Ubuntu & Chrome - Dual Attack on Microsoft?

-Akshay Ranganath

Today, I was just going through some of the popular news items on Digg and found some interesting articles.

Microsoft which has been the leader in desktop OS and the browser market (despite alternatives) is now suddenly in the midst of a dual modal attack. Until now, the competition to MS was more ideological - GNU movement that defined what is *free* but failed to provide any alternative that anyone could use.

However, with Google Chrome and Ubuntu OS, the stranglehold of MS is reducing - or so says most of the sites. Here's some interesting facts that I found:

Ubuntu

An article in NYTimes talks about Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, the maker of the Ubuntu OS. Citing on its usage, philosophy and business model, the article says:

More than 10 million people are estimated to run Ubuntu today, and they represent a threat to Microsoft’s hegemony in developed countries and perhaps even more so in those regions catching up to the technology revolution.

The technology research firm IDC estimates that 11 percent of American businesses have systems based on Ubuntu. That said, many of the largest Ubuntu customers have cropped up in Europe, where Microsoft’s dominance has endured intense regulatory and political scrutiny.

Canonical also receives revenue from companies like Dell that ship computers with Ubuntu and work with it on software engineering projects like adding Linux-based features to laptops. All told, Canonical’s annual revenue is creeping toward $30 million, Mr. Shuttleworth said. That figure won’t worry Microsoft.

But Mr. Shuttleworth contends that $30 million a year is self-sustaining revenue, just what he needs to finance regular Ubuntu updates. And a free operating system that pays for itself, he says, could change how people view and use the software they touch everyday.

The company’s model centers on outpacing Microsoft on both price and features aimed at new markets.

Google Chrome
In a separate article on the blazingly fast development cycles of Google Chrome, an article in InternetNews.com says, "Google first released Chrome in September of 2008 and has issued 18 releases spanning both its dev and stable channels."

To top it, Google has quickly upgraded the WebKT toolkit used in rendering by the browser. But, a more serious dent to Microsoft is the creation of a Google HTTP Stack. This HTTP stack totally bypasses the Windows based WinHTTP rendering the browser mode cross-platform. Google is slowly making the browser more and more independent of the underlying platform..

Compare this with a single note on what Microsoft has been doing lately (from NYTimes ):

Microsoft had an estimated 10,000 people working on Vista, its newest desktop operating system, for five years. The result of this multibillion-dollar investment has been a product late to market and widely panned.

References

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3795366/Latest+Chrome+a+Step+Closer+to+Linux+Mac.htm

Google Chrome is now off beta

-Akshay Ranganath

As per the Google Blog dated 11th Dec, Google Chrome is now off beta.

Frankly though, I am so used to FF that Google Chrome never really registered with me. I did use it more as a fancy thing for a few days and then sort of forgot. How was it with you guys? Any ardent fans of Chrome out there?

One thing that is not clear is if users will need to reinstall the new code or if the browser automatically updates itself. I did not see anything happening to my browser at home. If Google does not support such an automated update it would be a pity since people have sort of come to expect such updates now.

As an aside, Adobe has released Adobe AIR, that lets rich internet applications (RIA) to run outside the browser.
Read more at: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Sun released an alternative to Flash/Flex and Silverlight called JavaFX. Read more at: http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/ . Here's a nice post that does an analysis of this new product. Sun being so late into the RIA game, the feeling is that it may not be of any use at all!

Updated after reading the comments…

Writing on the post and responding to comments, I just realized.. We has so many sites that are not cross browser compatible. If there were enough people who are not getting utilized, this could be a wonderful project to take up. It would give us an ability to:

1. Understand the complexity of cross browser support. In our project, we could estimate for anything but this one aspect. Cross browser is such a horrible beast to tame and help is relatively tough to find. Unless you've faced it and solved it, there is no help. And unfortunately, most times, there is no logic in the solution

2. Showcasing capability: By making our own sites cross browser would be a great show case to any client if they ask for our credentials in supporting multiple browsers.

Any team out there interested in this initiative :-)??

