As you watch them, so you are watched! New real-time tracking tools for your website
I want to tell you about an incredible experience I had in July. I was surfing around oneforty.com, clicking on their new tool called SocialBase. Their business development person immediately started to chat with me in a little window. I was flattered, because of the attention, and he convinced me to sign up for the free trial of SocialBase. It costs $80 a month and is basically a checklist which I could easily make in a google doc, so I decided in the end not to go with it, but one of the things that struck me from that entire interaction was,
“WOW, he SAW me and he FOUND ME and he TALKED with me and CONVINCED me to do something pretty difficult, like give him my credit card info!”
So that really impressed me, and I decided to investigate HOW he had done that. I think I found my answer today.
Ever since I installed Ghostery, I discovered that there are a LOT of different tracking software solutions trying to track us on all of these various websites. I’ve spent the day researching these different “solutions” and it’s quite incredible how much they’ve been able to find out about me before I blocked their software with Ghostery.
There’s google analytics of course, but also Crazy Egg, KissMetrics, Performable, Chartbeat (oneforty.com), Omniture (HuffingtonPost), Tynt, Comscore Beacon (linkedin), Brightcove (Nytimes) Insight Express, Revenue Science (CNN.com)
So, here are a few that I’ve been investigating.
Kiss Insights Poll for Website visitors
This allows you to auto-poll website viewers on what they thought of your page, if they found what they were looking for, or if they needed something else. I think this is what the guy at oneforty.com used to chat with me, but I don’t see that functionality in the free version of their tool. Maybe it’s in the paid one?
Who’s On
Who's On, which lets you see real-time visitors to your website, and chat.
Now THIS tool actually does what it says. It shows you who’s on your website, in real-time, and it allow you to start to chat with them. I tried this today on another site that I own, but no one took me up on it. Still, it was an interesting exercise, and exciting too, to try to speak to people who were on my website, right then, reading my words.
Performable, which just got bought by Hubspot
I am not sure how to explain what this does, because they’re integrating it with the hubspot toolkit now, so it could do something different next week, but I watched the video, and what it SEEMS to do is give you a place to track EVERYTHING about your potential customer, including if they mention a competitor on any of their social media channels. Which is kind of scary. I mean, I guess if they’re a large enough potential client, you’re going to want to nip that sort of thing in the bud, but STILL. SPOOKY.
Any other tracking tools you’d like to share?
