I had done a couple of very simple contests before, where I would compile entrants manually and pick winners via random numbers, but this was the first time I created a contest using a dedicated software to do so and with more bells and whistles I’d ever been able to add before.

In this post, I’ll show you all the results I got from running the contest and break down all the lessons I’ve learned from it. Be warned, though: what you’ll read below is probably not what you’re expecting…

The Contest

If you missed it, here’s a quick overview of what the contest was about:

The prizes up for grabs were:

• 1x Kindle Paperwhite ebook reader + Pro License of WP Sharely + Pro License of Viral Quiz Builder (1st prize).
• 4x Multi Site License of WP Sharely + Multi Site License of Viral Quiz Builder (2nd-5th prizes).

Anyone could enter the contest and would receive 1 point (or 1 entry) if they opted in with their name and email address and confirmed their email address. In addition, every entrant received a unique sharing link and could earn an additional 10 entries for every person they referred to the contest.

This is all handled by Contest Domination, the platform I used for the contest.

The Numbers

Here are the final stats, after the 5 day contest’s conclusion:

The first row shows the total numbers. The second row shows direct visits and the third row shows “viral” visits: the visits generated through users sharing the contest link and referring more visitors. Here are the key takeaways:

The Numbers Are (Mostly) Low

I noticed that the open rate and CTR of the email I sent for the contest were slightly lower than average. This surprised me, as I assumed that “win something!” would get above-average attention.

The “virality” of the contest was pretty good, on the other hand. Roughly 1,200 visitors generating roughly 600 referral visits is a good result, even though it’s far from a viral “snowball” effect that would be the best case scenario for a contest like this.

The Conversion Numbers Are Extremely Low

Where it all falls apart is the conversion rates: for a focused landing page, 8.62% is an abysmal conversion rate, no matter the traffic source. And 27.2% for direct traffic (e.g. email traffic) is equally shocking. As a comparison, if I send this traffic to a regular squeeze page or a webinar signup page, I’d expect a 50% conversion rate at the very least, with 80%+ not being out of the question.

Ultimately, I gained 52 new leads from the contest. In my business, I’ll get about this many leads if I just sit and wait for two days, without any contests or launches going on.

Clearly, this contest was not a great success, but we shan’t let that keep us from a valuable learning experience.

What Went Wrong?

As mentioned above, the virality of the contest was decent. Of the people that signed up, many actively shared the contest via social media. Here’s a twitter snapshot:

Good Twitter Activity During the Contest

We have to ask ourselves: what makes someone click on a link that says “win WordPress plugins and a Kindle”, but then decide not to enter the contest, once they see the landing page? The message on the landing page is essentially the same as the one in the link: “enter here to win WordPress plugin and a Kindle.”

What was it that compelled them to click, but not to enter?

Here’s what the landing page looked like:

The focal point of the landing page is the video, which auto-plays on page load. It is a relatively short video, selling the merits of the two plugins and explaining how the contest works.

It’s possible that something was wrong with the page. I noticed that the YouTube stats for the video showed only 17 views, throughout the contest. This seems very strange, but even if the video failed to play (and it worked in all of my tests), I’d still expect higher conversion rates.

If two or three lines of text are enough to convince 50% of visitors to sign up for a regular freebie on a squeeze page, why isn’t the same true for a contest like this?

At this point, I can only speculate, but here are some ideas.

“I won’t win anyway…”

When you sign up for a free report or something similar, you receive it instantly and there’s no doubt that you’ll receive it. With the contest, there’s a possible factor of the “what’s the point, I won’t win anyway!” objection coming into play.

I believe this might be the crucial point: when someone clicks on the contest link, they don’t know anything about the likelihood of winning. When they see the landing page, they still don’t know anything about it, but they form a hypothesis, in their head.

In the case of my contest, that might go something like this: “there are only five prizes up for grabs? I bet millions of people have already entered this contest, so there’s no chance I’ll win.”

Possible remedies for this are:

More Value

The likelihood of winning and the value of winning are weighed against each other, for a contest. If the chances are far lower, but the value far greater, you might still enter (see: lottery, where you’ll never win, but if you did, you’d win big).

So, perhaps giving away something worth multiple thousand Dollars would help?

More Prizes

The other side of the balance can be addressed with the volume of prizes. What if there weren’t only 5 prizes, but 500? Or 5,000?

A large volume of prizes would eliminate the “I’m not going to win anyway” objection.

Opt-In Combo

What if you combined a free report and a contest?

This might be a way of combining better opt-in rates (as seen on typical squeeze pages) with the viral factor of the contest.

Better Landing Page?

Maybe my landing page just sucked. That is possible and it’s also a bit of an embarrassment, since I’m supposed to be good at this kind of thing. Then again, no one’s ever become good at something without being bad at it, first.