PiWik v/s Google Analytics

-Akshay Ranganath

For a particular need, I had done a comparison of Piwik versus Google Analytics as a web analytics tool. Thought of sharing the same.

Points considered in evaluation

1. Cost / TCO
2. Development or customization time
3. Features needed (traffic reports v/s commerce metrics)
4. Ease of integration to other marketing products
5. Maturity of Analytics implemenation

Advantages of Piwik

1. All collected data within organization - if privacy is biggest concern or if extra analysis of data necessary, this helps. Assumption is that the organization has the ability to handle the scale of data loads coming in via the analytics tools.
   GA would be a SaaS model and hence, all data is hosted on Google's data centers.
2. Open source and hence reports can be customized. Customization though would need maturity in both understanding the reporting needs in advance as well as development team's cabapility to handle PHP based tools
   GA offers only limited customization in terms. But, it does offer a lot of minor tweaks in the name of filters but completely new reports based on user's needs may not be possible.
3. API support for pulling in data: PiWik supports exporting reporting information. This could be used for displaying something like "Top 10 picks" etc.
   GA currently does not have this feature and data export is not possible.

Disadvantages of PiWik

1. UI is not that great. If organization wants jazzy reporting, this is not the product.
   Commerce reporting is minimal: Piwik is good for basic reports like No of visitors, referring URLs,
2. Search engine, Search words, etc. However, it does not appear to be strong on commerce reporting. So if the client expects a lot of reports on conversion from visitor to a customer, funnel analysis / drop out rate in a multi step buying process, this tool may not be that good.
   GA on other hand has a good set of comemerce variables. The drop out and funnel analysis via Filters is proven and has been used successfully. (It too suffers from minimal customization and this where commercial products come in)
3. Integration with external tools is minimal. GA on account of being a Google product easily integrates with Ad-Sense and Ad-words. So for an end-to-end marketing campaign (Email marketing, search engine marketing) GA offers a good tracking. In Piwik, this does not seem to be the case. Of course it can be customized but, will clients wait for development when both products are free?
4. On technical front- Piwik needs PHP/MySQL and a server with enough disk space. This involves an investment. Compared to absolutely free storage on GA, this is still expensive<>
5. Reporting interval used to be fixed in old version of this product. So, reporting for any customized interval (which is available in GA) may not be available in Piwik. Also, GA offers comparison reports for two time intervals which is completely missing in Piwik.
6. Availability of support in implementatation: Pikwik assumes that you know analytics and need only a tool. It does not offer any documentation on what is analytics and what to measure.
   GA on other hand offers lots of documentation and most importantly, paid consultants are available who can actually design the implementation strategy using the tool. For Pikwik, all you get is only the PHP based support on making the code to work - nothing on how to use the product itself.

Google updates Google Analytics solution

-Akshay Ranganath

Google recenty announce bundling of more Enterprise class features into its Analytics package (See Google Analytics blog at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/tRaA/~3/428822828/more-enterprise-class-features-added-to.html)

In short, the new features added were:

1. User Interface refresh.
2. AdSense now integrated into GA.
3. Advanced visualizations: Motion Charts!
4. Custom Reports!
5. Advanced Segmentation!!
6. The Google Analytics API.
7. Automatic importing of AdWords cost data into Urchin.

Of this, 6th and 7th are in private beta meaning you get it only if Google invites you to use :-(

Avinash Kaushik has written a nice post on what it means and how to use it here (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OccamsRazorByAvinash/~3/428799691/google-analytics-releases-advanced-segmentation.html)

Commenting on the new features, CMS watch wrote a report on the shortcomings of the enhancements:

• Unlike most enterprise-ready analytics tools, Google’s analytics offering lacks an ability to query against raw data, limiting in-depth analysis into segmentation behavior.
• No API exists to support the import or export of data for third-party e-marketing package and enterprise data integration.
• Support comes only from consulting partners, which lack the ability to make modifications on the Google back-end. And with little documentation, license-holders have come to rely on bloggers for assistance.

And it even mentioned one good thing:

businesses have come to effectively employ Google Analytics as a supplement to more robust offerings. It is especially helpful for AdWords performance metrics and campaign tuning.

