Getting Sitestat certified: the professional partnership program

Last week, I spend 3 days in Amsterdam at the Nedstat Headquarters to be sitestat certificated. I was send by Netprofiler to be trained in the use of Sitestat as part of the Professional Partnership Program.

Day one

Day one started off with a presentation from Fred Ven Der Wuff, the VP sales, about the history of Nedstat, the current state of the Sitestat software, the benefits for its users, the distributions strategies and the goals of the recently created partnership program. Our trainer for the coming days, Menno took over to give a general overview of the software, how to create reports, the direct view mode, how sitestat collects data, who certified them and how to implement the software with a focus on creating counter names.

After the training we dropped our stuff at the hotel to go out for dinner with our fine Nedstat hosts, for fine food and fine conversations... mostly about web analytics of course.

Day two

Day two started with a recap about the previous day, quickly followed with some more detailed explanations how Sitestat handles funnels and conversions. Segmentations was discussed, and also the more recent features like Stream Sense (client site video data capturing). Latter in the afternoon, Michel Berger (CIO) presented about the upcoming features of Sitestat for the coming quarters. Too many to mention but I particularly like the report builder (where you have almost unlimited nesting of items, can combine any metric and use math formulas). Also the integration with offline data and using it for segmentation promises to be very powerful. Although Sitestat is being very proud at their real time reporting, they are even becoming more agile with new time intervals consisting of the last sixty minutes. The twitter and youtube integrations also looked promising together with the new “one call” api.

Day three

Day tree we dived deeper into conversions and talked how Sitestat tracked real time out of session conversions. Even more funnel creations and the use of direct view to very intuitively create funnels. E-commerce tracking and multiple domains tracking was about the end of the training.

General impressions

I liked how Nedstat took the time to explain about the software architecture and how the development effort of the recent years was geared towards creating the right infrastructure with flexibility, scalability and real time data capturing and manipulation in mind. Now, this infrastructure is set so they can focus on more front end features and adding more functionalities. So new exiting features will be rolled out the coming quarters.

One other excellent thing about Sitestat is that it works with raw data. It will capture your raw data and keeps it that way. Every time you create a report, the report will be computed on the fly. Combine this with the real time data capturing, it means that you are able to follow your visitor's behavior when they do it. Furthermore you can create funnels and segments and apply it immediacy on all of your (historical) data. This allows you to experiment and test your segments fast.

About the program itself, it was very well organized. The people of Nedstat were very friendly, open and knowledgeable about their product. You really got the feeling like they are open for a real partnership with agencies. Overall very good training content wise and very animated as well. Thanks to Menno Hagen and Patrick Douwsma for being such excellent trainers and hosts. Looking forward using Sitestat as an analytics tool.