I’m not sure about the two-column layout, which is the standard Contest Domination layout and maybe I should have removed the logo from the top left. Also, I briefly changed the image on the right side (to the one next to this text, right here). The idea was to display the prizes in a more tangible way.

I couldn’t see any difference in conversions, though. It was a pretty futile attempt anyway, because unless I could do a proper split test, the results would always be questionable. So, dear Contest Domination: add split testing, pretty please?*

I’m Big on Twitter

The most notable positive result I got from the contest was an increase in social media followers. My Twitter followers went from 962 to 1,048 and my Facebook page went from 779 to 829 likes, during the course of the contest.

So yeah… I’m a big deal, now.

Conclusion

This contest didn’t perform very well, but that didn’t come as a big surprise to me.

Sure, I expected higher conversion rates and I hoped for a better result. But pretty much everything I’ve ever accomplished started  with an early attempt that failed. What the results from this case study show me is that I’m not good at running profitable contests… yet.

My plan is to run at least another two contests, changing a few variables each time. As long as I keep the cost of the contests in check, it’s something worth experimenting with, to see if I can figure this thing out.

As usual, I’ll be reporting what I learn here, so you can avoid my costly mistakes.

As for this particular post, here’s what I’d like you to keep in mind: I have a history of trying things, failing at them and then keeping at them until I succeed. In this post, I’ve laid bare my entire thought process that happened after this initial failure. Even if you don’t care about contests, I can guarantee you that this way of thinking is useful for your own business venture.

Thoughts, questions, feedback? Leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to reply.

*Lack of split testing is the only thing I an criticize about the software, so far. I definitely can’t blame Contest Domination, since the software did what it’s supposed to do and was very easy to use, as well.

Cloning Technology for Your Website

This weeks app protects you from losing your website data and makes clones that I like to use for 3 purposes:

For anyone interested in building up their own business, Travis’ story is worth some close examination. Without any funding, he managed to bootstrap his way from a plugin to a successful SaaS business. In today’s podcast episode, he provides insights into how he managed to build and grow his company.

Podcast Video

Podcast Audio

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Click here to download the mp3 file.

Links

Click here to try Contest Domination for yourself!

• Travis’ blog
• Travis on Twitter
• Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes

As always, questions, comments and discussions are very welcome. Leave a comment below and don’t forget to share this episode, if you enjoyed it!

Maybe it’s because of perfectionism or because of a fear of selling, or maybe you started out with the wrong kind of product idea to begin with. Whatever the reason, when you keep treading water and a project never seems to come closer to the finish line, it saps your motivation and saps your budget until your business inevitably dies.

To survive and thrive online, you need to get your products and projects to market quickly. And in this post, you’ll discover exactly how you can do that.

Ready, Set,…

Here’s what you need at the outset:

You start with a basic idea for your new project or product. This is very simple and you should be able to sum it up in one sentence. Example: “a meal-planning application for athletes”.

The next step is to formulate a USP. Yes, you need a unique selling proposition before you start working on the product. It doesn’t have to be perfect or brilliant. You just need one, so you have a potentially interesting advantage over your competition. Example: “my meal planning application works for people with vegan, keto and paleo diets”.

The third component is your plan and initial target. Here’s the formula you need:

Basic Idea + Details + Dreaming Big

Use Evernote to record every idea you have, related to the project. What will it look like? How will the product be delivered? What are some amazing features that you want in a future version of the product?

This is NOT about creating an elaborate business plan. This is NOT about creating a 50-page in-depth strategy document.

At this stage, those would just amount to busy-work and “active procrastination”.

What we’re doing here is simply recording those ideas that are buzzing around in your head anyway. Most likely, you can complete a document with these three steps in less than an hour. In some cases, it might take some time to come up with a USP, but even this will be done before the end of the day.

Here’s an example document for one of my products, WP Sharely:

 As you can see, that’s just one page. With a lot of white space.

Yes, there are more notes that I cut off from the bottom, but the core of the document is tiny. The addition thoughts are just ideas that I record over time, as they come to me.

Also, it’s far from perfect. Do I have a mind-bendingly brilliant USP?

No. Far from it.

Really, all I have are a couple of things I didn’t like about all the content lockers I’d ever tried before. My USP amounts to “mine won’t suck like those do”.

Your Minimum Viable Product

Once you’ve got your basic outline, you need a minimum viable product (MVP). Think of the MVP as the smallest version of your product or the simplest preview of your product, that you can use to get some feedback from the market.

Here’s the key, which is widely misunderstood in the Internet marketing space: getting a product to market is not about working fast or cutting corners and doing a sloppy job. The point is not to be in a mad rush and get your product finished as soon as possible. And neither is it a good idea to just create tiny, simple products, as a way to ensure you won’t ever spend much time on them. The key is to start with an MVP and then build your product from there.

