Web Analytics in China

Web2.0 (or cloud computing) opens a brave new world for website applications and products, and brings a lot of challenges for China’s web analytics as well. In this article, I want to briefly introduce how Chinese vendors help users to overcome challenge and meet their business requirement (although not perfectly meet).

• Taobao sellers’ tracking puzzle

Taobao.com is an extremely popular C2C e-commerce platform in China, just like eBay in the States. Analysis International data says that more than 3 million sellers and 180 million buyers are bargining and dealing every day. One day, one of my friends who owns a Taobao shop asked me a question. He wanted to use Google Analytics to track his shop’s performance.

"Ohh… it seems not possible" is my first reaction.

But the requirement is there. Sellers want to know a lot of things about their shops, e.g. traffic volume, traffic quality, traffic source quality, promotion performance and conversion. They even wanna know what kind of page design and content is more powerful to attract prospects and persuade them to purchase. Some of them are even more "greedy", they want to know their competitors’ performance. But, disappointingly, Google Analytics seems not a solution for us common users. We can’t utilize Google Analytics directly because Taobao is a ASP (Application Service Provider) website, a web2.0 site, where JavaScript tracking codes not allowed. How could my friend do? Some smart Chinese practitioners gave out some solutions:

• 1×1 beacon, let Google Analytics work!

We know that Google Analytics collect client end data by requesting a 1×1 pixel GIF pic. If Taobao can’t accept external JavaScript, we can leverage Google App Engine, which is a free public service that allows you to track your visitors using just an image, CSS background, or anything that allows external resource requests in the website you want to track. By doing that, we can at least insert 1×1 pixel gif picture in the shop’s pages to connect Google App Engine, and this is what Taobao allowed. If this way works out, then we will be able to get some traffic reports. But the problem is how can we get the Google Analytics’ 1×1 pixel pic?

One method is to use Nojsstats, a good and easy tool to implement in Taobao pages.

There is a similar service provider in China as well, Google Analytics For Taobao, provides the same function for no-JavaScript-environment.

• Vertical web analytics tracking tools for Taobao sellers

1×1 beacon can help to track webpage’s traffic volume, but is powerless in collecting traffic source and transaction data. In Google Analytics traffic source report we can see that all the traffic is from “direct”, because 1×1 beacon is not able to catch referrer information. In terms of transaction data, it is stored in Taobao’s server but not in the web page, so no way for 1×1 beacon to integrate the data to Google Analytics’ e-commerce report.

Therefore Google Analytics is only a sub-optimal solution for Taobao sellers. We need some more sophisticated tools, which can integrate more comprehensive data.

Xiao’ai Statistics is one of the tools. The tool is developed just for Taobao sellers, providing more data than GA’s 1×1 beacon, including traffic volume, traffic source, key words/phrases of internal search, heat map and more important, the goods statistics.

 

Upper graph shows the dashboard of the tool. The dashborad has a radar chart to illustrate different dimensions of the shop’s situation, including traffic volume, PV/Visitor, Time spent in shop and promotion intensity. Radar chart is a good benchmark tool since the score baseline data is based on overall shops data which Xiao’ai tracked. Then you can have an overall idea on what your shop’s strength and weakness comparing with all other shops. It provides traffic trends of the shop in the bottom as well.

 

The tool provids a map overlay function for different visitor, but I haven’t figured out the usage of it. Maybe a Google Analytics style map overlay report will be more useful.

 

Click heat map is a pretty cool report, if the report can cover all customized links in the page, will be extremely instructive.

 

For the goods’ statistics, the tool can’t provide transaction data, therefore ROI analytics is not available. It’s really a regret, because Taobao hasn’t opened the transaction API for 3rd party developers yet. Hope this could be changed in the not-to-distant future.

I really prefer end to end (from promotion to final transaction) ROI analytics feature for different web analytics tool. You have this feature, you can say your tool is a mature one.

In general, the tool is a step further comparing with GA’s 1×1 beacon, because it provides some features and reports pointed to Taobao sellers’ demands, although the tool leverages 1×1 gif as well and both methods have no substantial difference. However, I must point out that the tool is far from perfect, esp. in ROI analytics perspective.

There is another very similar tool to track Taobao seller shops’ performance, name is Quantum Statistics.

These tools are badly demanded for end to end ROI analytics report!

• Beyond Taobao, what else?

E-commerce is an extremely hot zone in China Internet market. Some local web analytics tool vendors have already had their fingers in the pie. Many China e-commerce websites just utilized 3rd party e-commerce systems rather than developing their own sites and systems. ShopEX and ECShop are some most popular ones of these 3rd party e-commerce systems.

Company who owns Xiao’ai Statistics has already developed some tools can be perfectly emembed in some 3rd party e-commerce systems. They give the tools a new name "Net Steelyard". Some other companies are heard have taken actions to create relevant tools as well. The market won’t be silent for long.

They are cutting through the market from intermediate region. Google Analytics and some other famous free global tools are not strong enough to fulfill China mid-scale e-commerce sites’ mearsuring and analytics demands, however those sites couldn’t afford sophisticated tools like Omniture or CoreMetrics, either. These local solutions are more suitable for them, not very expensive, not very complicated, and pretty pointed.

Really a growing market.

• What about SNS websites tracking?

Comparing with the hot e-Commerce vertical web analytics, SNS tracking is rather cold. I haven’t found any tools to track mainstream China SNS sites such as Kaixin001, Renren (both are like facebook) or Sina Micro Blog (just like twitter). Two reasons for that I belive. One is vendors don’t see any chance of making money from providing SNS tracking service, and another reason is China has pretty strict censorship in SNS sites and all other user generate content sites.

But I belive the situation will be changed very quickly. More advertisers have realized the significance of branding or marketing in SNS sites, and if they want to know the true performance and learn some insights, 3rd party tracking and analytics vendors will come out.

For current situation, we can’t say there is nothing worth a mention. I found a RSS feed tracking tool.

The tool’s name is Feedsky, and actually it’s the Chinese version FeedBurner. Since FeedBurner is blocked in China, Feedsky has hundreds of thousands users.

The tool provides basic metrics of RSS feed, including number of feed subscribers, number of article clicks from feed and share of different subscribe tools, as below chart shows.

 

The tool provides a subscribe trend as well, as chart below.

 

All the metrics and reports of the tool are extremely straightforward and simple. We may be thrilled by the increasing trends, but we really can’t learn more insights from the report.

A summary of China vertical web analytics is the market is growing. It is expected to see more companies entering mid/small-scale e-commerce web analytics. SNS sites analytics will also bring us some suprise. The market may not be booming in short term, but new things are close.