Watching those who watch us
At Data Applied, we use Google analytics to monitor incoming traffic to our website. We then crunch this data using our own product to extract more meaningful information than we would using Google’s UI alone. For example, we use clustering to automatically categorize visits into different groups, based on characteristics such as visit duration, page views, or location. We use association rule mining to identify hidden associations between visit time, keywords, and network names. We perform outlier detection to get a list of visits which may be out of the ordinary. Finally, we use our own super pivots to better visualize this information. In fact, if you have already created a free account, you should notice a new (anonymized) clickstream dataset we uploaded into the demo workspace.
Regarding network names, there is some type of asymmetric information warfare at play here. Because we are a small startup, we do not have the luxury of maintaining a private network. This means that, when we connect to any website, we appear under a generic (ex: “Comcast customer”) network name. The same however does not apply to other large Business Intelligence companies when they pay us a visit. Here is some summary clickstream data regarding recent visits to our web site. We’re publishing this information because we can, or more precisely because we find it interesting that we can but our visitors cannot. But of course, we’d still like to say thank you for paying us a visit!
Network | Visits | Pages/Visit | Avg. Time |
microsoft corp | 94 | 4.106382979 | 155.606383 |
sas institute inc. | 42 | 6.666666667 | 294.7142857 |
acxiom-claritas | 7 | 5.857142857 | 427.2857143 |
tableau software | 6 | 1.833333333 | 171.5 |
kxen | 4 | 18.5 | 981 |
PS: we reviewed Google Analytics terms of service to make sure it is ok to publish this type of information.
Update: for some unknown reason, we received a lot more visits (over 700 from Microsoft).
Simple. Someone sent your blog post around on an internal mailing list, because you listed Microsoft first.