(Source: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-content/google-analytics-shoots-for-enterprise-falls-short-001298.php)

Being stuck in project, I've not had time to see what the new features look like - planning to check it out over the weekend.

Gut feel though - Google is still catching up with the likes of Omniture. GA is still quite less customizable and the flexibiity offered in terms of user defined variable and metrics is tough to use.

Marketing campaign analysis & tracking via Google Analytics

In the world of web analytics, one of the fundamental pillars of understanding the site behaviour is through segmentation whose “is to allow your marketing/sales program to focus on the subset of prospects” (1). One of the methods of segmenting the visitors to a web site is via campaigns. It is defined in as:
A specific, defined series of activities used in marketing a new or changed product or service, or in using new marketing channels and methods (2).

To test the effectivness (and to learn) campaigns, I experimented on my personal blog. The plan was simple. I wanted to check if the readers of my blogs who come from various sources behave any differently if the reader is a friend of mine. Albeit a non-brainer thing to verify, it was an interesting thing to see how different my friends behave as target audience as compared to normal readers. So here goes the steps for setting up the campaign and the results.

Setting up the campaign
The first step in designing a campaign is to identify the goal. In my case it was to see if sending out emails whenever I publish a blog was a successful method for attracting better quality audience. A better quality audience in my case is audience who spend more time on the site and visit the site more than once.

Based on the goal, the metrics that I needed to start tracking were Visits, Absolute Unique Visits, Repeat Visits, Time on site, Pages per visit and Bounce rates. I also needed to separate visitors whom I was targeting via emails from the rest of the audience.

To segment the audience, I set up a campaign which is basically appending some special parameters at the end of URLs that can be used for tracking the visitors. To help build correct URLs for Google Analytics, Google offers a URL Builder (3) that gives a URL based on parameters that you want.

If you look at the screen, it has 4 parameters. They are:

1.Campaign source – where are the audience coming from – in case there are multiple sources
2.Campaign medium – how did they reach the site.
3.Campaign term – To see which of the multiple terms resulted the audience reaching your site. In my case there was none since it was not based on search at all.
4.Campaign content – What type of content led to audience reaching the site. It could be a text based ad on Google, a banner, a flash, etc. This can be used to identify effectiveness of multiple content types, if applicable.
5.Campaign name – A name to identify your segment of visitors

Based on this, I set of the campaign for my blog. Screen shows the campaign I setup to track visitors from this blog.
http://rakshay.blogspot.com/?utm_source=ch1&utm_medium=ch1blogs&utm_term=none&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=collegues

Viewing the campaign
Once having setup the campaign, it was time to wait for people to start 'converting'. After sending out email about a new blog that I had written, I waited for about a month. To see the results of campaigns, go to Traffic Sources -> Campaigns.

Here you can see the results for your campaign (reported based on the 5th parameter provided above). The report can be analysed in various dimensions like the landing pages and the comparison of traffic against the entire site.

If you look at the image below, the reports very clearly show that the campaign has been a great success for the parameters that I'd defined. The average time, repeat visits and page per visit is much better than average site.

The following screen shows the performance of the various landing pages under the campaign:

The best part – since i'd sent the mail to a limited audience I can exactly calculate the marketing metric of conversion:
No of people targeted (n1) = 26
No of people converted (n2) = 13
Conversion rate = (n2) / (n1) %
= (13) / 26
= 50%
Well, considering that the average conversion from a marketing capmaign on search PPC is around 2%, the 50% I've got is nothing short of a jack-pot :-)

References:
1.Segmentation: http://www.businessplans.org/Segment.html
2.Campaign: http://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/term/82444.html
3.Google Analytics URL Builder: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

The reference site for the article is my personal blog where I'd written about the funny aspects of the traditional indian arranged marriages. The URLs sent for the campaign were:

1. Arranged Marriage Blues - Part 1: Entrapment!
2. Arranged Marriage Blues - Part 2: The Rejection
3. Arranged Marriage Blues - Part 3: First Meeting
4. Arranged Marraige Blues - Part 4: Arranged Travel

Do send me your feedback on my other blog too - if you get some free time to have a look:-)