Author: padams

1.4.0rc1 has been released: goals, funnels, e-commerce, campaign and more

by padamsin Announcements, Community, MediaWiki, Releases, WordPress

I’m pleased to announce the first release candidate for the 1.4.0 release. See the full release notes for v1.4.0 for all the nitty gritty details but this release is chock full of new features, bug fixes, and scalability improvements. Some of the highlights are:

  • Conversion Goal Tracking – define and track up to 15 conversion goals per web site.
  • Goal Funnels – visualize the set of steps (or funnel) that users experience before hitting your goals.
  • Campaign Tracking – add campaign tracking parameters to your inbound links and see how effective your traffic driving efforts are.
  • E-commerce Tracking – track and report on revenue and products purchased.
  • First Party Cookies – track and report on an unlimited number of web sites from a single OWA instance.
  • 60+ new metrics – all accessible via the data export API.
  • 20+ new dimensions – all accessible via the data export API.
  • 10+ new standard reports.
  • Clustered Deployment – deploy OWA across a cluster or tier of servers for better redundancy and scalability.

This is a release candidate so there are still some sharp edges, but please join the community and file tickets for any bugs or oddities that you experience. We’ll be updating the wiki with the latest and greatest documentation over the next few days.

Also, please support open source web analytics by spreading the word about this release and OWA in general. Tweet, blog, smoke signals, whatever. The more we can get the word out that there is a robust open source alternative to commercial web analytics services/software, the better OWA will become.

And lastly, a big thanks to everyone that contributed to this release by filing tickets, writing code, and offering up an instance or two for debugging purposes. We had a record number of submissions and contributions to this release milestone. Keep those tickets coming.

Mouse Tracking is better than Eye Tracking

by padamsin Features, usability

The good folks over at ClickTake have posted a great piece on how eye tracking compares to mouse tracking in terms of analyzing web page usability.

Mouse tracking differs from eye tracking in that a user’s mouse movements are recorded instead of their eye movements as they interact with a web page. The best way to think about mouse tracking is that it turns your web pages into a one way mirror through which you can literally watch how your users interact with the page.

When it comes to usability work, mouse tracking often times is far more effective than eye-tracking because:

  • It can be performed on live users of your site, instead of simulated in a lab.
  • It doesn’t require specialized/expensive labs, recruitment efforts, consultants, or equipment
  • If you use Open Web Analytics you can do it for FREE and get started immediately. No waiting.

Have you ever debated a design decision with a client or colleague only to wind up agreeing to disagree? Well, if you were recording mouse movements you’d be able to back up or disprove your hypothesis with real interaction data in minutes. Heck, you’d even be able to show live recordings as examples.

Here are some of the important usability questions that mouse/key-press tracking can answer:

  • Do users ever scroll the web page? If so, how far exactly?
  • Do users ever click on a particular element of the page?
  • How long do people spend interacting with the web page?
  • Do users use any keyboard short cuts to navigate the page?

General web analytics tools can’t answer these questions because they do not track what happens after a web page loads.

Open Web Analytics comes with built-in support for tracking a user’s entire “in-page” experience including mouse movements, scrolling, and key-presses. We call the entire stream of in-page events a “Domstream” and allow you to record them for all of your visitors or just a sample percentage that you define.

Watching Domstream recordings is like watching a reality TV show – once you start watching you can’t stop.

Because OWA is free open source software there is no limit on the number of Domstreams you can record. This means that if you have a large web site with lots of different page types you won’t bump up against the limits that commercial tools put in place or run out of budget as you record more streams or do A/B tests.

To see how OWA’s Domstreams work check out the OWA demo site and start tracking your user’s Domstreams. We just did 😉

1.3.0 Has Been Released

by padamsin Announcements, Releases

OWA version 1.3.0 has been released. You can grab the code as a tarball or from SVN.

The full v1.3.0 release notes are here.

Major New Features

True Metrics & Dimensions – this release introduces a new abstraction layer for all of OWA’s metric and dimensions that allows developers and analysts to work with them without having detailed understanding of OWA’s underlying database schema. All metrics and dimensions now have their own names – allowing you to easily mix and match them in result sets and API calls.

Result sets – metrics and dimensions are now accessed through a new API method called getResultSet. This method greatly simplifies access to metric and dimension combinations greatly simplifies how you work with data in the presentation layers.

Data Export API – OWA now has a REST based API that you can use to export data in JSON, XML, serialized PHP, and even basic HTML.

Redesigned Reporting Interface – OWA’s reporting interface got a whole new look and code face lift bringing with it HTML5 graphing/charting as well as paginated data grids.

Action Tracking – you can now track an unlimited number of custom site “action” events using the new Action Tracking functionality. Track form submissions, video plays, downloads, or any other action that users can take on your site. You can even group action events and associate labels and values.

MediaWiki Action Tracking – OWA will now automatically track and report on the following MediaWiki actions: Article Creation/Edits/Deletions, User Registrations, User Logins, and File Uploads. No need to do custom page tagging, OWA will instrument your Mediawiki for you.

