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During SES San Jose this past August I was able to sit down and chat with one of the founders of VisiStat Analytics, Tina Bean. During our conversation Tina and I spoke about various aspects of Visistat as well as web analytics in general. Here’s how it went:
[Tina Bean]: VisiStat originated from the need for an intuitive analytics platform within the small to medium size business marketplace. It was created by Stephen Oachs, who at the time was running a hosting and collocation company called Pixelmation Internet Technologies, http://www.pixelmation.com/. Frustrated by the “off the shelf” analytic packages, he set out to create a web analytics package that “answered more questions then it raised.” Customers loved VisiStat so much that Oachs decided to spin it off into its own company in the summer of 2005. That’s the point at which we joined forces and he and I founded VisiStat.
[Manoj]: What differentiates VisiStat from other web analytics products?
[Tina Bean]: VisiStat is a hosted, on-demand (SaaS) suite of tools created for sales and marketing mindsets. Not meant to be IT centric, our real-time technology and intuitive interface really speaks to those mindsets. You’d be surprised, multiple people within organizations log in to check their VisiStat account multiple times per day—You see it’s because they can monitor the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns in real-time. With VisiStat, you don’t have to be reactive with your marketing approaches. Real-time stats allow you to be proactive. If something is not working, you know immediately and can turn on a dime.
Here’s a peek into one client’s daily log ins… Like I said… multiple people in the organization, multiple times a day.
[Manoj]: Why would someone use VisiStat over something free like Google Analytics?
[Tina Bean]: First and foremost, VisiStat prides itself on its phenomenal customer support. Pick up the phone and call us 408-725-9376. We answer it. Submit a support ticket, you’ll get a response within hours, if not minutes.
Aside from that, you can track all your PPC under one umbrella with VisiStat. We not only chart conversions, but can get as granular as to relate conversions back search terms, IP addresses, ISP look ups, Geo look ups, and entire click paths. Although we are not a cookie based technology, we can tell you if that visitor has been there in the last 90 days.
VisiStat has an “Alerts” feature that will send you an email or text message when a predetermined instance happens on your website (as easy as setting up a rule in Outlook). Did your competitor come? Did your potential customer surf your site? Was that special landing page visited? Did someone “Google” you? Here’s a blog post I wrote on how I win customers with Alerts http://www.visistat.com/fromthedesk/tina-website-alerts.php.
One of our customers recently told us that he uses VisiStat to successfully bridge the gap between the Marketing and Sales department with his use of special landing pages and Alerts. He targets the company CEO through email campaigns. Each CEO gets their own landing page. When one is clicked on, he gets an Alert that says it’s been hit. In the situation he was referencing, he watched it get hit multiple times. Here’s a screenshot of a report that he ran on that one page. It showed how the CEO had forwarded this email to 33 people spanning in 14 different geographic locations (spanning 2 countries) and had seen the page a total of 46 times. What an incredibly hot lead. He told me how it was fantastic feeling to be able to deliver such a hot lead to the Sales department. I guess VisiStat helps him answer the “what have you done for me lately” question. I love that story.
Here’s a screenshot of the report he was able to put on the sales manager’s desk:
[Manoj]: What is VisiStat not meant for (What things will we never see in Visistat)?
[Tina Bean]: Because VisiStat only monitors human activity, you will never see information on crawlers, bots, spiders, or email harvesters.
[Manoj]: How important is it for a company in the analytics space to be aware of what their competitors are offering?
[Tina Bean]: We cannot be an expert in everyone’s technology. We are aware of what’s out there, but stay focused on VisiStat and its vision of being an all inclusive, integrated suite of tools for small businesses.
[Manoj]: You recently introduced reporting for Mobiles, were you noticing a major need for this?
[Tina Bean]: For those VisiStat “addicts,” its perfect. Real-time stats on the road. Plus the interface is beautiful:
[Manoj]: What do you enjoy most about working at Visistat?
[Tina Bean]: The customer enthusiasm towards VisiStat is what undeniably keeps me coming to work happily every day. Like the loyal Mac enthusiasts, we have VisiStat enthusiasts. I love watching their “light bulbs go off” when they see their stats inside our reporting area. Some customers never knew technology like this existed, most have never seen it presented in a format they could actually understand. It’s very satisfying knowing I’m out there helping website and business owners be smarter about managing their businesses.
VisiStat is a very unique product which could potentially be the choice as an analytics solution for many companies. It was a pleasure meeting Tina in person and believe that Visistat has strong leadership guiding the company towards success.
Interesting read, thanks Manoj. I’m a visistat user and I’ve experienced their customer support – they are very prompt and great with their follow through. Haven’t tried the visistat mobile app yet.