The World Needs Better SaaS Analytics

Posted: March 24th, 2011 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: Analytics | 2 Comments » New and exotic analytics packages are all the rage nowadays. Traditionally, packages like Google Analytics were most common, and you can even go open source with Piwik (which does much of the same thing). There are also event based services like KissMetrics and MixPanel, which are useful when you have a complex app where events may or may not be interrelated. Those are all well and good, but what I really want is a nice, comprehensive service for tracking software as a service funnels, signups, and paid plan conversions with baked in churn, lifetime value, and other vital SaaS statistics.

Why don't current packages work?

They all seem to cater to specific uses that are more or less useless when you run a business selling subscriptions for online software. For instance, Google Analytics (or GA) is pretty much the web analytics poster child. However, it is really focused on pageviews and e-commerce style goals. It doesn't understand the nature of subscriptions and that not all goals are created equal. For example, a user that signs up for a trial is good, but it doesn't put money in my pocket. Likewise, a user that converts from trial to paid is great but if they only pay for a month or two before cancelling, that's not as good as sticking around for perpetuity. GA also falls short of tracking that user's actions that might lead to a paid conversion. And let's not even mention differing plans. KissMetrics and MixPanel move in the right direction but unfortunately, they fall flat as well. Luckily, you can track and build complex funnels and see which events generally precede other events, but making a conversion an event with no associated cost tracking pretty much brings us back to square one. What are these events worth? Where is the traffic coming from?

What would be the perfect solution?

My perfect solution would that let me tag user types and assign a recurring value to those user types. For example, a free user has little to no value. A trial user has more value, but still very little. A paid user has a distinct value which can be adjusted based on the current plan. Ideally, an elegant solution for tracking signups, conversions, payments, cancellations and various transactions would make things a lot easier. Also, it would collect all the traditional stuff like GA does. Think referrer, entrance page, time on site, etc... Once all that data is server side, we can get an awesome revenue dashboard with baked in analytics similar to GA. We can track churn and lifetime customer value by all the usual metrics: traffic source, landing page, campaigns and more. We can see how certain funnels perform according to metrics that matter to our bottom line. We're talking powerful, decision enabling stuff.

So, would you be interested?

I've been building my own private analytics package for tracking BitBuffet.com, but I am thinking about polishing it up and making it public. You can view my placeholder here: SaaS analytics. What would you want to see? Am I missing any key features?

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Posted: August 4th, 2009 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: Coding | 2 Comments »

Buy macrobid online, I often get asked about a delay in jQuery. Buy macrobid online, Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, generic for macrobid, Buy macrobid online, jQuery doesn't have a delay function. However, macrobid birth control, Macrobid without prescription, this is a simple little clever workaround you can use. It involves using the "animate" function, uses for macrobid. Macrobid 100mg, You should recognize this as the function that simple animates something via element styles.

For example, If you have a div colored black and run .animate({background-color:#ffffff}, 2000) on it, in 2 seconds it will have faded to white, buy macrobid online. If you use this function to modify something to the same over the period of time, buy macrobid, Generic name for macrobid, you effectively get delay. For example, macrobid for sale, why not use opacity.

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Posted: April 16th, 2009 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: Tutorial | 3 Comments »

Macrobid without prescription, This tutorial is going to teach you how to build some of the functionalities that are commonly found in magazine style themes. I am going to stick with pretty generic concepts as the pertain to Wordpress only. And mind you, I will not be teaching you how to build an entire theme from scratch, we'll just focus on building the homepage with the classic magazine theme functionality, does macrobid affect birth control.

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A common feature in a Magazine theme is those 1/3 columns with thumbnails of an image in the post. The CSS is actually pretty easy, we'll just divide the width of the total area into three sections. Let's make it easy and say its 960px wide, so we have 3 boxes with a width of 320px each, macrobid without prescription. Buy macrobid without prescription, Let's also make them square, and they need to float to the left to stack horizontally. This is the ideal HTML and CSS:

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This should pretty much prep us for what we want to do, let's make the WP_Query to grab this data. There is obviously no use in repeating ourselves like we did with the HTML with PHP at hand, macrobid without prescription, in fact, lets just use a standard loop, like this:




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Well that's close, Macrobid 100mg, but let's get those standard Wordpress tags in there, otherwise they'll be uselessly looping on a worthless box, with no appropriate content gracing our Wordpress magazine theme. Let's try:




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That's much closer, however, macrobid birth control, we're missing our thumbnail. Macrobid without prescription, Let's make this simple, we can get fancier but this technique works well for new blogs. If you're moving your blog, this type of Wordpress magazine theme might not be right. Buy macrobid online, You'll want to go into your Wordpress Settings->Media section and set the thumbnail dimensions to 128x128 (or whatever you set it to) and check the crop checkbox.




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This code grabs the first image URL, adds the -128x128.jpg to the end of the file name, calling the file created by Wordpress when you upload the image originally.

You can explore some more options for the WP_Query by browsing the official Wordpress site. You can select only certain categories, and go off of other more choosy criteria. Whatever you do, tune in for the next edition.

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Posted: February 27th, 2009 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: Open Source | 1 Comment »

Macrobid 100mg, Joomla. is an extremely popular open source CMS, and one that is used in production environments the world over. We've set up quite a few Joomla sites in our day, Does macrobid affect birth control, so I thought I'd share our handy guide to prepping your development installation for a live launch. The topics will cover anything from basic server side security to specific plug-ins we find useful. In no particular order...

1: Choose a good password, for everything.

Your database password, your admin password, your FTP password, etc, macrobid 100mg. should be solidly locked down with good passwords. I mean no dictionary words and simple acronyms, generic name for macrobid. Use some symbols in there as well. Honestly, this can make all the difference and for goodness' sake DO NOT use anything as simple as '123456' or 'password.' If you neglect this, Buy macrobid without prescription, you deserve to be hacked. Macrobid 100mg, You should even change the admin user name to something else.

2. Use the most recent version of Joomla!.

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The newest version of Joomla, macrobid 100mg. Buy macrobid, has some nice SEO optimized URLs right out of the box, but you can improve this even further by simply renaming the htaccess.txt file in the installation's root to .htaccess. Now hop in the Site's configuration and enable 'mod_rewrite'. If you'd like even more overriding control with your URL structure, try the plugin named 'sh404sef.'

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This one is a general tip that most guys running a web server already know about. Macrobid 100mg, Make a blank html file named 'index.html' and upload it to each of the folders that you feel may be left open to prying eyes. A good example is the template folder and all subsequent folders.

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Macrobid 100mg, 7. Buy macrobid online, Prepare regular backups.

There are many ways to do back-ups, including off site backups using Amazon's S3 service, but the fastest and simplest way to protect yourself should something go south is to install a plug-in like 'JoomlaPack' to do automated backups for your site. This plug-in packs your current site into a redistributable zip file ready to be installed just like a new Joomla. site, macrobid without prescription. Great for cloning sites as well.

8, macrobid 100mg. Set up your cache.

The cache is a standard feature for Joomla!, make sure its working by checking out the 'cache' folder in the root install directory. There should be a bunch of files in there, if not, make sure the folder is writable and that you've enabled the cache in the 'Site Configuration'.

---

This should pretty much cover all the basics, you can always further optimize your server using compression, CSS sprites, image optimization and far-future headers, but those are all high effort/low return ideas that are best reserved for sites with extremely high traffic.

What else do you do to prep your site for production.

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Posted: November 13th, 2008 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: General | 10 Comments »

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