Why does this matter?

Because right now, it’s just you and your idea. You assume that people will be interested in buying this, but you don’t know. And the only way to find out is to test.

A minimum viable product doesn’t only serve to get your product to market as quickly as possible, it’s also a clever way to minimize risk.

Picture two scenarios: in the first, you have your product idea and you’re determined to make it perfect. You spend months of time (and all your money) creating that perfect product. Then, you finally release it… only to find out that no one cares. You’ve risked it all and lost it all.

Second scenario: you have an idea for a grand project, but you start by creating a very simple MVP. It’s done in a few days and costs almost nothing. You release it and once again, there’s not much of a reaction. You now have two options: you abandon the project (no big deal, as you haven’t lost much) or you dig deeper and try to find out if people want something like your product, just not exactly what you had in mind.

Here’s an illustration, in more detail:

Click here to view the full infographic (opens in a new tab).

The Feedback Loop

Why do we want to get a minimum version of our product to market as quickly as possible?

There are two reasons:

1. Getting the Customer
   A “newbie” mistake is to focus on the idea, the product, the brand… when what really matters is getting customers through the door. The MVP focuses on what matters: getting the customer.
2. Getting Feedback
   You have an idea for a product, but is it really what people want? As soon as you get customers, they will start telling you what they want and need, eliminating guesswork.

This second point is invaluable for any business. The way to build the perfect product for your customers is not to sit and think about it for a long time. It’s to start that feedback loop and discover what your customers really respond to.

There are two components to the feedback loop. The first is simply communication: whether you like it or not, your early customers will give you feedback. They’ll tell you what they do and don’t like. They’ll tell you when something’s broken or doesn’t work for them. They’ll ask questions that you’ve left unanswered.

The second is testing. This one is a bit trickier but also more important. People aren’t always very good at knowing what they really want. Sometimes, you’ll get suggestions that, if implemented in your product, will make one customer happy and everyone else unhappy.

Minimum Viable Product Examples

I believe one of the best ways to learn about anything is by looking at real-life examples. When I was doing some research, trying to find examples of MVPs, I discovered that the term is often misunderstood. Most examples I found were really just stories of businesses that evolved over time. They may have evolved based on user feedback, but unless the first version of their product was deliberately kept small and created to test a product idea, it wasn’t an MVP.

With deep enough pockets, you can invest millions into building a complete product, learn that no one wants it and then invest further millions into turning it into a better product. But that’s not the point of an MVP.

With that said, here are some real examples of minimum viable products:

Example 1: Groupon

Few companies have had more hype or more controversy surrounding them, than Groupon. What’s interesting to us is how they got started, though.

Groupon was created by a team of people who ran The Point, a group activism site. The Point failed to gain much traction. Someone on the team brought up the idea of offering a platform for group-buying deals, rather than group activism.

And here’s the important part: the first reaction to this idea was not “yes, let’s turn this company around! Full steam ahead!”

The team recognized that this might be a decent idea, but that it needed testing. The MVP for Groupon was a simple WordPress blog, hosted on a subdomain (i.e. they didn’t even spend money on a new domain name). All the work was done manually, at first. They’d write a post describing each day’s new deal, they’d have people sign up for it and they’d manually send out PDF documents with the coupons, by email.

To quote Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon:

“It was totally ghetto. We would sell t-shirts on the first version of Groupon. We’d say in the write-up: ‘This t-shirt will come in the color red, size large. If you want a different color or size, email that to us.’ We didn’t have a form to add that stuff. We were just… it was so cobbled together.”

You can get some idea of just how basic it was, by visiting the web archives (although styles are missing from the early pages).

As you can see, virtually no money was spent to get this idea off the ground. They didn’t build a group coupon system, custom design a website and then release it to see how it would do. They didn’t actually build anything or start investing until it was clear that they had struck a nerve with the Groupon idea.

Example 2: Buffer

Buffer is a simple app for automatically scheduling your social media activity. It can be used up to queue up a series of messages that will then be sent out on your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, throughout the day.

The app experienced very quick growth and its beginnings are a great example of a minimum viable product.

Buffer started as no more than an idea and two simple pages. The first page consisted of little more than three bullet points, explaining what the product is about:

A click on the “Plans and Pricing” button by any visitor was interpreted as a signal of interest. Anyone who clicks is interested enough to at least consider signing up and maybe even paying for the service.

However, keep in mind that at this point, the app didn’t actually exist yet, so this is the page people saw, after clicking the button:

On this page, visitors learn that the app is not available yet, but they can opt in to receive an email notification as soon as development is done. This is very clever, because an opt in is a further signal of interest. In addition, the creators of the app are building up a mailing list of people who will be happy to be initial users and potential customers.

