Last week I had the pleasure to have a demo of XiTi, the leader in behavioral analysis applications in France and in good parts of Europe. I had heard of it for several years, but had never had the real opportunity to see it first hand (and frankly I was a little more interested in what we find here in North America). Fehmi Fennia, the head of Xiti’s still small office in Montreal, was kind enough to proceed to show me what that application has in its guts.
And it’s got a lot!
First, XiTi has a free version, and I understand that this is how it got so well known in Europe first. What I saw, though, was the full-blown XiTi Analyzer. I was first impressed by how much slice’n dice that can be done on the fly with the data vizualisation (tables, charts, etc.). It’s got a powerful page grouping structure that allows you to configure 8 levels deep! It’s possible to take out specific days in a custom date range, say the last 10 days except last Monday and Thursday. One can even drill down to an individual visit! They are the only ones, I believe, who will create separate reports for brand-related keyphrases in the search reports. And they have a heatmap module together with a data overlay one.
In short, I was impressed with its flexibility.
I think that the product is particularly interesting with its segmentation capacities. One can create segments on the fly, with the reports that will then all reflect that specific segmentations. I have never had the pleasure to see Visual Sciences work during its prime, but this is definitely the most flexible application I have seen (except maybe for WebTrends Visitor Intelligence, but that product is not really in the same category, since it sits on a relational database. And yes, there’s Omniture Discover).
A XiTi implementation, in terms of tagging, seems to be pretty much like an Omniture one; you need to do a lot of planning beforehand. For now, XiTi will offer free implementation services to its new North American clients.
I know, nobody knows where the web analytics application market will be in a year or two, with all those acquisitions, and free (ahem, subsidized) stuff around. But if you believe that your organization should take the investment way, which I think it should if you do anything substantial on the Web, you should probably put XiTi on the list of products to consider.
P.S. Fehmi, don’t hesitate to post a comment if I made a mistake in my summary.
Thank you Jacques for this invitation.
I have only one comment to add to this post, regarding implementation.
With XiTi, Tagging is neither heavy nor complicated. However, as a comprehensive decision-making service XiTi implementation could require consulting work for some high–level projects. This may be necessary in order to understand customer site strategy, define mark up according to site objectives and KPIs to analyse.
In order to avoid costly delays in implementing such projects XiTi was designed with :
– Very light and easy to parameter JavaScript Tags
– A Page grouping structure that allows configuring up to 8 levels deep and adapts easily to complex websites
– Different tags for different situations: tags for content , Actions ,Events, Forms, sources, personal indicators, categories of visitors, conversions…
This reduces significantly the time and efforts spent on tagging and allows a faster access to acurate data even for complex projects.
Hi Fehmi,
Thanks for the additional information.