Review my startup: vistrac.com | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup: vistrac.com

vistrac.com

67 pointsendtwist40 comments

Just to give you all a little background: This business originally started under another name, Tapefailure, but unfortunately, I had to shut it down due to major problems with the way the analytics were condensed (PHP caused major problems). However, I was determined not to let this idea go...

So, I've spent over a year re-planning and redeveloping the entire thing from scratch. This service will analyze everything from where users click, to where they pay attention when scrolling. It takes the concept of sites like UserFly one step further and breaks down the data for you.

I just launched today, so please let me know what you think.

The site and intro slideshow look amazing. The demo is nice and the FAQ is helpful.

I'd sign up, but it's down now :-(

Any idea how the slideshow was made? It indeed looks completely amazing.

from a quick look at the source: http://www.electricprism.com/aeron/slideshow/

I liked, although I received a email from your service today and I didn't remember opting in(Of course I might be wrong!), but I had a account on tapefailure.

yeah i was a bit confused too. a more obvious mention of the tapefailure history would have triggered a mental connection.

Agreed. I almost hit the report spam.

Very nice, and very appealing.

Some impressions from the demo:

Resolutions appear to be backwards to what I'm used to seeing -- I'm used to 'width by height.'

Demo page says I've received 0 visits. Maybe make the demo page some live data for vistrac or something -- that reads strangely.

Oops, can't click around more right now... looks like your site went down.

(shameless plug, I run http://sitecanary.com/ -- check it out :)

Getting a "502 Bad Gateway".

Seems the server had a little case of stage fright. Sorry, everyone! (And it should be fine now.)

Very cool. Nice to see some other options in this field. I have used userfly in the past and was not very impressed. I am currently using CrazyEgg and think this is more of a competitor to that than to userfly. The site looked very clean and well organized. I think CrazyEgg has you one-upped a bit with its confetti view showing referrers w/different colors but I imagine you're aware of that and considering adding it.

I would also like to invite you to add your app to my site, launchly. Launchly is all about getting feedback and attention for new web apps like yours. We track all aspects of your launch to help you see how you are doing and decide what changes to make. http://www.launchly.com

Congrats on your persistence. I like the homepage - clean. I also like the freemium model packages. I have never seen the form metrics before and looks quite useful.

Was that a feature based on feedback?

The form metrics feature was, in fact, based on feedback. I had some very basic form analytics in Tapefailure, but got a number of requests asking for more. I gave it a lot of consideration and came up with the current version as my initial solution.

Looks good. However, I think there are a couple of features missing:

* referrer: web sites, direct access, search. Make a list of website referrers (with the exact page), percentage between direct access/search/referrer, and where they land

* time spent of each page

* path people are taking: 60% page A, them 30% page B + 60% pace C + 10% left

The pricing seems really high for such limited amount of sessions/users tracked.

Looks nice; I think a lot of people (myself included) have wanted some kind of all-inclusion analytics package for a long time. The pricing seems rather high, though.

Consider using something other than Lucida family for Windows visitors. It looks rather sloppy when rendered compared to Arial or other native OS fonts.

It was looking interesting... now I'm getting 502 Bad Gateway errors. Looks like whatever FastCGI was running behind nginx went away...

Sorry about that. I'm having a few minor problems that didn't pop up during testing; nothing that can't be fixed with a process restart, but will be fixed.

what kind of data portability features are there (I can't see any)? Would love to know my data can be ripped as .csv and taken with me should i choose to, especially on the paid plans.

cheers.

endtwist, I have been exploring pricing options for my behavioral targeting and optimization startup (http://www.wingify.com/) and was wondering how did you arrive at this pricing. Did you test the pricing? Or did you took an idea from your competitors' pricing and upped it a little bit? I am curious because your competitors (ClickTale, CrazyEgg, etc.) have a more affordable pricing.

Compared with CrazyEgg and ClickTale, I think the prices are actually very affordable.

CrazyEgg, while great for click analytics, does not offer scroll or form analytics.

On the other hand, ClickTale does, but they price by Page Views (individual pages), not Sessions (all pages browsed by a single visitor). If you do the math (assume 2 pages/visitor @ 20,000 page views for $99/month is equal to only 10,000 sessions), ClickTale is actually more expensive.

Of course, I'll have to let my potential customers decide the pricing, but I tried to choose prices that fit within the current market.

It might be a interesting idea options other then subscription.

For example, many someone might want to use this to audit a site. You need a data collection period (maybe collect data on x visits and then stop) then access to the analysis tools.

You could price that as a one off package.

You could also do A/B tests on pricing and pricing model. Like currently on Wingify, we are testing what text elicits better responses: "Free Private Beta" v/s "Exclusive Beta" or "Signup for Beta"

My first thought was: "How is this different from Google Analytics?" I imagine that's the 800 lbs gorilla you're dealing with, right? So, it might be worthwhile to just throw that in my face right when I show up. Tell me why I should pay money for something I can already get for free.

(Note: I'm not saying your site isn't worth the money, just that I was unable to immediately determine what differentiates you.)

When looking at the pricing page, my first question was, "How exactly does this site calculate a visitor session?" If I visit a site on June 1st and then go back on June 7th is that one Visitor Session or two?

Maybe put an asterisk next to the term Visitor Session and then define how you'll calculate that metric in the paragraphs below.

i signed up for a free account and saw "email (username)" and immediately just put a username. after submitting the form i just got the plain text error "bad email" with no other explanation. you may want to make the error messages friendlier and show the user the form data again, not just a white page with "bad email".

also, after receiving the script code and then clicking through, i was prompted to login again. not sure if that's an error or intentional but it seemed weird.

i put the script code on a couple sites and will see what kind of data it produces over the next few days.

the new _vt_* cookies sent by your script caught me by surprise when loading my site. i guess _vt_* reminds me of the old microsoft frontpage extension junk (_vti_bin, etc.) which triggered some bad memories.

If I change the number variable in this line in the script:

VisTrac.SetAccount(number);

to a different number than what was assigned to me, will I be messing with other people's stats?

Other than that, it looks good. I like it. I think I may use it.

For me signup failed. I get a near blank page (it says 'None'), however, the url shows "bad_email". I think it doesn't like email addresses of the form foo+bar@gmail.com - which is a valid email address and in common use, as in foobar+vistrac@gmail.com

Looks like an nginx error at the moment. Probably to much HN traffic ?

Great signup flow, incredibly fast. Very happy I could setup my account without having to confirm the email.

Its running on a client's site now, looking forward to seeing some data.

Its awesome. Love the vision and execution. Wish I could afford it.

Yes, that's expensive. The free version is, but a very simple demo.

http://vistrac.com/register/create

Got a message saying 'none'. Would have loved to try it.

Sorry that I can't really add anything of substance, but I want to mention that I hate moving parts on a home page. Looks good and useful otherwise.

I won't repeat what everyone said: It's great!

One thing: It's not SEO optimized and uses lot of pictures instead of text

I can only see the summary report in the demo.

pretty cool, you'll probably get a call from Google in the near future

Instead, I think the next version of Google Analytics would put a lot of companies out of business

Looks really smooth!

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