This MVP was shared on twitter and that brought in some initial traffic and enough feedback to validate the idea. Later, a page with a pricing table was added to the mix as well, to test what kind of price range people would be willing to pay, for a product like this. You can read more details in this post.

Buffer serves as an impressive example of how an MVP on a tiny scale with practically zero risk or investment can turn into a profitable business.

Example 3: Kickstarter Projects

Kickstarter is a crowd funding platform. It works like this: you create an entry on Kickstarter, where you present your idea and a funding goal (the amount of money you need to complete your project). People who like your project can then help in funding it, by paying whatever amount they choose.

As you can imagine, Kickstarter is full of MVPs. In the gaming industry, Kickstarter has become a force to be reckoned with: small, independent studios have used it to reach new fans and make larger-budget projects possible.

From games to books to new tech gadgets, all kinds of projects are being funded on Kickstarter. In some cases, the projects aren’t MVPs at all, but often, a game will be pitched using nothing more than a short preview video (before any actual development work is done) or a book will be funded before the author starts writing. In these cases, Kickstarter is used not only as a funding source but also as a means to test whether there’s a real market for an idea. In addition, people who back the projects are the perfect candidates to communicate with and get a feedback loop going.

Example 4: Zappos

Zappos is a much lauded company. They are often featured as a shining example of a company with excellent customer support and a unique company culture. As it turns out, the humble beginnings of this billion Dollar company are also a great example of a minimum viable product.

When Zappos was founded in 1999, most people would have told you that no one is ever going to buy shoes online. Surely, with shoes, trying them on for size and comfort is such an essential part of the buying process, you simply can’t compete against brick-and-mortar stores with a virtual one?

Instead of setting up a large online store, filling a warehouse with shoes and then hoping people would buy them, founder Nick Swinmurn took a different approach: he set up a simple little site, went to local shoe stores and took pictures of the shoes there.

Initially, he would go and buy the shoes at the shoe store and then ship them to the customers who ordered them through his site. Clearly, this wasn’t profitable, but it was enough to prove, on a small scale, that people were in fact willing to order shoes online.

You can read more about the Zappos story here.

What About Information Products?

Most of the examples above are for fairly complex businesses – online retail, software as a service and game development (as well as many other Kickstarter projects) are great business models, when done right, but they aren’t ideal for beginners and bootstrappers.

I don’t discourage anyone from building, say, a software company if that’s what you dream of. But given the choice, I can recommend cutting your teeth on smaller, more easily manageable projects first. In this post about what to sell online, I made a similar point.

Luckily, creating smaller products, information products, memberships and the like doesn’t exclude you from being able to build, test and improve your ideas by using MVPs. As an example, we can take a look at my first self-created product.

Info-Product Example

The first product I ever created myself was an information product about search engine optimization. More specifically, it was about one aspect of SEO: building backlinks.

The product consisted of a member’s area with close to 30 video-lessons and several downloadable PDF manuals. It was not a small product by any means. However, I didn’t build a huge info-product like that just, just hoping that people would buy it; by the time I officially launched the product I knew people wanted it and were willing to pay for it.

There were many small, cautious steps and stages that led to this certainty:

The first step was simply the blog. Even though the scale was minuscule (I was happy to get 20 visitors a day, at that point), my early blog posts and interactions with just a few commenters showed me that there was demand for clear, actionable information about SEO.

The second step was in free reports. Free products are a great way to test demand for a premium info-product. Before starting work on my premium product, I released three free products. One was about the basics of setting up a website. I didn’t learn much from that. The second was about keyword research. I got a lot of good feedback from that. The third was also SEO related, but it flopped. This was also an important learning experience.

Next comes the mailing list. The freebies put only a few hundred people on my mailing list, in total. But it was enough to get a feedback loop going. It was enough to get a few dozen replies on a survey I sent out. From this basis, the idea that my product should be about backlinks, was formed.

Before the launch, there’s the pre-launch. Even with my idea formed and somewhat validated through surveys and other interactions with my small crowd of readers, I didn’t jump straight into creating a large-scale product. Instead, I created another free product, specifically about backlinks. This attracted more potential customers and strengthened the feedback loop.

Finally, I released my product at a very low price, when it was about 70% finished. This was the final validation: I now knew that people were willing to pay for my product and I had early customers to talk to, so I could refine the product before launching it publicly.

Are all these steps necessary, to launch a product? No, not by any means. I was probably too cautious and too slow, in this process, but it did end up paying off. Get more details on this whole process in the case study video.

Next Steps

Congratulations, you now understand what minimum viable products are really about. The essence of an MVP is that it is built to test an idea. It’s not necessarily a smaller version of a big product and it’s not necessarily a product that then evolves into a different product, over time. It’s just a test and whatever works, to test your idea is a valid MVP.

