KISSMetrics
The K-I-S-S in KISSMetrics stands for "Keep It Simple, Stupid," something CEO and founder Hiten Shah firmly believes in. Shah and his team, the brains behind CrazyEgg, are going for the same type of simplicity in their analytics tool: user-interface simplicity, not in what it does.
"Analytics, in general, is focused on marketing and how to get the most out of your marketing dollar," Shah said about the state of the industry. "There's a lot they don't do when it comes to actually revealing what the users are doing on your website or your application."
Shah isn't overly impressed with the service most social analytics companies provide, either. "There's extra meta data associated with people that's really easy to grab, such as age, sex, vocation, more advertiser-focused information," he said. "A lot of these social analytics companies are just focused on that sort of information, to use it as a way of brokering data for advertisers."
KISSMetrics' analytics tool mines more than just age, sex and location data. Designed to be broad enough to work with nearly any application on the web, it specializes in social applications.
"Our system and tool provide the ability to get really deep insights into your user base, based on what your application is doing," Shah explained. "We focus on creating a highly customizable system so that, no matter what type of web application, you're able to get a lot of deep insights that normally you'd only be able to get by doing analysis from your database."
How the company does it is proprietary, but KISSMetrics is relying on the experience of its team and a proven track record with CrazyEgg to succeed.
"We wanted to take all of our knowledge in terms of analytics, scaling it, building really simple things that are valuable, and apply that to a broader kind of spectrum," Shah said. "And the social space is very interesting. I think a lot of companies are going to have a lot of challenges when it comes to tracking analytics related to that. But we felt like tackling the problem -- taking the team we've built and doing that."
Part of its recipe for success is educating publisher clients. "That's where our strong focus is," Shah said, "helping them understand what they should be doing, more than how to make it happen." This education is particularly germane, given that KISSMetrics charges for this service. But Shah believes that once publishers understand how useful it is, they'll pay for it.
"Based on our experience with CrazyEgg, if you create the right product, people are going to be attracted to it. It'll be like a magnet," he said.
