Nedstat – Web Analytics Vendor Review

The past three days I have been at Nedstat for a partner training on the latest features of SiteStat. Nedstat is one of the top 5 vendors for website statistics and analytics solutions. At Nedstat currently 125 people are working from offices in Amsterdam (HQ), Antwerp, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Paris and Stockholm serving approx. 750 enterprise companies with website analytics solutions.

It were three interesting days for sure and really gave me a better look into the added value compared to competitors and understanding of their analytics platform and the way some features are actually working under the hood.

The thing that made the most impression on me was their approach of storing the collected online analytics data. As a former business intelligence consultant I really like the way they store any kind of little detail about your visitor in an unaggregated way, enabling you the make any report or dashboard that answers your questions. As most analytics platforms are storing the information in predefined collections, reports and tables, in my opinion, you will never get the flexibility Nedstat offers. For example it is very easy to make a report on any metric based on a funnel in the past. Most platforms, as not all, do require to first setup a funnel for a specific KPI and then measure it for further analysis. Nedstat / Sitestat’s unaggregated data approach enables you to simply use a funnel you come up with on any period in time on any metric you can think of. This is a useful feature as most suspicions require a more detailed analysis you didn’t yet defined and don’t want to wait till you collected the specific traffic data. This also fits perfectly in their philosophy that a question about your visitor’s behavior leads to another question and this feature give you maximum power to get the true answers for these. As founder and chief innovations at Nedstat Michiel Berger stated; we want to measure everything for anybody in a company.

Other innovative functions that made me even more enthusiastic about Nedstat / Sitestat were their options for tracking mobile and video. Stream Sense™, their video analytics function isn’t limited to just some common events as playback, stop and video duration metrics, but also they are capable of measuring detailed viewing behavior, bandwidth usage, event trails, advertisements in video, engagement after/during the video and more. Very interesting, distinctive and inspiring stuff!

Also their OneCall API gives you maximum flexibility to instantly and very simple retrieve Nedstat data and load it directly into your own data warehouse for further mining. You can use the Nedstat / Sitestat data in combination with other offline customer data as for example CRM, payment history or contract information to complete the 360 degree customer view with also the online engagement information of your customers. OneCall API.. I like it very much! For the other way around they provide a data merge or data lookup function I personally am less interested in.

Their current user interface is a little bit boring and less sexy than competitors if I may say. It is basic but covers the most important usability features. But no cool data visualization options or web2.0 glossy and interactive graph features. Also don’t hit F5 to refresh data as it is Java and it will result in the Sitestat login screen instead of a refreshed report. You can only use the refresh data button . During the last day of my stay at Nedstat the roadmap for 2010 was also shared which made clear they are aware of their focus on reporting functionalities, integration, flexibility and less on the GUI the last past years. Although there was no sneak preview unfortunately, I was told we can expect a major uplift of the GUI in Q4 2010 catching up or even outrank the competition.

Some other nifty solutions & features they offer which I will discuss in a much more detailed report on Nedstat / Sitestat within the next weeks are; Extensive segmentation, Integration with pure players on e-mail marketing (re-mailing functionalities), CMS vendors and advertisement bid management platforms and other sophisticated features as online campaign attribution, Direct View™ (website overlay) and visitor engagement.

Check out http://www.nedstat.com for additional company information or request a Sitestat product demo for your URL if you are interested. You also can contact me and I will forward you to the right person within Nedstat to answer your request.

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