We would never want to take a penny from any company that wasn’t going to fully benefit from our software. Unfortunately, some others in the analytics industry appear to be happy to do so.
Analytics software varies in pricing, ranging from free up to very high amounts. Most systems offer a free trial and then prices tend to range from what we charge (normally £30-50 per month on a month to month basis) up to much higher amounts (£150+ per month, locking people in for 12 or more months).
The purpose of analytics software is to enable you to gain useful insights into your website visitors. Some analytics software focuses purely on identifying companies that have visited (which is useful information) and others (such as ours) does the same but additionally focuses on website data that can highlight where there are inefficiencies (in the website or the way in which it’s marketed).
Our view though is that there’s no point in paying for analytics software if you don’t have enough website traffic to make analysis worthwhile.
Say, for example, that you only have 100-200 visitors to your website each month. Chances are that a high number of those fall into the following categories:
Of the remaining visitors, many will be unidentifiable and there may be some identifiable companies within your data (but the numbers will be relatively low).
Over the years we’ve seen examples of companies that have used free trials of other analytics software and at the end of the trials they’ve been encouraged to pay large sums of money to keep using the software. The problem here is that in cases where the website traffic is too low, it’s very hard to get a return on investment from that software.
Say, for example, that a website has 200 visitors in a month and 20 of them are identifiable as companies. Of those 20, there may only be a few ‘good potentials’. The question here would be “is it worth spending a lot of money to get access to that information about so few visiting companies?”
We don’t think so.
Our software adds more value because it helps to highlight website visitor patterns that could be of interest. That makes it more justifiable because the costs are lower and the benefits are higher. However, even then, we’d still say that low website traffic can limit the full power of what our system can do.
If, for example, you had 300-500 website visitors a month. That’s a better number to work with because it makes data analysis statistically more useful. Below that number and the data becomes less useful.
While we allow anyone to set up a free 30 day A1WebStats trial, we still feel that it’s only fully beneficial if you have enough website traffic to analyse. We’ve had many examples where people have signed up for the trial and during the trial we’ve contacted them to suggest that we pause the trial until they have stronger website traffic (and give them the opportunity to start the 30 day trial afresh at a later stage). To us, there’s no value in having a subscriber who pays after the first month but then doesn’t see the value (because their website traffic is too low), which could mean they want to cancel their subscription. We know of some other analytics system providers who lock their buyers in for several months (sometimes a year or longer) at a time and we’ve spoken to people who feel ‘trapped’ into such contracts. That’s one of the reasons why we allow people to cancel at any time.
If you are considering using website analytics, we would be happy for you to take our trial but we would be honest with you if we thought you couldn’t get the best benefits due to low website traffic. We also advise you (if you don’t already know) to initially consider using a free solution such as Google Analytics because that will show you the basic information about your website data. If you have low traffic (under 200 visitors a month) then Google Analytics will show you that.
So what’s the answer if you know you have low website traffic? Well, you could contact us – we’re always happy to provide some free advice about how you could inexpensively boost your traffic. And of course, you’ll have existing contacts that you can speak to about raising website traffic.
All we would urge you to NOT do is commit high amounts of budget for analytics software until you’re at the point that your website has enough traffic to make the most of how that software can help you.
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It is a refreshing change to come across an online service company that is prepared to turn away business when they know their service is not right for the potential customer.
I think having integrity is even more important these days when it is so easy for bad experiences to be shared across the social network.
And I’ll bet your ethical approach encourages website owners to come back to you when they are in the right position to benefit from what you offer.
Hi Carol,
Thank you for your encouraging comments. You are indeed right – we’ve had people come back to us several months after initially considering analytics. Agree with you totally that integrity will become more important – we’re particularly pleased that our interactions with people have been proven to lead to new potential subscribers taking the trials.
Andy