Thanks for stopping by and giving us an interview for the Webanalyticsbook readers.
For people, who don’t know him, Gretus runs SEO-united.de, one of the top search engine optimization blogs in Germany. Heiner is currently also working on a secret SEO Tool, which he will roll out within a few months.

Webanalyticsbook: Since we already spoke a few times, let’s start the interesting stuff right away. Why another SEO Tool?

Gretus: In Germany there are only a few tools, which offer all the relevant information for webmasters. There are a bunch of great tools, but most are quite expensive. We want to offer simple tools, which can be used by everyone and most probably will be free.

Webanalyticsbook: What functionalities do you want to include in your tool?

Gretus: As already said, our tool will only deliver the basic information, e.g. keyword positions, number and quality of backlinks, PageRank, TrafficRank and so on.

Webanalyticsbook: How does this differ from tools such as Sistrix, Searchmetrics or SEOlytics, which are the three big one’s in Germany?

Gretus: You can´t compare our tool to them. The named tools are more or less huge instruments, specially made for companies and SEOs. If you´re a webmaster who only earns a few dollars with a site, you can´t affort a tool which costs hundreds of dollars a month.

Webanalyticsbook: The tool will be completely free?

Gretus: It will be completely free!

Webanalyticsbook: Do you plan to offer an API for more advanced clients or will you offer a closed system like the most vendors?

Gretus: First we will start out with a closed system, too. We are planning a kind of networking component, by which all the users can change the tool and build it out.

Webanalyticsbook: How much further do you want to develop the tool? Will it be a fully-equipped tool like Searchmetrics or rather stand in the middle?

Gretus: As you know from our SEO-united.de project, everything is possible. If the users like our tool, we’ll build it out

Webanalyticsbook: Thanks for the interview! I’ll follow you on Twitter and good luck with your soon-to-be launched SEO tool.

Clicktale just announced a few new reports, which they now started offering:

- Engagement Report
- Low/High Click Report
- Sites w. most Javascript errrors
- Pages, which take the longest to load

Great Search Analytics presentation by Marko Hurst. Check it out:

Having looked at many analytics tools and dashboards, I was always impressed what vendors came up with to show some value of their tools. The latest trend, that especially SEO Tools like Searchmetrics, Sistrix Toolbox and SEOlytics came up with, was a so-called
“Visibility Index”, which aims to tell the visibility of a website in the search engines.

Visibility is something extremely tough to measure and unless you run an entire proxy server farm in several continents, you’ll probably have an issue getting really valuable data.

On top of that we are in the days where social media can drive more traffic than a search engine and visilibity in the organic rankings might be interesting, but the really valuable traffic might come from a Youtube video, which a visitors placed on Facebook and promoted through Twitter.

That said…I saw an intresting graph over at Marshall’s blog: the 6-month performance an key events report (see below). What a beautiful graph to show how a website is doing! I hope one of the vendors pick up the idea and generate a dashboard report, which not only displays the webanalytics data and 3rd party products (via API), but also allows the user to include key events such as “Database crash” or “New SEO tool added”.

If two smart Stanford graduates decide to leave their jobs and come up with a new analytics tool, it’s certainly worth a look. Chris and Ashvin decided to launch a usability tool called Userfly.
Userfly allows to record mouse and clicks movements. Ideally to improve landing pages or to analyze overall site usability.

Two thumbs up. Userfly is a tool, that everybody should install if they want to increase their website traffic without wasting time on crunching numbers.

userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.

Since I am so incredibly busy with some work and with my newborn at home, I totally missed out on the brand new Yahoo Analytics 9.5.

The newest feature which is included is the Demographics capabilities.
Since MS Adcenter Analytics is shutting down end of the year, I believe Yahoo Analytics will be the only analytics solutions, which includes this feature:

Found via Visualrevenue.com and Webmetricsguru.com

Bango, one of the few high-end mobile analytics solutions, hasn’t given up the fight, but rather launches product feature after product feature.

Their latest release includes the following new features:

- High accuracy through privacy protected, unique user ID
- Track unique visitors no matter their network connection
- Particularly important for smart phone users as they swop between home & office
- Greater level of granularity, see campaign results hour by hour
- Advanced filtering and sorting gets the results needed on a case by case basis

Finally Avinash announced it: The Google Analytics API. This will be an interesting move since Google Analytics will be open to third party tools. SEO ROI analysis and PPC analysis can now be done without scraping Google Analytics.

Now it’ll be interesting to see, which bid management tool will integrate seamless with the Google Analytics API and how far the API will open up data (real-time would be nice)

If done right this can be an amazing wayto do safe bidding as well as pulling SEO data in a never seen before fashion.

Having said that, I believe there will be some drawback. Google is smart enough to make sure that the shared data won’t be abused. Another drawback I have with G Analytics is the fact that Google owns already the data of half of my life. Do I really want to share and pull data from a system, which is not open about PPC prices?

This week Webtrends re-branded their company. It does not only look good, but also brings them back as a serious alternative to the other enterprise solutions.

Usually I don’t much write much about politics here, but assigning Aneesh Chopra as the Chief Technology Officer is kind of a bold move of Obama. He’ll work closely with Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and Jeffrey Zients, the Chief Performance Officer.

Not sure what it is, but I really like the idea of having some technologist sitting in Washington and taking care of how the government should be run on the technology side.

Wished the country of my origin (Germany) would make moves like this, instead of bolstering the dieing car industry.