WordPress Action Tracking – OWA will now automatically track and report on the following WordPress actions: Post Creation/Edits/Deletions, User Registrations, User Logins, New Comment, New Blog Created (WP v3.0), User Profile Edit, Password Reset, and Attachment Creations, Edits, Deletions.

The release also contains lots of new reporting metrics and dimensions, five new reports, and tons of developer features. See the release notes for more details.

Upgrading from 1.2.4 or Earlier

1.3.0 is the first release that requires PHP 5.2.x. It also contains significant database schema changes that may take a long time depending on the size of your database. These schema updates must be applied from the command line to avoid browser timeouts.

Please see 1.3.0 release notes for instructions on how to install or upgrade this release.

Also, I would like to thank everyone that was involved in this release. Whether you helped out by testing the code, troubleshooting an install, filing bug tickets, or contributing code, your efforts helped make the release happen. Thanks again and please keep contributing your ideas and time to the project.

To see what’s up next, take a look at OWA’s development roadmap.

1.3.0 RC1 Has Been Released

by padamsin Announcements, MediaWiki, WordPress

OWA version 1.3.0RC1 is the first release candidate for the 1.3.0 release and is available as a tarball or from SVN.

Major New Features

True Metrics & Dimensions – this release introduces a new abstraction layer for all of OWA’s metric and dimensions that allows developers and analysts to work with them without having detailed understanding of OWA’s underlying database schema. All metrics and dimensions now have their own names – allowing you to easily mix and match them in result sets and API calls.

Result sets – metrics and dimensions are now accessed through a new API method called getResultSet. This method greatly simplifies access to metric and dimension combinations and returns a new paginatedResultSet object that will greatly simplify how you work with data in the presentation layers. Result sets can contain multiple metrics, dimensions and can be constrained by any number of constraints. Constraint support has also been enhanced to add regex and substring constraints.

Data Export API – OWA now has a REST based API that you can use to export data in JSON, XML, serialized PHP, and even basic HTML. The API utilizes user specific secret key authentication or cookie based authentication when used within a pre-authenticated OWA session.

Redesigned Reporting Interface – OWA’s reporting interface gets a whole new look and code facelift bringing with it HTML5 graphing/charting as well as paginated data grids.

Action Tracking – you can now track an unlimited number of custom site “action” events using the new Action Tracking methods. Action events can be grouped and can have associated labels and a numeric value. Action events are stored in a new fact table and its associated metrics and dimensions can be accessed through the API.

MediaWiki Action Tracking – OWA will now automatically track and report on the following MediaWiki actions: Article Creation/Edits/Deletion, User Registrations, User Logins, and File Uploads.

WordPress Action Tracking – OWA will now automatically track and report on the following WordPress actions: Post Creation/Edits/Deletion, User Registrations, User Logins, New Comment, New Blog Created (WP v3.0), User Profile Edit, Password Reset, and Attachment Creations, Edits, Deletion.

The release also contains lots of new reporting metrics and dimensions, five new reports, and tons of developer features. See the release notes for more details.

Upgrading from 1.2.4 or Earlier

This release requires PHP 5.2.x and contains significant database schema changes that may take a long time depending on the size of your database. These schema updates must be applied from the command line to avoid browser timeouts.

Please see 1.3.0 release notes for instructions on how to install or upgrade this release.

Google Encrypted Search Strips Referrers, Hides Visit Source

by padamsin Web Analytics

Web analytics tools loose the HTTP referrer of new visitors that come from Google’s encrypted web search. The issue arises when the browser moves from an encrypted URL (https://) to an non-encrypted URL (http://) – which are most of the web sites on the net.

The effect on web analytics tools is that visits will appear to be coming “direct” when in fact they are originating from search.

Stay tuned.

OWA 1.2.4 is available – security update

by padamsin Announcements, Releases

OWA 1.2.4 has been released. This is a critical security and bug fix release that fixes some small bugs and prevents a possible remote/local file inclusion attack that was brought to our attention. We highly recommend that everyone upgrades to this latest release as soon as possible.

1.2.2 Has Been Released

by padamsin Announcements, Releases

Open Web Analytics 1.2.2 has been released. See the release notes for full details.

This release fixes a number of bugs found in 1.2.1 so we strongly recommend that you upgrade. In addition, this release introduces new and improved event queuing features that allow OWA to scale in high traffic volume environments by queueing events for asynchronous processing at a later time.

Specific features include:

Flat File Based Event Queueing – this mode allows OWA to avoid writing to the database during a tracking session. Instead tracking events are written to a flat file where they can then be processed at a later time.

Remote Event Queueing – this mode allows OWA to post it’s tracking events to another instance of OWA running under a separate php process or even on a remote server. This allows for multi-process and multi-server configurations where OWA’s event tracking is performed by one set of resources/servers and processing/logging is done by another.

Cache Expiration – Objects in OWA’s cache will now expire after a period of time in anticipation of a few upcoming features that will make it easier to update slowly changing dimensions.

More Event Processing Filters & Hooks – it is now possible to filter entire tracking events before they are logged to the database. This allows module developers to modify OWA’s core tracking logic without needing to modify any of OWA’s core files.

To get started, just download the 1.2.2 tarball or pull the tag from our SVN repository. Be sure to read the release notes for details on how to install or upgrade from a prior version.