'Net Features : real-time analytics

Keep Up with Useful Audience Info in Real-Time with PubNub

Michael Garrity — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 20:50:00 GMT

The Internet moves at a rapid pace, and Web professionals are in the unfortunate position of having to keep up with users as they continue to demand faster responses.

In an attempt to respond to the increasing consumer requests for more instantaneous service and/or information, many have turned to real-time analytics to garner data on where users are coming from, what they’re doing, and how they can be helped as they are interacting with a site or application.

PubNub, a cloud-hosted messaging Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for Web, tablet, and mobile devices, has long been working to provide real-time applications across these different channels, and recently announced that it would be launching Real-Time Audience Analytics to give its customers an instant view of the size of their active audience, and show them user locations on a world map. The analytics tool will provide multiple updates each second.

This new analytics solution can be utilized both as a developer tool and to provide valuable insights to marketers.

PubNub customers will be able to experience audience size and overall real-time engagement with their applications. Using Visual Geo-Analytics offers users an animated view of their audience size and the ability to display global maps that are overlaid with the locations of all of their active end users. By giving customers this information in real-time, it allows them to correlate events to geographic usage, such as finding out which features are particularly popular in different regions.

Two New Real-Time, Rich Media-Monitoring Tools

Michael Garrity — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 20:30:00 GMT

Marketers have always had many channels they could potentially leverage, and with the advent of the Internet that selection expanded literally overnight.

HP-owned analytics software company Autonomy is looking to aid marketers wanting to utilize as many of these channels as possible with two new format- and language-agnostic media-monitoring and analytics solutions, NewSocial 24x7 and MultiMedia Broadcast Monitoring.

Both solutions will be based on the IDOL computing platform and will offer in-depth, real-time media monitoring and analytics for all types of text, rich media voice and voice sources, including online, print, blogs, social media and broadcast news.

MultiMedia Broadcast Monitoring will allow for automatic real-time management of various marketing campaigns, including election campaigns and product launches. Broadcasters will be able to search dozens of news and video feeds in any format or language for “items of interest.” The solution can also automatically understand customer sentiment in videos, which gives marketers information to plug back into product development.

NewSocial 24x7 offers the same automated real-time monitoring on social media by helping marketers gain a conceptual understanding of customer commentary on social channels. This will help marketers quickly adjust campaigns based on consumer feedback.

These new solutions make up part of Autonomy Rich Media Management, which combines rich media management, Web content management, a conceptual understanding of all of a user's assets and advanced social media and broadcast analytics.

In addition to these two new solutions, a new version of Virage MediaBin 8, which also leverages IDOL technology, was released as part of the Rich Media Management platform.

Virage MediaBin 8 will automatically generate a conceptual understanding of any and all rich media assets that are located in an internal or external repository. This can mean images, audio files, video files and much more. This allows organizations to readily identify and use relevant human information on the Web and in video, print, social media, online ads and mobile campaigns.

Moreoever, MediaBin allows marketers to tag and classify rich media assets, in any language or format, to significantly alleviate a time and resource burden and (mostly) eliminate human error. It will also help deliver advanced analytics capabilities, automatic categorization, summarization, concept clouds, content hyper-linking, dynamic content associations and automated workflow and business processes.

Bit.ly Launches Real-Time Social Search Beta

Michael Garrity — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:30:00 GMT

In an effort to continue to expand its role on the Web, popular link shortening service Bit.ly just launched a new beta search platform and "reputation monitoring service."

The company will be using information gathered over time by crawling every URL that it has shortened to check each one's potential to go viral. This allows the company to provide a look at trending content and, more impressively, to predict the future by declaring that content which is going to trend through user search.

According to a blog post by the company, "Instead of pagerank we're using a different filter -- for any given search query, we display the stories that we predict will get the most attention over the next 24 hours. Then we use bitly's analytics to refine our predictions in realtime."

This is all a part of the company's growing realtime social search initiative.

"Many pages are so new, so fresh, that they don't have any pagerank," says the company on its blog. "Often [stories] reach a broad audience on social media before more conventionally-authoritative newsgatherers amplify their messages."

The idea of this realtime search effort is to act as an "early-warning system" to project upcoming swings in what users are saying about specific brands, which is what sets it apart from traditional clipping or trending engines.

The current beta version is only available for the services paying Enterprise customers.

Get Real Results with Real-time Analytics

Linc Wonham — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:00:00 GMT

Critical to the success of every online business is a healthy set of analytics tools – and the sooner you can retrieve the data you need, the more you are able to accomplish with it.

With the current emphasis shifting from “need to know” to “need to know right now”, a highly competitive environment has emerged in the field of real-time Web analytics. Today’s users are arriving at your website from all directions, and each one has their own singular purpose. The more you know about how they got there, what they want to accomplish and what they actually do on your site, the better chance you have of fulfilling their immediate needs and long-term goals.

