During one of the huddles at xChange, a good question came up.  What does Analytics look like?  Is it a report, a graph or even a conversation?

At first blush, this seams like a simple question.  It looks like Omniture or Google Analytics, right? Or does it look like Webtrends / Visual Sciences?  Wait a minute, I hired a web analyst and he gives me a report weekly with text on it.  Sometimes we even have a conversation about analytics.

During xChange, analytics looked a lot like conversations to me.  We all sat around tables and talked a lot about it.  The problem is, there is no answer for this.  I know what accounting looks like.  I know what my doctor’s office looks like.  I know what most other professions look like but there doesn’t seam to be a standard way to communicate analytics.

Just printing out a dashboard or special report doesn’t seem to cut it for me.  Neither does a dry report.  When I used to receive weekly reports from our web analyst, I used to insist that he sit with me and go over the report.  I wanted to hear a story about our traffic.  I wanted to speculate as to reasons why things were up or down. 

Data itself is not very interesting.  I think Analytics must tell a story.  It must tell us something we didn’t know before we started.  I want to know how analytics can help our user experience or how it can help us avoid problems.  Those are the stories that interest me.

What does analytics look like at your organization?

It’s been a few weeks since we signed up for Tealeaf and I wanted to give you all an update.  Here’s the situation.  In our environment, we require three new servers to make it work.  We need one server to collect the data on our Linux server, one to collect the data on our Windows server (for Endeca), and one to compile and serve the data so we can read it.

Our servers are actually in two different locations.  Our Linux servers are in Connecticut and our Windows server is at Rackspace.  So we physically must install new servers at both locations.  Well, Rackspace has been great.  They are a traditional co-location facility.  We’ve arranged to have our servers sent there and installed.

Unfortunately, our Connecticut host is not as hospitable.  They’re paranoid about allowing in foreign servers.  They only offer about 4 different configurations and everything must be purchased and installed through them.  If you are simply running a website and don’t need special hardware, that’s great; however, if you need a special configuration such as a special router or firewall, you’ve got issues. 

Moving out of Connecticut is not a simple option.  They are the most reliable hosts and experts for our shopping cart.  If we move from them, we’d need to bring in extra expertise to keep our shopping cart running.  Granted, we are in the process of changing our shopping cart and moving to windows, but that won’t be ready for at least 6 more months.

So what to do?  We are currently working with our hosts to see if they can come up with a solution.  I’d hate to delay our tealeaf implementation because of this.

A couple posts back, I mentioned that we are interested in using Tealeaf to analyze our visitor sessions with the hope of fixing any interface issues.  Well, we signed up for them on Friday.  I’ve decided to blog about our experiences using tealeaf and give you an inside look into the implementation.

Let’s start with the contract process.  Tealeaf isn’t cheap.  It’s a product that major companies use and it’s priced that way.  Fortunately for those of us on the bottom half of the IR 500, Tealeaf came out with an offering called the SMB Package.  If you’ve shyed away from them because of the price, this may be a good opportunity for you to take a second look.  I’m not going to get into the exact price we paid them because I don’t want to find out later that we paid too much or upset someone else because we got a better deal.

We purchased the SMB Package which includes Tealeaf CX (the part that gathers the data) and cxImpact (the part that allows you to see the data).  In addition, we added cxResults.  cxResults gives you multi session capability among other segmenting tools.  This is important for us because our average transaction takes 3 days from the time a visitor first sees our site.

Tealeaf also offers other products such as cxView which is their dashboard product and cxReveal and cxVerify (which are customer service optimization suites) and cxConnect which allows you to connect to third party applications such as Omniture.  However, since we are on a budget and only need the core functionality, we passed on those products.

In addition to the product costs, there is implementation and training which will certainly vary based upon the complexity of your architecture and your training needs.  Our environment is modestly complex because we have servers at Rackspace in Denver and also a Linux server in Connecticut.  Therefore, Tealeaf needs to combine those sessions into one coherent view.

I’m excited about this new implementation and will be happy to let you know how it goes.  If you have any advice for me or any questions, please feel free to comment.