Tel Aviv/San Francisco based Nuconomy (part of the recent Israeli Web Tour in California) is aiming to give publishers a lot more information about what’s happening on their sites than Google Analytics currently offers. CEO Shahar Nechmad says he wants to give people insights that are usually only available to sites that can pay thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per month, from service providers like Omniture, WebTrends and Coremetrics.
But Nuconomy is also approaching analytics in a new way to try and put more meaning into the data that is thrown back at users, meaning that in many ways it will be more useful than even those hugely expensive alternatives. Dan Farber took an early look at them last year and wrote a little bit about the approach. In general, though, they’re moving beyond the simple page view model to measure different types of activities. And they are digging a lot deeper on both the user side and contributor side.
Beyond The Page View: Correlation and Contribution
For example, Nuconomy is designed to consider the impact of widgets, Ajax, Flash, mobile, etc., which don’t generally show up in page view metrics. And they are also measuring everything on both a contributor level (think analytics by author in a blog) and user level (people on the site).
Correlation is a big party of Nuconomy, which shows how things on the site affect other things. Do more posts/articles mean more page views? Does one author get more comments but less page views? How do photo uploads affect the number of comments? And so on. See image above for how it is presented.
Another feature that helps sites measure contributors is a ranking formula, set by the publisher. Page hits, ratings, comments and other metrics can be weighted differently to come up with an overall algorithm to compare authors.
Two Way API
Nechmad says that existing analytics services don’t do anything to help sites make changes, or provide direct input into decisions. Possibly Nuconomy’s most important feature is a two way API, allowing your site to make changes automatically depending on input from the service. Today humans have to view the data, analyze it and then make changes based on that. With Nuconomy, changes can be made without humans slowing things down.
New Funding
Nuconomy raised a $300k seed round in April 2007 from Yossi Vardi, Shlomo Nehama and Uzi Tzuker. Today they announced another round, estimated at $3 million, from WPP.
Nuconomy is currently in private beta, although it is being tested by some of the largest portals and publishers in Israel. They are opening up another 400 slots for beta testers today. Integration is through the API or via a simple java embed. They are also planning to release a Wordpress plugin in the next month or so. During the beta period Nuconomy is free. Eventually they will charge a small fee for sites with more than a couple of million unique visitors per month.
This is actually pretty interesting. With the web changing and standard analytics so old, it is time for a change.
we use several statistics packages and they all show different data. we shall try if this one is more correct than the others.
It is nice to see some new products in this area.
I would also like to see something advanced and with option to host it on your server. In this way the statistics are more accurate.
Cause for example – my AWStats results are not the same as Google Analytics results.
Anyway good luck
I think they need some work on their sign up process
- I signed up for Beta,
the page refreshed, there was some text that I couldn’t read that disappeared
and then their home page again
so I am not sure what happened to my sign-up …
Thanks
Steve
congrats to Shachar/ Yosi and Nuconomy. I think you guys are on to something
Andy, Yakov –
You right. a lot of the times we see big differences between the information of different analytics providers. There are a number of reasons for that, but the two main ones are probably:
- The use o cookies. Some providers are using first party cookies (like us) and some 3rd party cookies. 3rd party cookies are much less accurate as they get blocked many times.
- the lack of standards. There is still a big lack of standards on how to measure things. Even the terms used for different reports are very different from one product to another.
The web analytics association and the IAB are working to create more industry standards, but this is just taking a very long time.
We believe that the future lies behind counting page views. Traffic is king but ROI is god. As sites gets more and more rich functionality we want to not just really understand our users but also how to cultivate those insights into better web experiences
Shahar Nechmad
CEO, NuConomy.
I wanted to try ajax on my website but I need more page view to boost my stat.
good to see this thing
This is a very good news for all of us. I was looking for a more talented service than Google Analytics.
Andy Gongea : AWstats cannot be the same as google stats, because in AWstats, there is a lot of non relevant data, like web spiders etc..
I think Google stats are pretty accurate if you want to count only real human visitors.
