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Roast my product: Simple Analytics

Tell me everything that's wrong with the marketing page and with the tool itself. Especially on the marketing page because I'm going to fix that soon. It should convert better.

https://simpleanalytics.io (sales page), https://simpleanalytics.io/wip.chat (stats)


Homepage

  • There's no product preview! Most important thing for me is to see the actual product (screenshots) right away without having to click another button.
  • The dark blue headline with light blue background feels too soft for me. I'd like to see more contrast.
  • Overall the colors feel too soft. More contrast would communicate the "simple" idea better.
  • There's a lot of text. I'm not reading all of that. I wonder if anyone does
  • The testimonials lack context. Who is this Pieter Levels guy? j/k, but maybe add a headline, etc
  • The "clean" and "simple" benefits are too similar IMO.
  • "Friendly" doesn't communicate the privacy aspect. I'd use a different word.
  • In fact, I don't see any mention of privacy above the fold. Maybe you could use something like "Website analytics that don't invade your vistor's privacy" or "Website analytics that respect your privacy"
  • Overall I think the page does a bad job explaining the privacy benefits. I think it would be great if you show a visual comparison with Google Analytics as that's what 99% of your leads will be using right now
  • Your Intercom widgets says "we", but elsewhere you explain it's just you.

Pricing

  • IMO all plans should include data exports
  • $49/mo for 100k+ pageviews seems like a lot to me with current feature set. I'm not saying decrease the price, but I think you'll need to become more competitive in terms of functionality to warrant that price
  • Have you tried a trial without credit card? I think once people overcome the hurdle of adding the tracking code, they are more likely to convert to retain access to their data.

Product

  • I really like the simplicity of the one-page dashboard. Google Analytics is powerful, but it feels like a chore to use. Simple Analytics is more fun and gives me a decent portion of what I need from an analytics tool
  • I don't find it valuable enough yet to pay for it. It hasn't crossed that threshold for me. I'm not sure what it would take, but I wonder if you can do something radically different from Google Analytics rather than just being less privacy invasive.
  • It's quite possible I'm not your target customer. Are there websites that are hyper sensitive to privacy? Websites that currently don't use Google Analytics? They might still want the analytical insights, but for whatever reason cannot use Google Analytics.

Great feedback!

Homepage

The feedback on the homepage is clear, will fix that.

Pricing

  • Why do you think to have data export for all plans? I want to target businesses, and need more differentiating features between starter and business.
  • I will get more features every day, so that price is maybe too high now, but will be good later.
  • Haven't properly tried without cc, but I do have emails from people that fill in the demo input field. So will make something for them where they can try out without cc and bug them in the platform so they need to upgrade.

Product

  • Thanks 🙏
  • Radically different, hm, if you know something, let me know. For me it's hard to think of more business features, makers features are easy. But I think that keeps me small.
  • You know this Pieter Levels guy? He suggested to get a list of companies that I should contact for offering my products for free, so they can be on my homepage. Companies like Ghost (looks like they use GA). But selling myself to those companies is as easy as writing my PR message ;-)

Re: data exports

It feels wrong to me when I pay for a service and they take my data hostage. I understand it's a common business practice to create a vendor lock-in, but feels hostile to me.

Re: radically different

I'm not sure what exactly it should be. This isn't it, but just to give you an idea of thinking out of the box: everyone's stats are open to each other. So by joining Simple Analytics you're able to benchmark your stats compared to other websites. (e.g. to determine if your 62% bounce rate is good or bad, etc.)

To find such an idea (but an actual good one) you need to talk extensively to your customers and understand their deeper business needs. For example for me with regards to Startup Jobs I have these questions:

  • Is there more SEO work that I can do? (analytics tool build around SEO with practical tips on which pages to improve and what to add/change/etc)
  • How well is my paid advertising work? (
  • Would increasing the number of job posts increase my revenue?
  • Where are my customers coming from? (Google Analytics often says "direct" but I can't imagine so many people typing in the URL)

These are great questions. I can definitely do something to help answer those.

The more I think about it the more sense this makes. I feel like I need to grow in features that help website owner with whatever problems they encounter. So why limit it to analytics?

Yeah nobody wants analytics. People want actionable insights. Analytics are just a way to get there.

Just had a quick glance.. Nice layout.. But felt that the home page could you a nice big image on top - showing the product. Something felt missing on top of the home page - guessing it is the product pictures. Also, the 3 buttons below the pricing seems off on the desktop. Alignment is right and all that - but for some reason it feels too cluttered - maybe push the buttons into each respective pricing div.. The pricing buttons plus the 'send me demo' buttons felt a little crowded. Rest all looking good. Congrats!

Your landingpage looks quite nice.

However just at looking at it, it is not clear for me that "friendly analytics" mean privacy first.
And IMO you should push that privacy aspect. I guess it will sell well, because of GDPR. People are now way more concerned about privacy. And privacy first products will need to come up.

However, as I am EU based I would not use your service, because of GDPR.

I think you will need to enable data export in the starter plan, because of Art. 20 GDPR "Right to data portability".
So even you are not collecting as much information as google, you are processing data and for any EU company it is important to know where the servers are located. However I can't find anything about it. Are there located in the EU ? Are they in the US? Are you a PrivacyShield member?

The video is quite nice, however pretty unimportant for me . I would rather see some screenshots of the product in action.

Hi, Adriaan!

First of all, I love the concept of SimpleAnalytics.
It's simple and privacy-friendly. I will definitely use it when my project went live.
I hope my feedback will help you even a bit :)

Context: Privacy matters me a lot. I use the tools listed on privacytools.io. I even own some self-hosted apps and emails on Swiss server. I'm angry with the big corps take advantage of our data. I care about my audiences' data as much as I care about my privacy.

Home Page

  • I love the video! And you say a very important message at the end of the video. I'm not sure all the people have time to watch it to the end, so it would be great if we can read the text version of your message elsewhere on your website.
  • Probably we need a screenshot(s) of the stats page before the demo link. I wanted to see it how it looks like before I click the link.

Product

  • I feel that the price might be a bit high compared to the feature. When I pay your service, I consider 40% of the monthly payment is for the actual product value, the rest is for patronage to the like-minded privacy advocate's project (you!)
  • As @apertureless wrote here, I also want to know the server location and detailed information about how you manage your data (e.g. the server-backup locations and the use of third-party tools)

Suggestion

  • I would buy/subscribe now if simple analytics have a self-hosted version. Initially, I planned to use Matomo (former Piwik) because it's self-host software and free. I decided to choose SimpleAnalytics over free app because of its carefully minimalized features and ability to make the stats public. Honestly, I still prefer a self-hosted app because I can own my audiences'/customers' data on my server.

Is it definitely cookies free? I remember some debate on here about gdpr and whether you used some cookies or not.

Yes, cookie free forever. That is for the scripts on peoples website. To login on SA you need a cookie of course.