startup

Why are there so many analytics startups?

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Originally published on Quora: Why are there so many analytics startups?

Question:

Why are there so many analytics startups in the past 2 years?  With Google Analytics getting better every year (for FREE!), what is the value proposition?  I understand the need to augment with some new perspectives such as Clicktale, but I’m not sure I understand the value prop of KissMetrics, SpringMetrics, etc?

Answer:

There are two main reasons:

  1. Features gap between google analytics (free) and google analytics (premium aka 360 now!) — there are a lot companies (esp. with multi-million customers) that want to use premium features but still cant justify the ROI of GA premium. So there are analytics startups out there that try to cater to these “gaps”. Even though GA is improving, there will always be some feature gap(s).
  2. Access to venture capital for these startups — so these startups found a market and they went for it. They also had access to venture capital (easier two years back then it is today!) and it also helped them that “big data” and “data science” was (and still is!) a highly discussed tech topic.

I believe we will see some consolidation in next few years.

How to analyze “new users” metric by specific pages in Google Analytics?

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Problem:

you want to create a funnel chart of how your new users move from their landing page to your desired destination. Ideally it’s goes something like this:

Stage 1) lands on your home/landing page

Stage 2) goes to a product page

stage 3) goes to a checkout page

stage 4) sees a thank you page

Now, if you want to analyze the conversion among these stages for a “new” user then you will need create custom reports in google analytics. You will basically need to create a report for each specific page that you want to analyze. So how to set one up?

Solution: 

1) Navigate to Google analytics profile

2) On the top of the go to “customization” section and click on create a new custom report

3) here’s how you can set up a custom report that will use you new users by a specific page (notice the page filter?).

New users by specific pages funnel visualization google analytics

Conclusion:

In this post, I outlined the steps that you need to take to setup a custom report in google analytics that shows you new users by specific pages.