This is the aspect that most people don’t get about MVPs and where most examples I could find in my online research simply miss the mark.

The next step for you is to build your MVP. Set yourself a deadline for it.

Then scratch that deadline out and set one that’s much closer to the present date. Get it done by the end of the week or the end of the day, even.

And most importantly: no matter what your business idea is and no matter if you have practically no reach, get started!

It’s simple: the time to do something is NOW. What can you start working on right now, so that you can ship something by the end of the week? Stop sitting on your ass and dreaming about what you could build. Start building it right now. And ship it.

Don’t make it perfect, make it happen.

Want Expert Help?

Do you still have unanswered questions about minimum viable products? Want to pitch your MVP idea and get some feedback?

Leave a comment below and I’ll personally respond and provide as much help as I can.

P.S.: If you want to dig really deep into this topic, read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It will forever change the way you think about running a business.

Does Postling’s less-is-more approach make for the killer app you’ve been waiting for, or does the tool under-deliver?

Watch this quick video review and tour, to find out:

Postling Video

Quick Notes

• The social inbox does a good job of pulling together relevant activity from all your sources.
• Additions like Tumblr, WordPress and Yelp integrations are rarely found in other tools.
• “Postling Suggestions” in the stream are a very good addition.
• The user interface is not as polished as many competing apps. Posting and scheduling in particular, are better in many other apps I’ve tested.
• If you agree that less is more and apps like Hootsuite or Sprout Social seem overloaded to you, you’ll probably love Postling.

You can get a $1 trial of Postling, to see what it’s like ($1 for 30 days). Plus, if you go through this link, you can get 30% off the subscription price:

Get Postling for 30% off!

A closer look under the hood reveals that there are a few things GA does not do well at all. Depending on your business model and your needs, an alternative analytics solution might serve you far better and be a lot more useful to your business. Whether you’re looking for something supplemental or something to completely replace GA, this post has got you covered.

Read on to discover the drawbacks of using Google’s own system and learn about the best Google Analytics alternatives.

Quick Navigation

What’s Wrong With Google Analytics?

From a technical standpoint, there is at least one glaring mistake in the way Google Analytics tracks pageviews and visitor actions. We’ve written about it extensively in the post about bounce rates, where you’ll also find something of a hack, to help improve the situation.

In short, GA cannot truly measure how long a visitor stays on your site, unless they perform another action like a new page load. Many visitors will show up as having stayed on your site for zero seconds, even though they might have spent minutes or more, reading a page or watching a video. This leads to skewed bounce-rate and time-on-site data. This is not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it’s something you should be aware of.

By all means, use GA, it’s infinitely better than not analyzing your traffic at all.

Apart from that, there are many alternative analytics solutions that provide features that Google Analytics doesn’t or give you new and improved ways of working with an interpreting your visitor data.

How to Spy on Your Website Visitors

Here are some of the criteria I looked for, in the different analytics services:

• Does it do real-time tracking, so that you can see what’s going on on your site right now?
• Does it properly measure time on site, even if only one page is viewed?
• Does it make a distinction between a “bad bounce” (short, one-page visit) and a “good bounce” (long, one-page visit)?
• Does it allow useful sorting and filtering of the stats, so you can make intelligent decisions based on your analytics?
• Does it allow easy goal/conversion tracking?

Chartbeat

Chartbeat reminds me of the hollywood-stereotype of a beauty pageant winner, which is to say that it’s extremely pretty, but also mostly useless.

Chartbeat has a very strong focus on what’s happening right now, as opposed to the emphasis on historical data analysis that most tools have. On a second-by-second basis, it shows you how many visitors are on your site, how many of them are reading or writing (e.g. comments), the geographic location of the visitors, an action stream and much more. Like Clicky, it also comes with twitter monitoring, so you can see who’s talking about your site or brand, at any given moment.

One very interesting and potentially useful user engagement metric is that Chartbeat shows you a graph of the average scroll-depth for your visitors (i.e. how far down a page they are scrolling). Apart from that, I find it difficult to envision the actual use of all these metrics. Chartbeat shows me what’s buzzing on my site at any given moment, but unless I can match up factors like conversion rates, traffic sources etc. none of this really helps me make intelligent decisions about my site.

Chartbeat Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Chartbeat is very pretty and maybe there are some uses to it. To me, it seems more like a super-attractive distraction than a useful tool.

Link: Marvel at Chartbeat here.

Clicky

I’ve been using Clicky for quite a long time now. In the beginning, I had mixed feelings about the user interface, but once I got used to it, I recognized it’s merits. The standard dashboard gives a very comprehensive overview over all of the core data: visitors (today vs. yesterday or any other date-range you set), visitor actions and bounce rate, top content, top search terms and traffic sources.

