Over the weekend I re-wrote the entire analytics engine of SlideMagic. (Apologies for the frequent app updates).

I had a whole bunch of tools installed, some of them dating bask a long time when I just started out with the blog. They were spitting out a lot of data that was never really used. Web analytics brings back memories of my time as a McKinsey consultant. The client having a massive and sophisticated business intelligence (“BI”) information system that could produce any breakdown of any segment at any time. Our work was to find what actually mattered, which often was a surprisingly simple chart.

If you are running a massive web site with billions of hits, then A/B testing the colour of buttons might make you money. You hire the web analytics consultant, let her do her work, and in the end your return on investment is a 0.005% uptake in conversion on a billion of clicks minus the cost of the data analysis project. The result is a massive amount of trackers that follow you across the internet.

SlideMagic no longer has them. I went back to basics, and put a very simple system in place, that gives me the information I need given the growth stage SlideMagic is in (making sure that the product works flawlessly). In the process I could also eliminate any possible information that could, if you really wanted to, identify a user. All is clean now, and I understand/control 100% what is actually going on with your data.

Photo by Nick Loggie on Unsplash