Thats Interesting

The review team at odinjobs.com showcases up and coming companies and their products. Who knows one of them may be the next Google.

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Who’s calling the shots in Web Analytics? Not Google.

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Big Brother never had it easier. With web analytics companies springing up out of the ground, he just needs a single dashboard to find out which sites you visit, what you saw and how long you stayed. Most are even working on outbound clicks, i.e. where you are heading out as well! Our spotlight this week is on two companies, on either side of the Atlantic. Basil, based in the UK and Get Clicky, sitting pretty in Portland, both claiming to have outmatched Google Analytics offering for small to medium businesses.

Is Basil more to customers’ tastes?

A name like Basil, a field like web analytics, you can smell those puns on spicing up a mile away! Jokes aside, this UK based company is steadily garnering business with an extremely user friendly interface and focused results, without any of those migraine inducing charts and tables. Basil’s approach is to take the number crunching where it belongs (behind the scenes) and present only the findings in a relevant, useful way. The application gives you a single dashboard view of the number of visitors, the number of pages viewed, what was viewed (the contents), how did the visitors find your site (through search engines or other websites) etc. The client can choose to have the reports on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Basil charges a fee of just £12.99 ($25). It currently targets individuals and small businesses.

Why the comparison with Google Analytics?
The general opinion is that Google Analytics takes up too much of the users’ time. Across reviews, the one thing that stands out is the complexity of results churned out (those darn tables and charts again) and the lack of real time data. Basil scores higher both counts. (Basil’s spokesperson however hastily denounced all comparisons to the web giant!)

The flip side however is that Basil has no RSS or SPY features, however the company assures us that they are in the process of upgrading.

And Basil has a lot to say.

What’s the story behind the name?

Nothing interesting here am afraid. The idea for Basil came one day when we were looking around for a decent small business/personal/blog stats package that didn’t suck. We came across a nifty package called mint that seemed good but didn’t really serve our needs. We decided to implement an internal stats package. It was only when it was completed that we realized there was a gap in the market and calling it basil was just an amusing tribute to mint.

Where are you located?
United Kingdom

How does your product differ from your competition?

I don't think we have competition at all. At our price point ($25), the features, the ease of use, the fantastic support and the ability to install it on your own hardware, there is nothing else that compares in this market.

How does Basil compare to Google Analytics?
I am flattered people even mention us in the same breath as Google Analytics. I've tried to address this comparison as a GA/basil thing.

GA targets a different market. It targets stats junkies who love spending the better part of their day looking at meaningless numbers, charts and data. Basil targets people who want information at their fingertips without having to dig through tables and tables of data.

GA targets people who love counter-productive time, fiddling with reports (if they can find them). Reports with basil are a matter of minutes. The only reason you would want to spend more than 5 minutes using basil is because you cannot believe how simple it is and are trying to find a bad point about it :).

GA targets people who do not want real-time data. Basil provides real-time data.

GA targets people who have no issues giving up their data to a third party. Basil allows you to own your data and do what you want with it by installing on your own machine.

I could go on, but these are some unique differences.

Do you have any solutions for pay per click?

Basil is soon going to include a marketing module which will enable PPC tracking. However, do not expect a solution like Omniture or the like as our motto is always "web analytics that make sense", meaning they have to be easy and relevant.

Different versions are due out throughout this year, one of which is Basil-Live- how does it compare to live chat solutions?

Basil live is quite different from a live chat solution. Basil live is about gaining insight into real time visitor interaction on your site and making informed marketing and webmaster decisions. Live chat is a poor excuse for bad support.

Who are your ideal clients?

Individuals, contractors, and small companies who don't mind dishing out the price of a large pizza in return for a reliable and simple analytics solution that takes out the pain out of obtaining stats, yet delivers information in a user friendly way.

We are also looking to target web hosting companies as we are confident it will help them add value to the service they provide to clients.

What type of reports does Basil produce?

Basil currently produces reports on visitors, pages, referrers and searches. It will soon produce more reports which are available from the dashboard.

Does your product assist sites in search engine optimization?

Although we are not aimed at SEO, the whole point of analytics is SEO. The ease with which you can track keywords and search engines and content performance (through pages) by itself lends to great SEO.

What are the capabilities of the demo compared to the full version?

There is no difference except the demo version will not allow admin level access to edit information.

Does your product assist in describing where visitors go after visiting a site?

Are we talking about which sites your visitors are going to from your site (i.e. outbound links)? Basil does not do this currently but with the rapid upgrades due and the roadmap, this is going to happen soon.

Posted by Sally Richardsson       Posted at 12:32AM Mar 22, 2007 by Sally Richardsson   


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