Finnish
web analytics vendor Snoobi has taken big steps forward when it comes
to product and service development. I used to work more with the system
years ago, when it still had some major
drawbacks. The company has improved since then, developing an
interesting business model combining software and
services. I had a good chat with
Mikko Seppä a couple of weeks ago
about Snoobi Analytics’ version number 4 and possible future
development. If you want to test it yourself,
you can get a free 30-day trial via Snoobi.com. Here are my thoughts about Snoobi Analytics at the moment, many times benchmarked to
Google Analytics. If don't have time to read the whole article, you can jump directly to
executive summary.
If
you are an analytics ninja, Snoobi has pretty much all the same tools
and possibilities as other medium level web analytics systems. I'm not
talking about
Adobe (Omniture),
IBM (Coremetrics) or
Webtrends here, which are still more or less heavy weight suites. All the tracking data is in database, as usual. Using Snoobi’s decent
API you can do integrations and use the data in other systems as part of your daily business.
If
you are doing business to business, Snoobi offers very good lead
reports. Basically, you get a list of organizations that visited your
website, filtered and rated based on visitor behavior.
This means you can create lead lists highlighting the most interesting
and interested visitors. Snoobi’s integration with
Asiakastieto
means you can also pull out more information (such as revenue, business
area etc.) and decision-maker data on the companies that have visited
your website. Especially
Finnish organizations have been covered very well thanks to Snoobi's
work with IP identification. You can – and maybe you should – integrate
Snoobi Analytics with the CRM used. Snoobi Analytics already offers
integration applications for
Salesforce and
Microsoft Dynamics.
Nowadays, you can create custom KPI reports where you can easily track changes in important metrics. You can also follow trend graphs and set up minimum and maximum goal limits + alerts for each metric. Snoobi Analytics’ eCommerce report will give you necessary information related to turnover and visitor value by source or keyword. It takes some time to define KPIs and build the reports that you need, but I guess that's pretty much the same process with every tool.
Snoobi
is automatically tracking file downloads, email addresses and outgoing
links. This is something that usually needs some configuration with
Google Analytics. Snoobi also recognizes campaign
tags done with the
URL building tool for Google Analytics.
There will probably be a Snoobi-specific URL tool for campaign tracking
in the future. However, there are more important features in
development.
Soon
you will be able to create very clear dashboards and combine these with
the new Command Center. The Command Center includes very nice features
for turning data into always-vital actions.
You can set up and share tasks with other users and create email
notifications. You can link relevant metrics to tasks and make notes.
With the Command Center, you can say goodbye to
Basecamp
or other similar and overlapping project management systems. In good
hands, this is a very important part of a web analytics system, and
hopefully it makes the data more actionable!
There is another interesting area of development:
Facebook reports. Snoobi has stepped into the social media monitoring with these new features. Snoobi pulls the data from
Facebook's API
and brings relevant data, including Facebook page subscription
information, geographical and demographics data, discussions
and competitor benchmarks, from Facebook
performance into the web analytics tool. With Snoobi Analytics, you can
analyze the data from website, you can control your
Google Adwords
campaigns and monitor the quality of Facebook page conversations.
Convenient? And with Snoobi Analytics, customers own the data! Maybe
it's just matter of time when we
will see same for Twitter (and the rest, e.g.
LinkedIn and
Google+)?
Alongside the launch of the new version of Snoobi Analytics,
Snoobi announced new services.
With Snoobi Care, you will gain constant development with a personal
web analyst. If you don't want to outsource all, you can use Snoobi On
Demand
services when needed. If you are more hands-on analyst yourself, or
have the dedicated people in your company, you can use Snoobi Education
services to jumpstart your analytics and get more advanced training
later on. There's also a very handy live customer
chat in the tool, which is something included when you are using Snoobi
Analytics or Services. If you really want to compete or build an
analytics-driven culture, you need to have people in place to work with
the data and create insights, information and knowledge
for your organization.
Old customers of Snoobi got version number 4 automatically, and 25 other improvements during the year. Snoobi is nowadays
HTML5-compliant
so the system scales for smaller displays too. Still, I think usability
is probably one of the key development areas in the future. The look
and feel has improved
in couple of years but the overall user experience with Snoobi has to
be better in order to compete with bigger vendors.
Like
other markets, Snoobi has lot of competition in the whole field of web
analytics. But, on the other hand, if you are not willing to pay huge
licence fees, take a
deeper look at Snoobi Analytics. Depending on your needs and internal
resources, you should evaluate and compare Snoobi, the product and
services, as an option. It will be interesting to see how the
combination of product development and expert services is
working for customers.
Several studies have shown that
there are other things than the tool that make the difference to be
successful with analytics or not. For companies outside of Fortune 500,
Snoobi may be relevant option in terms of return
on investment.