Proactive Analytics Suite Launches

NuConomy announced the public launch of its Studio analytics product today. Previously in private beta, the free tools move toward what the company calls a “proactive” approach to Web analytics. Instead of reporting page views, a common metric, NuConomy Studio aims to present meaningful data in a way that borders on story telling. Check this out:

One of Bruce’s favorite sayings is that you know half your marketing dollars are being wasted, you just don’t know which half. Proactive analytics aims to identify that half. Rather than combing through and cutting up the data yourself, the tools compare that day’s statistics with the historical record in order to report what it considers are “things you should know”. Then, by simply logging on to the system, your email or your RSS reader, the reports arrive right on your screen. This seems to me like wonderful solution to the headache many companies face when they try to take on Web analytics — a slow and labor-intensive process that begins with collection and then analysis, before conclusions can be drawn and action taken.

There are some sweet benefits to bloggers, too, who will be thrilled to see user activities, user interests and user contributions all mapped out pretty like:

Can you think of an easier way to address the most popular topics and encourage reader participation? Those posting videos will also get a kick out of the analytics reports that break down how much of a video is watched, who’s watching entire videos and if ads were watched in the video.

Even more unique is the fact that NuConomy Studio is equipped to take action on your site. A two-way API effects automatic changes to a site based on the current metrics and correlations. The example they give is showing ads or pushing specific content that is relevant to a user’s interests. Very clever, NuConomy, very clever.

But before we get too excited, we’ll have to get a first-hand look at the quality of the NuConomy reports. If it really does pull out trends that you may not have spotted yourself or do much of the hard work for you, then these tools will see a boom in no time. But if the tool is simply pulling out all the weird spikes or outlying data points, you may end up with more noise than when you started. [I’ll be Polly Paranoid and ask about security while we’re at it. Who protects my data? –Susan]

Sure you had a 1500 percent jump in traffic from the UK, but if you don’t sell anything in the UK, it doesn’t really matter. The goal of analytics is to come up with actionable results from data that matters to you. Unfortunately, you can’t throw a mountain into a sieve and hope that eventually you’ll find the gold mine.

Have you tried NuConomy Studio? What do you think?

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.