What if you could actually see where your users were going, what links they were clicking and what they were actually doing on your site?
Well, SkyGlue is a service that helps you understand what your users are doing on your site. It works with Google analytics and enables individual user tracking and simplifies Google Analytics event tracking, automatically tracking links, downloads, form interaction activities, buttons and many more within your Google Analytics reports.
SkyGlue (patent pending) is one of the coolest, most simple tracking technologies I have seen laid upon the web. Google analytics helps you see basic user metrics, but most web site owners have difficulty with more detailed and specific user tracking. With SkyGlue, you just paste in some code and you're ready to go.
For free beta version, go here.
Eric Huang, founder of SkyGlue, says "Our goal is to make advanced web analytics extremely simple to use and easy to maintain. We want to help our customers gain better insights into the behavior of their online users." The idea behind SkyGlue came with several iterations to a previous idea. "Before our current product, our idea was to build a standalone web analytics service for user retention analysis. We developed a prototype and had some beta users. What we found out is that it is very hard to have the users spend time updating their websites to collect data. "
SkyGlue is a recent graduate of the startup accelerator Founder Institute. The FI program is a 4 month long incubator meant to help first time founders get a business established and an initial product into the market. The process is grueling and only about half of the accepted entrants usually end up fulfilling the requirements and graduating from the Founder Institute.
After completing some market research Huang found most of the high-end web analytics solutions, like Omniture, require consultants to add tags to websites to collect detailed user activity data. According to Huang," Using these services is an expensive and time-consuming process. For small to medium websites, they use Google Analytics, but they usually just use the default pageview tracking setting without tracking those high business value click events, such as form interaction, white paper downloads. If they don't measure them, they cannot improve them."
Huang notes website owners can just use Google Analytics, which is by default only measuring papgeview tracking and basic user segmentation. But without SkyGlue, their Google Analytics data is not actionable, and thus incomplete. Google Analytics has event tracking but needs programming APIs and code change (tagging) on all related links and buttons and other items usually needing to be completed by developers. SkyGlue lets users easily measure high business activities and find ways for improvement all with just embeding a line of code. The major difference between Google Analytics event tracking API and SkyGlue are shown on this chart below.
It took a while for Huang to find this specific need. "When I was in the Founder Institute Seattle program I spoke with various mentors and my beta users and it became apparent the idea for making advanced features in Google Analytics easier to use will address a bigger market." Eric adds that with SlyGlue, it will also be easier for you to attract more users with spending less money. In a sense, SkyGlue addresses the pain-point of streamlining advanced web analytics - detailed analysis of what users are actually doing on your site. Once a site owner knows this information, optimization can occur.
When you sit with Eric, you get a sense he knows what he is talking about. Not surprisingly, he has a Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University - Bloomington with a focus on distributed computing and cloud computing. After graduating IU, Eric joined Microsoft and became the 1st developer in Azure AppFabric ServiceBus team. He was one of the key early-stage contributors of Microsoft cloud service from incubation to V1 release. Prior to that, Eric worked for IBM Research and SONY.
With the current version, SkyGlue can automatically detect and track most website events that are of interest to you. Individual user activity tracking is automated as well. They have a good list of beta users that have provided tremendously valuable feedback. SkyGlue is currently in private beta and is looking to expand their user base and will soon implement an initial business model.
So there you go, now you can see exactly what users are doing on your site.
It's free for a limited time, so go here to get SkyGlue for your site.
Foursquare has been busy expanding its location-based social network, recently hitting the 10-million-user mark, but its revenue-generating abilities haven’t grown quite as quickly. Now the New York city-based startup seems determined to change that picture, by offering “daily deals” through a number of partners. If Foursquare can manage to make this marriage of location and deals work — and if it can somehow bring deal giant Groupon into the fold, a partnership it is rumored to be working on — the company might be able to justify the high hopes of its backers. The only potential dark clouds on the horizon now are Google and Facebook.
In its blog post announcing the news, Foursquare notes that it has been expanding into the deal or discount-offer market over the past few months, including the launch of a “load to card” partnership with American Express that allows cardholders to get discounts without having to print out coupons. Foursquare does not make money off the American Express deal. But the new partnerships represent a much more substantial move in that area, since they include LivingSocial — the number two player in the daily deal space — as well as Gilt City, which is part of the giant European Gilt Groupe operation, and BuyWithMe (Zozi and AT&T Interactive are also involved).
Going beyond the “check-in”
In some ways, the launch of these daily-deal partnerships are the fulfillment of Foursquare’s long-held ambition to “go beyond the check-in.” As far back as last summer, founder and CEO Dennis Crowley admitted in a sit-down interview with Om that he knew the simple check-in had become — or was rapidly becoming — a commodity, and that Foursquare was making plans to add more value for its millions of users, in order to try and keep them coming back (and potentially generate some revenue).
What that value was going to consist of, apart from more badges and mayorships, wasn’t exactly clear at the time. But marrying daily deals from retailers to a user’s location or relationship with an advertiser seemed like an obvious addition to the network — and Foursquare started to expand into that market with the rollout of Specials, involving discount deals with specific retailers and locations. But the latest announcements are a huge step in that direction: Even LivingSocial alone, which is backed by online retail giant Amazon, could add a massive volume of location-based offers to Foursquare (although how much of the revenue Foursquare will keep from these partnerships is unknown).
A few big question marks remain, however: one is Groupon and the others are Google and Facebook. Groupon recently launched its own attempt at marrying daily discounts and location, a program called Groupon Now that provides offers to users of its mobile apps and website. But there have been reports that Foursquare is in talks with the deal-based giant — which is launching its initial public offering of stock soon, expected to give the company a market value as high as $30 billion. If Crowley can land Groupon as a partner (something rival Loopt has already managed to do), that could make Foursquare the market leader.
Will Google and Facebook make a move?
Meanwhile, Google is busy rolling out its own deal platform, called Google Offers. While the search company is obviously a gigantic competitive force with billions of dollars to spend, it has been trying for some time to make a dent in the location-based market, with Google Places and a variety of other experiments such as Google Hotpot (which has been rolled into Google Places). Its mobile offering, called Latitude, has been around for some time — and was a successor to Crowley’s previous company, Dodgeball, which Google acquired in 2005 — but has never really managed to get much traction.
Facebook has also experimented with deals through its Facebook Places platform, which was launched last year with the support of a number of players such as Yelp, and it has its own Groupon-style offering called Facebook Deals that began rolling out earlier this year as well. But it has not made a major effort to combine the two yet, although that possibility certainly exists. But will it try to do this on its own, or partner with someone like Foursquare — a company it once reportedly tried to acquire?
Whether Google Offers or Facebook Places/Deals can break the location-based market open and broaden it beyond early adopters remains to be seen. But even with the competition from these two major players, a Foursquare-Groupon combination (assuming it ever comes to pass) would still be pretty hard to beat. And landing that kind of deal might finally justify the $600-million market value implied by Foursquare’s latest round of financing.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Nan Palmero
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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- The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
- Facebook Remained Social Media’s Chief in Q3
- Shopping Matters When it Comes to Location-Based Apps
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