One thing Clicky does reall well is allow you to dig down and segment/filter your data in many ways. It doesn’t just show you some fancy graphs, it let’s you get right down to the stuff that matters the most: you can find where your best converting traffic is coming from, you can see which pages are grabbing your visitors’ attention and which aren’t and much more.

Clicky also offers a simple way to set up campaigns and track earnings. An interesting feature is that it allows you to set up custom twitter searches, so that you can monitor mentions of your site or brand on twitter, from within the Clicky dashboard. The service also integrate with a service called SheerSEO as well as Visual Website Optimizer for rank tracking and split testing respectively. Plus, it comes with a very well-made WordPress plugin.

Clicky calculate bouce rate differently from most analytics solutions and they’re proud of it. Clicky considers every visitor who spends more than 30 seconds looking at a page as an “engaged” visitor and doesn’t count them as a bounce, even if they don’t view a second page on your site. This makes a lot of sense, since you can’t really say that someone who visits your site, reads a whole post and then leaves was “bouncing”. They just found what they were looking for. With this, Clicky has more relevant bounce stats, especially for blog-style sites where the goal is not necessarily to get every visitor deeper into a sales-funnel.

Clicky Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Intuitive and clean user-interface, reasonable pricing and some innovative features make Clicky a Google Analytics alternative worth taking a closer look at. Clicky has become my favorite analytics solution and I gladly recommend it.

Link: Click here to get Clicky with it.

GoSquared

GoSquared is all about live analytics, much like Chartbeat. And while I do feel a little bad about saying mean things about nice apps, I can’t help it: the “pretty but useless” syndrome is present here, as well.

Like Chartbeat, GoSquared shows you a second-by-second view of what’s happening on your website. This includes traffic sources, top visited content, referral sources and social media monitoring.

Historical data is almost completely absent from the GoSquared dashboard. As I said, it’s all about live analytics. That means you’ll only get useful data on high-traffic sites to begin with. It also begs the question of how one is supposed to make use of all the data presented.

Maybe I’m just biased, because in my businesses, useful actions usually follow from digging through some historical data and then setting up tests based on the findings.

GoSquared Features and Highlights

Conclusion: GoSquared is beautiful to look at, but only if you have at least a few dozen people on your site at any given moment. There’s a live demo on the site, which I recommend you take a look at. As for actually using the service? I can’t recommend it.

Link: try the GoSquared demo here.

Mint

Mint is a very stylish “less is more” kind of analysis software. Where many others pile on feature after feature, Mint strives to show you the most relevant data about your website in a simple “at a glance” kind of way.

The “less is more” principle is take a tad too far, sadly. The standard view shows you the visitor count (total and unique), the top referring websites, your most popular pages and the most popular search terms people are using to find your site. You can edit each view for a certain date-range or to show you recent terms/referrers rather than popular ones. Interestingly, there’s also a separate view for traffic coming through image searches, which could be a very interesting feature for certain types of websites like portfolio sites, sites about design or any other image-heavy sites.

Data digging is almost non-existent with Mint. It also doesn’t show bounce rates, time on site or any other useful user engagement metrics. My impression is that Mint shows you mainly “vanity stats”, but fails to give you the tools necessary to sort your data in such a way that it can lead to intelligent changes on your website, that improve your business.

The basic functionality of Mint can be expanded with so-called “Peppers”. These are plugins for Mint, which are provided by the developers themselves as well as third-party providers. Possibly, some of the features I was missing in the standard version can be added through these extensions (I did not spend a lot of time searching through them).

Mint is a self-hosted script and it costs a flat rate of $30 per website, making it very affordable.

Mint Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Mint is stylish and light-weight, but is it also useful? Unless there’s a very specific feature found in one of the many “pepper” extensions, that you’ve been looking for, I can’t see a reason to use Mint.

Link: Learn more about Mint here.

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics (or OWA) is another free, open source web stats solution, like Piwik. It’s also self-hosted and it’s available as a WordPress plugin, which creates one instance of OWA to track the specific WP site it’s installed on. Installed separately and independently from WordPress, you can use OWA to track multiple websites.

The user interface is reminiscent of one of the older Google Analytics interfaces in the choice of colors as well as the general navigation. It’s not a carbon copy of GA by any means, but it offers the same general navigation options and if you’ve used GA for a while, it won’t take long until you feel right at home with this new interface.

Open Web Analytics is very feature-rich, especially considering that it’s free to use. It can track goals along several steps of a conversion funnel, it offers separate stats filtered by pretty much any factor you can think of and it even offers heatmaps and mouse-tracking. However, be warned: with those last two options active, OWA will gobble up server resources like nobody’s business. A shared hosting account will not find this agreeable.

