys with a %49 decrease in unique visitors, a loss of 23,700 unique visitors for that month. (ouch!)
• with the highest unique visitor count (MAX) showed an average monthly growth of 15.49% from 113,800 unique visitors totaling 2,916,000 unique visitors.
  
• with the lowest unique visitor count (MIN) showed 0 growth and traffic.  (oof).

On average, the TechCrunch bump brought 35,300 unique visitors (26,600 unique visitors with outliers removed) for the month of September 08 and represented 8.83% of the total traffic they would receive in the following 11 months (6.64% with outliers removed).

Collaboration Sites

On these sites, visitors generate the content themselves. Wikis, news aggregators, user groups, classified ad listings, and other web properties in which the value of the site is largely derived from things created by others are all collaborative.

Between the months of OCT 08 (one month after TechCrunch50 ‘08) and August 09 (one month before TechCrunch50 ‘09), collaboration site finalists:

• received, on average, 138,000 unique visitors (86,400 unique visitors with outliers removed (MIN and MAX)).
• showed peaks with a 316% increase in unique visitors, a positive influx of 29,500 unique visitors for that month.
• showed valleys with a %63 decrease in unique visitors, a loss of 24,600 unique visitors for that month. (ouch!)
• with the highest unique visitor count (MAX) showed an average monthly growth of -1.02% from 108,000 unique visitors totaling 997,000 unique visitors.
  
• with the lowest unique visitor count (MIN) showed an average monthly growth of -50.70% from 1,400 unique visitors totaling 5,000 unique visitors.

On average, the TechCrunch bump brought 37,600 unique visitors (26,500 unique visitors with outliers removed) for the month of September 08 and represented 47.23% of the total traffic they would receive in the following 11 months (29.58% with outliers removed).

Software-as-a-Service Sites

These sites are hosted versions of software someone might buy. SaaS subscribers expect reliability and may pay a monthly per-seat fee for employees to use the service. Revenues come from subscriptions, and a single subscriber may have many user accounts. On some SaaS sites, users are logged in for hours every day.

Between the months of OCT 08 (one month after TechCrunch50 ‘08) and August 09 (one month before TechCrunch50 ‘09), software-as-a-service site finalists:

• received, on average, 62,000 unique visitors (47,000 unique visitors with outliers removed (MIN and MAX)).
• showed peaks with a 337% increase in unique visitors, a positive influx of 18,200 unique visitors for that month.
• showed valleys with a %65 decrease in unique visitors, a loss of 15,400 unique visitors for that month. (ouch!)
• with the highest unique visitor count (MAX) showed an average monthly growth of 1.52% from 26,000 unique visitors totaling 250,000 unique visitors.
  
• with the lowest unique visitor count (MIN) showed an average monthly growth of 64.46% from 1,400 unique visitors totaling 5,500 unique visitors.

On average, the TechCrunch bump brought 23,800 unique visitors (21,800 unique visitors with outliers removed) for the month of September 08 and represented 100.23% (!!!) of the total traffic they would receive in the following 11 months (91.81% with outliers removed).

Notes:

Big thanks to wa7iut for helping me with the stats!

Alfabetic.net was not included because it was impossible to determine what kind of site alphabetic.net is (site is down, nothing on Google cache or archive.com and the ustream demo doesn’t make it clear).

We used a combination of fotopedia.com and fotonauts.com data due to a site rebrand.

footnote.com was not included in the analysis.  By the time that they were presenting at TC50, they had 1.3million unique visitors a month, with 1.4 million unique visitors in December 2007.  Statistically (and from a TC50 perspective), footnote.com was too much of an anomaly.  We do, however, think that their site is totally cool.

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1. DemoCamp Guelph