{"id":769,"date":"2009-12-09T14:40:46","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T13:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=769"},"modified":"2009-12-09T14:40:46","modified_gmt":"2009-12-09T13:40:46","slug":"getclicky-sucks-an-analytics-service-going-out-of-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2009\/12\/09\/getclicky-sucks-an-analytics-service-going-out-of-business\/","title":{"rendered":"GetClicky sucks: an Analytics service going out of business?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A year or so ago I did a roundup of the major free Web Analytics services. I was interested to see how Google Analytics had affected the market: was there a market left any more?<\/p>\n

One of the trials I signed up for I found so useful I carried on using after I’d written the review. GetClicky<\/a> had a lot less information than some services – including GA – and less detail than the free tools I already run on all my websites (e.g. AWstats). But it was a lot more user-friendly, presenting the most critical information all at once on a single screen.<\/p>\n

Today I finally started disabling GetClicky on my sites; the company has forceably blocked my site from their service. Why? Because I had a week of heavy traffic *while I was using the premium version which allows unlimited traffic*. That’s it. I stayed within their requirements, but I was banned anyway. That suggests to me that their company is in trouble…
\n<\/p>\n

What went wrong?<\/h4>\n

My AppRejections.com<\/a> site – a small blog chronicling Apple’s submissions process for iPhone apps – got hit by a storm of traffic for one week. I’d only started the blog a week or so earlier, and I hadn’t got around to adding analytics to it yet (it only had 5-10 hits a day!).<\/p>\n

Once the traffic surge started, I panicked and quickly setup a GetClicky account for it. As a new site it was signed up for the GetClicky “free premium trial”, which allows the site to have unlimited traffic (more on this later). The traffic surge ended a few days before the free trial ended.<\/p>\n

The site is now running at less than half the “limit” for a non-premium account. Well within the company’s rules. But when the trial ended, I received an email telling me they were cancelling my free account too, because my site has too much traffic.<\/p>\n

So, assuming it was an automated email, and that they’d understand if I explained:<\/p>\n

\nMy site doesn’t average that much any more – it was a few days blip.<\/p>\n

Presumably the getclicky stuff will carry on working?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To which I got a snarky email from them – NB: they have the FULL DATA on this site, they could easily have used their brains and checked:<\/p>\n

\nThe limit for free traffic is 3,000 daily page views. Your site has been above this number for every single day of your trial except the last 2 days. That’s not a “blip” in my opinion!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hmm. OK. Snarky, but at least human. Let’s explain in more detail what happened (which they could corroborate easily if they cared):<\/p>\n

\nI accidentally got a massive spike of traffic on a tiny blog – I
\nwent from 10 hits a day to 50,000 a day – which made me realise that I
\nhad no stats tracking, so I enabled GC. That traffic is now gone, it
\nwas a flash-in-the-pan thing.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Response? They banned me. All stats stopped functioning.<\/p>\n

GetClicky’s problems<\/h4>\n

When I reviewed the various options for analytics, the interesting problem was that GA was providing the most powerful service … and doing it for free. Arguably Google shouldn’t be allowed to do this – it’s standard monopolistic behaviour – but having done the review of alternatives, I think it’s fine.<\/p>\n

GA is so incredibly difficult, complicated, and user-unfriendly that most people use it, but get less of out it than if they were using ANY of the direct competitors.<\/p>\n

Google is providing an “everything but the kitchen-sink” product which is really targetted at corporates who can afford to pay full-time staff to customize and manage their GA setup. For the rest of the world, Google is offering nothing more than a lowest-common-denominator product; the field is wide-open.<\/p>\n

The problem now for other analytics companies is how to monetize in this arena. There are some notable successes, such as the URL-shortening companies, who offer analytics on stats that are simply not physically accessible by GA.<\/p>\n

But in my experience, most of the analytics companies today have poor strategies for how to thrive and grow in the shadow of GA.<\/p>\n

What are they doing today?<\/h4>\n

GetClicky is a great example: there are only two significant advantages to their premium product:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The adverts on the stats page disappear\n
  2. You are allowed more than 3,000 visitors \/ day\n<\/ol>\n

    Normally, removing two small ads from a webpage wouldn’t be worth paying for (at least not since 2000; we’re all so used to seeing ads now that we don’t care). But GetClicky’s webpaged are rather badly written, and they block on downloading the advert-code. The advertisers webservers are often a lot slower than GetClicky’s, and you can often wait 10 seconds for a stats page to load, of which 9.9 seconds was waiting for the advert.<\/p>\n

    But, essentially, their value proposition comes down to:<\/p>\n

    \nA couple of trivial concepts in “forced monetization” that wouldn’t be out of place in the late 1990’s.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    There seems to be no real attempt to find stuff that modern consumers care about. For instance, the screamingly obvious USP for GetClicky – they have the most user-friendly of all analytics services, bar none – is completely ignored by the company.<\/p>\n

    Growth<\/h4>\n

    As a GetClicky user, I wanted to access their site on my iPhone. A year ago, you could access their website and get an iphone-only version of the site. It was using the fake webpages that pretend to look like an iPhone app.<\/p>\n

    Now, even that has been withdrawn, and their own support forums are full of people asking “when can we get an iPhone client?”, with answers dated late 2008 (over a year ago!) saying “we can’t tell you what, but something exciting will appear very soon now”.<\/p>\n

    This is ridiculous. Checking live website-analytics on the iPhone is a classic example of a service that users desperately want … and it fits perfectly with GetClicky’s USP as a company.<\/p>\n

    So … since I *am* an iPhone developer … I approached GetClicky’s Business Development guy, and asked him if there was an iPhone app in development. I added that if there weren’t, I’d like to go ahead and make one myself – either contracted to them, or as a standalone product that they’d get some secondary benefit from (it makes their service better) but they wouldn’t be able to charge for (because they didn’t own it).<\/p>\n

    A week passed, with not even a single brief email response.<\/p>\n

    The nail in the coffin<\/h4>\n

    Go look at the front page of http:\/\/www.GetClicky.com\/<\/a>. In passing, note the testimonials – all these are about usability (but the company refuses to make money out of the usability!).<\/p>\n

    Focus on the “who uses our service” part. Wow. Lots of famous, big name websites there. Um. No. None that the target audience is likely to know or care about.<\/p>\n

    What are they selling to here? Are they trying to go head to head with GA for corporate clients? Are they targetting marketing depts internally – NOT the technical depts – who just want ease-of-use? Are they going after the small website owners, who don’t have the time\/money to learn how to use GA?<\/p>\n

    Honestly? I don’t think they have any idea themselves… Which is rather sad, because it gives me little confidence they’ll still be around 5 years from now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A year or so ago I did a roundup of the major free Web Analytics services. I was interested to see how Google Analytics had affected the market: was there a market left any more? One of the trials I signed up for I found so useful I carried on using after I’d written the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,45,46,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}