Open Web Analytics Features and Highlights

Conclusion: OWA is amazing, for a free product. It offers very deep analytics with an intuitive interface. Unfortunately, it also has the same bounce-rate and time on site weakness of most analytics tools. In short, it’s not perfect, but possibly the best free solution available.

Link: Grab your copy of Open Web Analytics here.

Piwik

Piwik is advertised as an open-source alternative to Google Analytics and this seems an accurate description. It’s completely free to use and fairly easy to install. Currently only available as a self-hosted script (which has it’s advantages), there’s also the possibility of a hosted version of the service in discussion.

While the Piwik dashboard is nowhere near as fancy looking as some of the competitors’, I immediately took a liking to it. It’s a bit reminiscent of the WordPress admin interface and it just seems to have all the data and all the buttons in the right places. I found it very easy to navigate the data and set up some basic goals for performance tracking. It’s also a breeze to add as many websites as you like to one and the same Piwik installation. Much like with Mint, the Piwik dashboard is very customizable and additional plugins are available to add to the system.

One of the best features is that you can very easily set up and track goals. Beyond the basic stats, I would have liked options for deeper and more detailed segmentation, which is often lacking.

Piwik Features and Highlights

Conclusion: For a free analytics tool, Piwik is quite impressive. I would have liked a few more features, but the only big drawback is that Piwik has the same, inaccurate way of tracking bounce rates and visit lengths that Google Analytics has.

Link: Get a taste of Piwik here.

reinvigorate

Reinvigorate looked very promising, back when I was using the beta version. It still looks exactly the same, now. And that’s a bad thing.

Reinvigorate still feels like a beta product, even thought it’s been on the market for a while now. It has a very attractive looking user interface and it comes with a built-in heatmapping feature which can be very useful.

Unfortunately, in terms of actual traffic analysis, reinvigorate is mostly frustrating. It offers a great overview of the basic stats such as number of visitors, visit lengths and so on, but it doesn’t let you go any deeper than that. I found myself constantly clicking on elements of the UI, expecting to get a more detailed view for a specific page or specific search term. But nothing happens when you click, because more detailed reports are not available.

To make things worse, it seems that this service has been abandoned: at the time of writing their blog has been offline for more than a week (but a link to it from the sales-page remains) and their customer support is unresponsive.

reinvigorate Features and Highlights

Conclusion: in its current form, reinvigorate is a basic heat-mapping tool with some analytics added on. This could be quite useful, but especially since it seems to be abandoned, I’d recommend using a dedicated heatmapping service and a better analytics solution instead. Reinvigorate is not recommended.

Link: Take a look at what reinvigorate could have been, right here.

StatCounter

StatCounter is one of the better-known free Google Analytics alternatives and it’s been around for a while.

There’s no way to be nice about this, so I’ll just say it: Compared to the other solutions listed here, StatCounter is ugly. But, just because you don’t get the “oooh, shiny!” effect when you log into StatCounter, doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. The basic data is all there and you can get insights into visits, visitor paths, popular pages, entrance- and exit-pages, incoming keywords etc.

In terms of segmentation, goals, campaign/funnel tracking and fancy stuff like that, StatCounter lags behind the competition. As with Mint, I found that StatCounter fails to deliver the kinds of insights that will actually help you make meaningful changes to your site.

StatCounter Features and Highlights

Conclusion: StatCounter has one saving grace: it’s free to use. Given that, it’s no surprise that it doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles of premium solutions. Unfortunately, some of those bells and whistles are really important, which is why I can’t recommend this product.

Link: Learn more about StatCounter here.

Woopra

Woopra has been around for a long time and has undergone several transformations since the early days.

In the latest version, Woopra is moving away from “standard” analytics solutions and into the stomping grounds of Kissmetrics and Mixpanel (see below). Woopra’s defining feature is an integration of on-site analytics and customer relation management: the goal is to track individual visitors as they use your site and services, even across multiple devices.

Woopra is extremely attractive and highly customizable. You can either use it online or download a desktop client or mobile app to track what’s going on on your site.

The customization options are this service’s strongest point: to any set of data you’re looking at, you can add any kind of filters you can think of. Do you want to look specifically at the conversion rates from people who discovered your site through twitter and viewed at least two pages? No problem. Do you want to attach a specific label to anyone who leaves a comment on your site and also pass their name and email address to Woopra? With a bit of custom coding, it can be done.

To top it off, Woopra also comes with a live chat feature, which lets you display a “chat with us” widget on your site, or lets you automatically invite visitors to chat when a certain set of criteria are met. For example, you could set the chat window to pop up when a visitor is spending a certain amount of time on the checkout page, to help them with any last questions or objections they might have. As I’m sure you can see, Woopra is powerful, if it’s used right. But therein also lies a big problem with the service…

The biggest disadvantage to Woopra is the per-site pricing model. If you want to monitor several websites, you need to purchase a separate subscription plan for each one.

