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Ask HN: Launched Startup Project, Simple Analytics Reports, Feedback?

14 points by timme ↗ HN
A month ago we posted about a project, Metric Mail, that was in development at the time (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398876). Metric Mail is a service that generates simple Google Analytics reports as PDF and delivers them via email on a weekly basis. It is developed on Google App Engine in Python.

We just launched a first (hopefully) working version, which is exciting and scary at the same time.

What do you think? Any kind of feedback would be a great help for us, we'd love to hear from you.

http://getmetricmail.com

Thanks a lot in advance, Tim & Chris

12 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] thread
carbocation
Interesting. How is this better than doing the following one time:

(1) Login to Google Analytics.

(2) Click 'View Reports' for the site of interest.

(3) In the lefthand menu under 'My Customizations', click 'email'.

(4) If you have one setup already, click its title to edit it. Otherwise, create one.

(5) Choose the report you want it to send you.

(6) From the Date Range/Schedule dropdown, select among Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Quarterly.

In other words, it appears to me that that this can all be done from within Google Analytics. Perhaps I'm wrong though?

ziadbc
If people like this, they can do it for other metrics based services, and then just make one bigass report.
timme
You're absolutely right. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the setup procedure and style of Analytics' own report feature. Over the longer term, we will add other data sources to enrich the information that Analytics provides. At that point, the difference will become clearer. Also, we made the surprising experience that even the process outlined by you can be quite challenging for some website owners who try to avoid as much hassle as possible to get to their data, even if it means sacrificing a bit of depth. That's the situation we want to address by making the process as simple as possible, although (obviously) we have some work ahead of us.
carbocation
As you or someone else mentioned, your service will probably not stop at just GA. If so, then this will be quite valuable - creating a unified interface to all major analytics systems. My vision was too limited when I first thought about what you were doing. Great work!
herrherr
(4) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/84641/google_analytics.jpg :)

So what I'm saying is, that it is of course possible to create a report in Google Analytics but it is not that trivial. Especially for non web-savvy users.

carbocation
True, but 'Dashboard' is one of the options by default... So if you're not that savvy, you're probably just looking at the Dashboard anyways.

I do agree with some other commenters that, if this is a flexible framework allowing you to peer into other services besides Analytics, it could be quite a boon.

apgwoz
Very easy to setup, I've signed up, so I'll be able to give you a bit more feedback once I get the first email... I do like how simple it is. Give me a list of profiles, I select the ones I wanna see.

Edit: Got my first email. I don't like the font, otherwise this is great. None of my sites are really so critical that I check analytics every day, so getting this once a week is perfect for me. I'll keep it for now.

teisho
Is there any thought about expanding this to other analytics packages? We use Piwik instead of Google Analytics.
herrherr
If there is enough demand for something like this, we would definitely implement it.

In general, every tool that provides an API can be integrated.

AmberShah
I like it. Very easy to sign up. Previously I would log in periodically but it's easy to start getting compulsive about it.

I really really want Feedburner integration. Those are the two metrics I check.

I would prefer to receive these every 2 weeks or every month instead of every week.