Coffee, Sun & Technology

We’ve studied for a long time better ways for displaying Web analytics data. That’s how we came up with Site Explorer early 2001, which was an idea suggested by my friend Charles Hachtmann at Novica. Site Explorer is an awesome tool for visualizing click-throughs right on a page, instead of using a flat report with cryptic URLs.

4 years later, many of our competitors have copied this idea and implemented their own visualization tool, some call this “site overlay”. As I reflect upon the future of analytics I am convinced that we need another similar breakthrough to view multi-dimensional data in a friendly way. I don’t know how this can be done today any better than the classic Excel pivot table, but there has to be a better way.

It’s very hard for any Marketing manager to look at these huge pivot tables and make sense out of them, in seconds.

I have worked with SmartMoney in the past, and I have always been fascinated by their “map of the market” (see here). Pretty cool, isn’t it? Could this be applied to visualizing all your marketing campaigns? Let me think about it.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about integration between analytics and email. Besides the basic integration features, marketing managers ask me frequently about been able to build email lists on the fly from the Fireclick interface. Sounds cool. I need to investigate how that would work, realistically - and then run this by a few email partners.