Optify is one of the emerging leaders in the real-time analytics space, enabling its customers to instantaneously track visitors’ on-site activity and to identify the search terms that got them there, thus helping them better manage their marketing and social media campaigns. The platform is used by clients such as Microsoft, LexisNexis, AdReady and the Wall Street Journal, and software firm Corensic increased its organic search traffic by 300 percent just three months after implementing Optify’s real-time analytics and marketing solutions.

Optify launched its analytics software in March 2010, and the Seattle-based startup has just received more than $6 million in a new round of funding. An integration with SalesForce allows Optify’s clients to react to the real-time data by providing users with the information and assistance they need right away, converting visitors into customers and closing more deals. Optify’s analytics provide the basis for solutions in keyword research, website optimization, lead scoring, visitor tracking, marketing and social media campaign creation and management.

Optify offers a free trial for 30 days, beyond which customers can elect for a continuation of the free service or one of three packages ranging from $500 per month to $3,000 per month. Optify is a rising star in a developing market that has significant value to any online business, and here are some other providers making a name for themselves in the real-time Web analytics space.

Woopra is a real-time Web tracking and analysis desktop application with an open API and plugin capabilities. The service just launched a new interface in which users can connect to and track activity on multiple websites in one browser tab and switch back and forth without having to reload data or open new tabs. Woopra also added advanced funnel analytics and campaign management features as part of the version 2.1 it released this week. Woopra’s pricing plans, seven options to choose from, range from a free service to the Kryptonite package for $180 per month.

Clicky also recently launched a new interface, making the latest version available to all users at the end of September after two months of beta testing. Clicky’s look has been updated somewhat, but the feature-rich service largely remains the same that has made it the favorite real-time analytics choice for more than a quarter of a million site owners and business leaders. Clicky also provides video analytics from most services including YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler through an API for tracking interactions with HTML5 and Flash video players. Clicky is affordable and offers a free service as well as four packages that range from $5 per month to custom price points. Each new account comes with a 21-day free trial of the popular $10/month Pro service.

Chartbeat launched in 2009 and is already used to track the real-time analytics and social media engagement for some of the Web’s most well-known sites. Clients include the New York Times, Groupon, Forbes.com and the Onion, all of which take advantage of Chartbeat’s detailed reports on the real-time activities of concurrent visitors to their sites. Chartbeat also recently received new funding when it raised $3 million from Index Ventures at the end of August. Standard packages start at $10 per month and prices go up to $150 per month for the XXL plan.

ChartBeat Real-time Analytics

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:02:00 GMT

The trouble with real-time analytics is that they are like a vortex of awesomeness, pulling you in deeper and deeper, until you pick your head up at the end of the day and realize you haven't done any work at all.

ChartBeat is the latest real-time website analytics provider I've come across and just by the feature set alone I believe it to be a solution to consider deploying on your Web property. ChartBeats offers traffic alerts (notifying users when traffic exceeds or falls below a monthly average, maximum or minimum), uptime alerts and load time notifications (sent via SMS and/or e-mail), a real-time dashboard that shows how many people are on the site (widgets are available to publicize that too), what pages they are on and where they came from and even some social metrics to inform you what those users are actually doing (reading, writing, sitting idle). ChartBeat also provides historical trends, to show users how the site was performing at a specific date in time and how the site's responsiveness and popularity changes over time.

One of my main concerns with real-time solutions of this nature is that they tend to be bulky and interfere with the user-experience. Using Chartbeat however won't slow down your site as the javascript that must be placed is small and hosted on Amazon's Cloudfront CDN (content delivery network). Post-install, users will begin pinging chartbeat every ten seconds asynchronously (in the background). Unlike other similar programs the number of pageviews is not capped, but the amount of concurrent users is kept to 5,000.

Current pricing for Chartbeat is $9.95/mo (free for thirty days) and enables you to install Chartbeat on five websites.

Simple: RadarURL Widgets and Stats

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:10:00 GMT

There are a few problems with analytics solutions as they stand today for newer Web professionals. Most don't really want to do a lot of investigation to see who has visited their site, but more importantly, most analytics packages don't give you an idea of how many users are on the site (or an individual page) at any given moment. That's why, when I see one, I like to share it with the wider Web community.

RadarURL.com offers gives an easy way to monitor online visitors. While traditional statistics/analytics packages provide loads of in-depth information, it's rarely in real-time - something which RadarURL does and does pretty well. Website owners place the RadarURL widget on their page, and an image is loaded every time someone visits the page where the code is located. This enables RadarURL to count and keep track of your page's visitors, provide statistics about which pages are being visited and where the users are coming from at any moment in time.

Information gathered from the widget (quantity, country of origin, page being visited) and more can be seen on the advanced statistics page that anyone can view by clicking the actual widget itself. While not the most robust analytics or statistics solution, it is pretty entertaining.

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