- Why can't I just use Google Analytics?
-
Google Analytics has a mountain of data. Unfortunately, a "mountain of data" is
not how you get more sales. Problems include:
- Google Analytics can't tell the difference between a genuine, hot lead and
a pile of crap that inexplicably appeared in the past hour. Saying
"200 goals reached" just isn't accurate.
- You can't correlate Google Analytics data with records in your own
databases or CRM. (It's actually against Google's Terms of Service!)
- Most data is not statistically significant, but Google Analytics doesn't
tell you that. You waste time looking at meaningless data.
- Google has Google Website Optimization for A/B tests and Google Analytics
for web stats, but they're not combined! Oops.
None of this is a problem with Lead Spy!
- Is Lead Spy compatible with other services like Google Analytics and Clicky?
-
Yes, completely! In fact, don't un-install other services. Just use us as well.
As a bonus, if you're a Clicky customer, we automatically link our
database with theirs, which means with zero configuration you get all the
advantages of both systems!
- Why isn't it good enough to just use Google Analytics "Goals?"
-
When someone completes a form -- to give you their name and email -- Google
can count that as a "goal." But that's a terrible measure of whether the
traffic is useful.
The reason is the large amount of spam and near-spam. I know -- it doesn't
seem like there would be that many spam form-fills, but it's astounding.
As one of our users put it: "Talking of which, since I added the email form to downloads its amazing how many bogus attempts there are. The amount of bots that must be auto filling forms just to see what happens is scary, it totally skews my google analytics."
Besides a spam/no-spam determination (which is already useful), there are
"leads" where all you have is a generic Hotmail account. It might be
a real person but often it goes nowhere. Contrast that with a lead from a known
company with a company email address, and a full name which matches the name
in the email address. That's a real person, and it's worth more.
Saying "goal completed" just isn't enough.
- Will this service impact my website, my bandwidth, or my customer's experience?
-
The tracking code runs 100% in your customer's browser and connects directly
to our web servers, so it has zero impact on your bandwidth, your servers, or
your databases.
The tracking data is collected only after the rest of your site has completely
loaded, which means it doesn't impact your customer's experience. Even if our
website is completely down, your customers won't even know it.
- How solid is your hosting company? Will you scale?
-
Currently this project is in "invite-only alpha" stage, which means we're not
dealing with scalability problems yet. We're processing about 20,000 events per day.
Lead Spy is hosted in the
Rackspace Cloud,
monitored on-site by the legendary technicians and support folks at Rackspace.
To improve the availability and speed of the data-collection piece, that system
is extremely simple and physically separate from the big analytics, reporting,
administration, and long-term storage system that you see when you log into your
account. This means that even if we have problems with big, complex system,
the simple data collector can keep humming along.
Finally, realize that this is still alpha software, so outages are possible
both for data-collection and for the administrative interface. But remember,
the client-side tracking code you install will not affect your customers
even if our website is completely off-line or if it hangs a connection.
- Who are you guys?
-
Lead Spy was created by me:
Jason Cohen.
Here's the story of how this came about.
Enjoy, and let me know how I can better serve you. This is supposed to be fun!
- How do I request a feature?
How do I report a bug?
-
Use the feedback site.
Vote for your favorite features or make your own suggestions.
- Is this free?
-
It's free for now because it's in alpha. It will not be free forever.
The pricing structure is unknown
as yet. Don't worry, you can always export all your data and uninstall in 5 minutes,
so you can leave if it's not worthwhile.
- What's the legal stuff?
-
No warranty, no guarantee, no nothing. Use at your own risk. I reserve the
right to do anything at any time, up to and including terminating the service.
I use a few 3rd-party tools and data-sets which need to be mentioned. So here goes:
- This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com/