Steve – Sorry for the confusion… I hope it won’t happen again.
Feel free to contactme directly and I will help you get access to ur beta. My email is shahar at nuconomy dot com.
Shahar,
CEO, NuConomy.
seems like a great services ! it’s about time we get some normal statistics instead of the boring but useless hits only statistics. hopefully now we will be able to get all the info that will allow us to make educated decisions about our sites…
seems like a service long expected ! Thanks !
Gabriel,
That was exactly our intention – thanks for validating it
Yosi Taguri,
VP R&D and Social Thinker
nuconomy
isaac,
You have to find a balance between providing a rich user experience, sometimes at the expense of raw page view data, which impacts those Alexa and Compete.com type rankings.
others,
Google Analytics can track AJAX calls – you just need to call the appropriate AdSense function from within the function set in the onreadystatechange propery. Example:
…
xmlHttp.onreadystatechange = handleContent;
…
function handleContent() {
if(xmlHttp.readyState == 4) {
document.getElementById(”id”).innerHTML=xmlHttp.responseText
pageTracker._trackPageview(”ajax page called”);
} else {
document.getElementById(”id”).innerHTML = “something”
}
}
At any rate, I welcome new technologies and am always looking for improvements. Don’t get too wrapped up in Alexa-type rankings, however. They don’t do much for a site.
The biggest challenge in web analytics right now is adding meaning to the massive amount of data that can be tracked. Nuconomy will do well if they can accomplish this in a user friendly way.
Might want to checkout Scout (http://scoutapp.com), which lets you monitor, graph, and track just about anything (from unique visitors to the server load).
You can write your own plugins for Scout as well.
Derek Haynes
Co-Founder, Scout
while you can track actions in Flash with GA, this is not real time and for gadgets/widgets you can probably do something with javascript. The trick would be balancing the features of high end packages with something economical or free, preferably in one solution. should be extensive visualization opportunities in this area
Yes, the beta signup form is a little terse – I assume I’ve submitted the request (had exactly the same experience as Steve with the page refreshing and no confirmation that the form info had been posted). Shahar, can you check if I’m in the queue now?
Ian Thomas
Microsoft
The use o cookies. Some providers are using first party cookies (like us) and some 3rd party cookies. 3rd party cookies are much less accurate as they get blocked many times.
Ian,
We got your request.
You should have gotten an email confirmation.
we will also add a confirmation page.
Thanks for the feedback,
Yosi Taguri
VP R&D and Social Thinker
nuconomy
It’s great to see a new web analytics solution enter the mix. Yes, we are able to track non-page-view actions with existing tools, including Google Analytics. The difficult part, I think, is figuring out *which* non-page-view actions we ought to track, setting up that tracking so it works properly, and then feeding it back to the business in a useful way. If Nuconomy’s offering puts us closer to that ideal, fantastic. It will set the bar higher for every vendor.
June Dershewitz
http://june.typepad.com/
Nuconomy Emerges To Provide Next Generation Site Analytics
I met these guys on the tour, not only is their product amazing, but they are great people to work with as well! Good luck guys!
Richard,
Thank you for the kind words!
Yosi Taguri
VP R&D and Social Thinker
nuconomy
The product looks amazing!
looking forward for the beta!
Great work folks
Anil
A hands on review on this product – and short explanation why I think it is great:
http://swadirep...-not-analytics/
Gang-
Enough with the ‘ajax kills my ranking’ already. Does your business run on ranking? Your business probably doesn’t run on ranking or page hits. You only need 1 hit: the conversion event.
GA is good for giving some visibility into what happens after a user hits your site, but it’s built primarily to support measuring Adsense campaigns. You can use Goog’s website optimizer to perform multivariate analysis on your site features that support post-conversion events.
A mountain of data won’t help you too much either. You need to know what questions to be asking before any analytics package becomes valuable. Nuconomy might have something interesting to offer if it reveals hidden opportunities: either via correlations or by showing user-specific data unavailable in GA. But it’ll be a mess without someone modeling the behaviors worth tracking.
I’ll give it a try.
CG