ClickTracks CEO John Marshall Interviewed

There is a new interview with ClickTracks CEO John Marshall which gives a brief look into John's history before ClickTracks, reveals his passion for web analytics and provides some insight into what the future holds for ClickTracks after the their recent acquisition by J.L Halsey. Following is a few snippets from the interview that I personally found interesting.

John's entrance into web analytics -

I was running a small software company in 1998 (a very web centric marketing company) and we bought a log analyzer product which was the most popular and most expensive product at the time. I hated it; it was very clunky and rigid. It had 2 major problems: firstly, it did not encourage thinking about the website analytically. It was just list of stats, as if the developers had simply written every possible report in the hope the user would find something useful. Of course this made the product intimidating and actually discouraged heavy use. The second was the unnecessary complexity of the data presentation. I recall ranting that I just needed to see where people click on the page, and I can work out the rest – and the light bulb went on. Therefore my origin in the industry was as a small business owner trying to answer: What do people do when they arrive at my website? I realized that no product was doing a good job of answering that question, and therefore a need was going unmet.

How ClickTracks maintains its leadership in the web analytics world -

We practice what we preach by acting as Web Analysts to analyze our clients’ sites as well as our own. We go to a lot of Trade Shows where you’ll usually find me in the booth. There is something about the environment of the tradeshow where a customer or prospect will come and say in very passionate terms: I have the following business problem or I am looking for a product that solves this need. Sometimes those conversations involve us telling the customer/prospect that ClickTracks can solve a particular problem, whereas other times the conversations are more insightful making us think of ways to help solve their pain (this makes us learn from our customers). We are very methodical in the way we add features to the product, we generally don’t add features unless it solves a compelling need and this is a strategy I have learned from my past experiences doing website analysis. We are constantly trying to stay away from feature bloat by listening closely to the problems the customers are trying to solve.

On what makes a good web analytics vendor -

I think training and support, because you gain so much through one on one training and the process of good informed assistance. The value of the data and price of failure of a bad implementation is so high that a vendor really needs to nail this item. I am very biased to the idea of analysis rather than reporting because if you find yourself only looking at the trends of visitors to your site you are probably not going to succeed at improving your website. What makes a good web analyst and good web analytics package are somewhat related. Interactive exploration is important, for example: 2 months after I have collected my data, can I go back and add another segment (metric) and measure it against my previously collected data. We have designed our product to do that and that’s what we’re known for. It’s this idea that helps a good analyst think and understand why things are happening on a website rather than simply looking at a graph that goes up and to the right. That in turn requires some training.

What the recent acquisition by J.L Halsey means for the future of ClickTracks -

J.L. Halsey already owns 2 other companies that sell product to digital marketers. At the same time they acquired ClickTracks they also acquired Hot Banana (CMS Vendor) and you can clearly see that there is an intent to build a suite of products that focuses primarily on customer acquisition and retention. ClickTracks is mainly about the analysis of customer acquisition (email campaigns, search campaigns, click fraud…). We now have easier access to resources allowing us to grow our business faster. We basically have more scale and reach (we are growing and hiring).

You can catch the full interview at Web Analytics World.