Prateek Dayal

I use a lot of web based softwares everyday and I can almost see a pattern in the services I am in love with. They all provide very detailed statistics. Services such as Google Analytics and Gigya. Google Analytics is very well know. Gigya is a widget distribution service and you can see it in action on any of the song pages in Muziboo.

Both these services are highly configurable. For example, google analytics lets you remove your own visits from reports (using an IP address or cookie based filtering). It lets you compare reports very easily to see changes in trends or track goals (such as signup or payment). In fact analytics always plays a major role in any of the redesigning we do for our pages. Same goes for gigya. Even though its not as configurable as google analytics, its still one of the most configurable tools around. You can track embeds for a particular widget or a class of widgets (such as playlists). I think reports are important for two reasons.

However both these services lack a critical component. The ability to fetch the reports using an API. This is important if I want to share the reports with my users (for their pages or widgets). This is where analytics tools like piwik come into picture. Piwik is a hosted analytics solution that can be queried or extended using their wonderful API. This helps in organizations use it and build services over it. For small teams (esp startups) that is very useful.

So if you are building a new service and want loyal early adopters, try giving usage stats, an API to query it and let people build stuff over it. I think twitter has grown a lot thanks to its API. Imagine twitter giving stats about the number of people who clicked your link or read your tweet. I think some marketers would even pay for it. I would certainly pay for a tool like google analytics or gigya anyday.

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