Blogs

I just saw an advert for Google Analytics in my GMail the other day that mentioned something about a new industry benchmarking feature. I knew immediately what it was.

The idea is that you take the analytics information from all the sites using Google Analytics and generate some benchmarking data by industry and apply it to your stats. That way people who use Google Analytics can see if they have an unusually high bounce rate compared to their peers or if they have a really low pages per visit stat. Right now when people look at their Google Analytics information - aside from their past experiences - they haven’t really got much to go on in terms of what a good bounce rate or pages per visit value might be. This way one can actually compare with others and then prioritize what needs to get fixed based on what is most out of whack compared to others in their industry.

In the case of Google Analytics, I think that this sort of feature could really change analytics from being a private sort of thing to becoming something that, dare I say, a social network could build around - who wouldn’t want to be featured on the Google Analytics homepage for having the best web stats?

I had this idea a while back and I think it can be applied to a lot of different industries outside of web analytics - sort of like PayScale is doing with salary reporting - but of course an idea is nothing unless you can execute

Hopefully we can apply the same sort of idea to RobotReplay in the future.

I have been playing around with RobotReplay playback and made a simple little mouse trail. Check out the movie of a test playback below.

Just starting to scratch the surface really!

Also posted over on the RobotReplay blog.

We have finally released the public Beta of our RobotReplay service. What RobotReplay does is it records the mouse movements, clicks, and key presses and allows you to play them back. The service is completely Ajax based with no special plugins. Right now we don’t have much in the way of features but we are going to be constantly adding more and listening to our users about what they want to see.

First take a look at Andre’s screencast.

Otherwise, just sign up now and see what your users are doing.