Unica Affinium NetInsight
Eric Enge is well known in the SEO industry for a variety of reasons, including the content that he publishes on the Stone Temple blog (http://www.stonetemple.com/blog), the Stone Temple Article series (http://www.stonetemple.com/STC_Articles.shtml), and his columns on Search Engine Watch (http://www.searchenginewatch.com).
Unica’s Affinium NetInsight is a great analytics tool, and not too long ago I developed a summary of my favorite things about it. Here are the top 10 things I like about Unica Affinium NetInsight:
1. Create custom dashboards:
Everyone who needs to consume your analytics data can get a custom initial dashboard that captures what is more important to them. One version for the CEO, a different version for the VP of sales, and yet another version for the business analyst. Setting up a solid set of dashboards can make a big difference in getting organizational buy in to your analytics investment. Here is an example look:
2. Ad-Hoc Analysis:
Many analytics packages do not allow you to apply newly defined segments or filters to historical data. This ends up being one of the most frustrating parts of some analytics packages. You usually figure out what you want to know after the fact, and if you can’t perform ad hoc analyses of historical data, you have to wait for new data to come in before you get your answer.
However, Affinium NetInsight provides you a robust capability to analyze your historical data. Here is a look at it:
3. Creating Filters is a Drag and Drop Experience:
Affinium NetInsight provides powerful filtering capabilities. You simple drag and drop parameters around to setup filters, and you can setup several filters to run simultaneously. Results are fed back to you in real time, so a speedy analysis process is easy.
4. Powerful A/B Analysis capabilities:
Affinium NetInsight allows you to setup a highly visual A/B testing experience. You can literally create screens that show the results of the A/B test side by side on a single screen. This makes decision making really easy, as shown by the following screen shot:
5. Integrate Offline Customer Data:
Unica was in the business of collecting and measuring data of offline customer data before they moved into the web analytics space. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Affinium NetInsight allows you to segment your reports using your offline customer data. For example, if want to look at the online behavior of people who previously purchased offline, you can. You can also do one of many advanced types of analyses, such as seeing how the behavior of people who spent $100 or more offline compares to those who spent less than $100. This screen show shows segmentation setup by life time value of the visitors:
6. Explore Individual Click streams:
Users probably use a wide variety of click paths when traveling through your site. Following what happens is basically impossible. However, Affinium NetInsight lets you follow the click paths of individual users, so you can see what happened during session. This can provide real insight into actual user behavior.
7. Robot/Spider analysis:
You can also configure Affinium NetInsight to read your log files to capture data on search engine crawlers. This is invaluable data that you lose access to when your analytics package relies on Javascript tags only to collect data. Affinium NetInsight can read both log files and use Javascript tags to give you the best of both worlds.
8. Remarketing:
Affinium NetInsight allows you to recognize when someone abandons your shopping cart, flag it, and then, if you have their email address, send them a real time price discount offer on the product they were just looking at. How cool is that?
The following screen shot maps out the process for you:
9. Heat Map Overlay:
Site Overlays, or Navigation Reports, are tools that most analytics packages provide that allow you to see at a glance the click patterns on a given page. However, Affinium NetInsight takes this one step further by allowing you to implement segmentation on the fly. Now you can see the data by customer segment, as you can see here:
10. Date Comparison Reporting:
In Affinium NetInsight, it’s simple to compare data for one date range against that of another date range. Surprisingly, this feature is not offered by many analytics packages, but it’s very useful to have in your bag of tricks.
Here is a sample screen that shows how it looks:
Summary
Unica’s Affinium NetInsight has a lot of power packed into it, and is one of the easer to use web analytics packages out there. In addition, installation is simple and straightforward, so getting started with it is a snap.