Woopra Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Woopra can be an interesting solution, if the CRM features and integrations are a match for your business. With the pricing, it’s clear that it’s not for everyone, though.

Link: Check out Woopra here.

Honorable Mentions: Mixpanel and Kissmetrics

Mixpanel and Kissmetrics are two analytics services that were specifically made for businesses selling services or products. Both of these tools are especially useful if you are selling a subscription service, as they can not only track conversions, but also track customer retention, churn rate, customer lifetime value and much more. With that, they can give you insights into where your highest-converting visitors are coming from and what steps they usually take before signing up. In addition, they can help you analyze what makes customers stay with your service for a long time and what makes them leave in a hurry.

Mixpanel and Kissmetrics are very interesting services for a specific type of business. Because they are closely analytics-related, I wanted to mention them here. However, they aren’t necessarily meant to replace your “regular” website analytics and because of how highly specialized they are, they don’t quite fit in with the other services here. Perhaps I will review them separately, sometime.

Go here to check out Mixpanel and Kissmetrics.

Vanity Metrics

What both of the above solutions have in common is that they are a type of more advanced analytics service. They have a clear focus on individual users and on producing actionable metrics.

The danger with any analytics program is that we get lost in vanity metrics. Everybody likes to see that there’s more traffic this week than last week or that the bounce rate is lower this month than last month. But on its own, this kind of data is useless. In fact, any kind of data is useless, until you make a change, based on it. No matter which solution you choose, don’t abuse web stats as an emotional roller-coaster ride, with no further purpose.

Watch this short video, for more on the topic.

My Personal Preferences

Leading up to this review I was using a huge range of different analytics apps for my various websites and I had fun experimenting with all the different features and options. However, at some point I wanted to consolidate my data and not have to log into a dozen different panels to see the traffic stats for all my sites. Currently, I use Clicky as my main analytics tool. There are many other tools that can be highly useful and that I enjoyed testing, but Clicky is the one I kept coming back to.

I originally wanted to use either Piwik or Open Web Analytics, but I didn’t like how resource-intensive they were, sitting on my hosting account. So just be warned: if you have sites with a fair amount of traffic, the self-hosted analytics solutions can become quite the resource gluttons.

Conclusion

As you can see, for anyone wanting to keep Google’s googly-eyes away from their visitor data, there’s no shortage of excellent Google Analytics alternatives. Most of these services come with either a free version or a free trial, so there’s nothing stopping you from giving them a test-drive. If you don’t want to spend anything extra for your analytics, then you should give either Piwik or Open Web Analytics a try.

What do you use for analysing your website visitors? And how do you make use of the data you get? Let me know in the comments below!

Cheers,

Zap Your Apps Together!

Watch the video to see how you can combine your apps into your ultimate business suite:

By releasing a minimum viable product.

Check out the infographic below to see what an MVP is all about and why it’s better and less risky than the model most businesses use:

Embed this graphic on you site:

A must-read book on this topic is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Without knowing it, I had already been following a lean startup model for years. But once I read this book, things became so much clearer and I wish I had come across it sooner.

Thoughts, comment and feedback welcome! Share this if you like it!

Dan Andrews, our guest in this episode, doesn’t just live this dream; he’s become a leading expert in location independent businesses and has helped dozens (if not hundreds) achieve the same.

In this podcast episode, Dan shares some truly refreshing insights on growing and managing location independent businesses.

Podcast Video

Podcast Audio

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Click here to download the MP3 file.

Links

• Tropical MBA (Dan’s main site)
• Lifestyle Business Podcast
• Dan on Twitter
• Dan’s portable bar company.
• The 4-Hour Work Week (book)
• Mastering the Rockefeller Habits (book)
• Get the IM Impact Podcast on iTunes!

What’s your take on Dan’s approach to launching an independent lifestyle supporting business? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts and questions!

With built-in publishing, trend-watching and engagement tools for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, it looks like a promising solution for both individuals and teams.

Check out the video review below to see what Sprout Social is really made of:

Sprout Social Video

Quick Notes

• Beautiful interface, very smooth and easy to operate.
• Great messaging features.
• RSS reader a bit sluggish, unfortunately.
• Good tools for discovering and connecting with influencers.
• Auto-scheduling is a let-down compared to Buffer and Hootsuite. Sprout wants $99/month/user before smart auto-scheduling becomes available. With Buffer, you get it for free (tweroid connection) and with Hootsuite you get from a 10th of the price.
• Amazing stats and demographic insights (including Google Analytics integration)

Bottom line: fantastic user interface, beautiful and very detailed stats, great tools for team collaboration and tools for finding and engaging influencers make Sprout Social a very cool tool indeed.

Get a free trial of this tool here!