8 Ways to Sunday

Stuffed Guys — a scrappy little software company headquartered in Moscow — has their sights set squarely on two of the sacred cows of Web 2.0: Chicago-based web application company 37signals and Google, the 800-pound gorilla of search, traffic analysis, e-mail, and whatever else they feel like doing this week.

Who are these Russian madmen, and what exactly have they got up their sleeves? More importantly, can their products help your business or organization?  

This post will focus on a Stuffed Guys offering that competes with Google Analytics. A future post will deal with their in-the-works project management application, which is getting ready to square off against 37signals’ popular Basecamp.

The first weapon in the Stuffed Guys arsenal is a web site traffic and conversion analysis tool that they call Stuffed Tracker. It has a pretty interface (plenty of white space, colorful charts and reports), a list of features as long as my arm, and it runs on your own PHP/MySQL capable web server. No more waiting for that Google Analytics invite.

Stuffed Tracker has an attractive, colorful interface.

I haven’t used it myself, but based on the official user guide (PDF, 884 KB)¹ it seems to do everything Google Analytics does and then some.

“And then what?” I hear you ask. My experience with Google Analytics is still a bit limited, since my invite only came through a couple of weeks ago. Based on what I know, however, here are a few areas where Stuffed Tracker seems to have Google beat:

• Speed — As anyone who has used it can tell you, Analytics is slow. Google only turns accumulated traffic data into reports about once every 24 hours. This won’t be any help at all if you need to discern the difference between an influx of traffic from Slashdot or Digg and a distributed denial of service attack on your site. Since it runs locally, Stuffed Tracker is always up to date.²
• Customizability — Stuffed Tracker lets you create custom reports and charts, which Analytics only lets you fine tune the built-in reports.
• Data Ownership — You can export the data for specific reports from Analytics, but with Stuffed Tracker all your data lives in your very own MySQL database. It’s yours to do with as you please. If this is important to your business, it’s a big plus in the Stuffed Tracker column. It’s worth noting that a search of the Analytics documentation could find no guarantees or explicit policies for data retention.
• Better Campaign Management — Stuffed Tracker supports several different kinds of pay-per-click advertising campaigns, allowing you to track the effectiveness of each. Analytics only supports Google AdWords.
• Brand Reinforcement for Service Providers — The “Agency” version of Stuffed Tracker (which is geared toward web hosts, developers, and marketing/SEO agencies) has what Stuffed Guys calls a “white label” license. This means that you can strip away their branding and replace it with your own.

In fairness, there are a few areas where Stuffed Tracker lags behind. The most obvious one is cost. Analytics is free³; Stuffed Tracker is not.

Another area where Google excels and Stuffed Guys trail behind is localization. Stuffed Tracker only does English and Russian out of the box, with user-contributed modules for Spanish and German available in the support forum. Google Analytics is a localization champ, available in all of the following languages:

• English
• French
• Italian
• German
• Spanish
• Dutch
• Japanese
• Korean
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese
• Portuguese
• Danish
• Finnish
• Norwegian
• Swedish
• Russian

If you’re deciding on a web analytics solution for a big multinational company, if your small business works as a distributed team scattered over several continents, or if you just happen to be more comfortable in one of the extra languages supported by Analytics, then Google’s tremendous localization support is a big plus in their column.

The other thing Google’s product has going for it is something I’ll call “the security blanket factor.” There’s a reason that phrases like “industry leader” have a soothing effect on the people who sit behind large desks in overstuffed chairs.

By virtue of its sheer size, Google is somewhat insulated from the turbulence and chance of the cruel world of business. Members of the Cushy Chair Brigade (I’m sure you have a few in your own company, or may even be one yourself) have often achieved their lofty station by personally weathering that cruel business world, and their risk-aversion when it comes to choosing vendors is not without merit. If such concerns are paramount, then Analytics may be the right choice for your organization. Better yet — if you have the budget for it — would be purchasing the Urchin software upon which Analytics is based from a Google Partner in your region.

Finally, Stuffed Tracker may not be for you if your web site is running on a shared hosting account. Such accounts are often faced with limits on everything from CPU usage to allowed number of databases. In some shared hosting environments, Stuffed Tracker might push you over the edge and get your account suspended. The ground rules for different shared hosting plans vary wildly from one host to the next, so your best safeguard against account suspension is to ask your hosting company about running the software. You should also post any general questions you have about running in shared environments on the Stuffed Guys forum.

Customer Opinion

It’s surprisingly hard to find customer reviews of Stuffed Tracker online, partly because the obvious searches lead you to a bunch of free online script libraries that offer the trial version for download. With their combination of anonymity and intense competition among script authors, reviews posted on such sites are notoriously unreliable.

Stuffed Guys does offer a page of client testimonials on their web site, and I was able to find positive customer comments on the Webmaster World forum and from Gurock Software.

If Analytics fails to meet my needs, I may carve a chunk out of my schedule to give the trial version of Stuffed Tracker a try. Meanwhile, I’d be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who’s taken a chance on this gutsy little software company. Would you recommend the software to others? Why or why not?