* A trip to VisitorVille
Remember when Kai’s Powertools was released? We all went “Wow!” not just because of what the software could do (it provided astounding graphics generation and manipulation facilities) but also because it was one of the first programs to break away from the Windows GUI model and do its own thing.
What’s more, that “thing” actually worked! As unusual and somewhat eccentric as it was, KPT’s GUI qualified as “intuitive” – the industry term for a user interface that is quickly and easily understood and used.
My reason for taking you on this trip down memory lane – at least down the rutted track that counts as my memory’s lane – is that I have just come across a novel and “intuitive” interface for analyzing and understanding Web statistics. The product is from World Market Watch (see editorial links below) and is called VisitorVille.
The VisitorVille display runs under Windows and shows either live data from instrumented Web pages that are monitored by the VisitorVille hosted service or historical data from the log of the monitored Web server.
You need to see the screenshots of VisitorVille or download and install the product and run its demo mode to really understand what’s being presented, but a simple description would be SimCity for Web servers.
What VisitorVille does is display a model of a city with people and vehicles moving around it. The buildings are Web pages and the vehicles include buses that represent masses of visitors coming from the big search engines and taxis, fire trucks, armored cars, or police cars that transport visitors between buildings (you can choose a specific vehicle type for a given building … er, page – for example, fire trucks might be used to represent visitors being taken to error pages).
You can choose a city view or suburbs view and appropriate background noises complete the metaphor. Down the left-hand side of the display is the list of visitors as they come and go, and you can track a specific visitor, list the visitors in a specific building, and otherwise slice and dice the Web traffic in all sorts of ways. There’s even speech output that announces the arrival of visitors (I found this feature got old fast).
The product also includes a reporting tool to process the downloadable Web site activity database.
Pricing for hosted-only versions of VisitorVille are $4.95 per month for up to 50 unique visitors per day and $9.95 per month for up to 100 unique visitors per day.
Service schemes that include hosted and log analyzer services start at $19.95 per month for 500 unique visitors per day. Above that, starting at 1,000 unique visitors per day for $29.95 per month, the services add on the VisitorVille Intelligence service “an information service reporting how employees from 200,000 of the world’s top companies, universities, non-profit organizations and government agencies use the Web.”
VisitorVille is an appealing and well-executed tool, although I doubt whether it would be the primary analysis tool for really large Web sites. What VisitorVille may be unique in offering is a 5,000-foot view that can be easily grasped. The only question being will that grasp be more or less accurate than charts and meters?
Let me know what you think of this product, and if you use it, how it works in the real world.
