Welcome to the website intelligence news roundup (September 2023)!
Yes, it's that time of the month. And for those in the northern hemisphere at least, summer has officially ended!
Still, the sun never sets completely for business; it may be the quietest time of the year, but that's no bad thing! Sure, there's less external meetings, less business development, and less recruitment. But all this means is that we all have a little more breathing time to catch up, organize, and strategize!
But much like your TWIPLA integration that is silently purring behind the scenes, we've also been busy. There have been some pretty big changes here, and this includes some exciting developments to our website intelligence solution.
So here's your website intelligence news roundup (September 2023), in which we run through what's been happening in the world of website analytics since our last update back in July!
So click on one of the links above to drop straight down to the article of your choice or keep scrolling down through the website intelligence news roundup (September 2023).
Our advanced website intelligence solution will enable anyone to grow their website quickly - all while staying data privacy compliant!
This is the big one, and you might have already noticed a few not-so-subtle changes to our website and app.
We've rebranded. It's been a big undertaking, and is the first and last one that we'll be doing.
So we're now called TWIPLA - a loose acronym for The Website Intelligence Platform.
"Visitor Analytics" was a very descriptive company name at the beginning, given that our platform..... analyzed website visitors.
But we've moved forward in leaps and bounds since starting out in 2015, and we've now outgrown this description. Back then, we were only available as a Wix integration, and offered the standard website statistics that you (still only) get from alternatives like Google Analytics.
Fast forward to 2023, and our platform is now compatible with all website types. But the rebranding has a deeper significance. If truth be told, we've long felt that "Visitor Analytics" no longer does justice to just how advanced our website analytics solution has become. And given all the visitor behavior analytics tools and visitor communication features that we now offer, maybe Visitor Analytics++ would have encapsulated our full service provision better.
But we like TWIPLA, and we've been quietly rebranding over the last few weeks. And beyond the new logo and color scheme, we've also migrated our website. Plenty of fat has been cut off it, and you should find that it performs faster than ever.
Don't worry though, the changes to our platform are only skin deep and nothing about your account is different. Underneath, it’s the same privacy-first analytics solution that you already know, and we will continue to introduce loads of fantastic new features so watch this space!
We hope you like it!
The fact is that not all analytics platforms are created equally and if we're honest, the Germans know a thing or two about engineering - there's a reason why all the very best pianos around the world are still made by the German disapora.
But back to analytics. At TWIPLA, our developers have been focusing on privacy-perfect innovation since long before anyone else in the sector. And today, our advanced cookieless tracking engine enables website owners to collect up to five times more visitor data than with popular alternatives.
That's great news for insight accuracy and effective growth!
Sure, it's a pretty big statement but it's more than empty marketing gibberish - we've got the evidence to back it up.
Learn exactly why TWIPLA collects more website visitor data than competitors.
Given the competitive nature of the sector, we wouldn't be where we are today without our development team's capability to consistently roll out new privacy-focused features that keep us right on the cutting edge of what is possible in the world of analytics.
The last few months have been no different. In fact, all the updates to our platform could fill this website intelligence news roundup September 2023 by themselves.
There's been some exciting back-end developments, and none more so than an impressive new analytics clustering engine that is enabling more intersectional data analysis than ever before. Indeed, even eight years into our journey, this has been enough for the management to foam at the bit about the exciting opportunities that this affords our community of users.
And while this is all happening behind the scenes, some of the many future features we're planning have already been introduced over the last two months, or will be arriving soon:
This website statistics feature provides users with a thorough overview of all their webpages and related statistics. This is the first of a wide range of features that we plan to release that are built on our new analytics cluster, and really stresses just how advanced TWIPLA has become.
It is available to everyone, including our free standalone and Wix subscribers.
The Page Dashboard makes it possible for users to monitor, measure, and analyze website performance from the perspective of each individual webpage. You can see at a glance the performance of key pages, such as your product pages, landing pages, form submissions, check out, and so forth.
So if we wanted to know whether this website intelligence news roundup September 2023 was as engaging as previous ones, we can have more insights on it than ever before! And if we wan't to know what languages it's worth our time to translate it into, we can quickly learn this from the Page Dashboard!
Armed with this information, you can then leverage similar insights to make data-driven improvements to each.
Enter the Page Dashboard, and you'll be presented with the following data on each webpage:
What's more, it also enables you to group specific pages by up to five page path levels.
You can find your own Page Dashboard in the Main Dashboard module of the TWIPLA platform.
In order to leverage the full power of our analytics cluster engine, we've completely overhauled the way that the TWIPLA platform approaches filtering.
With this update, users can now filter data easily in a multitude of new ways, such as by UTM parameters, URL, and traffic channel.
The new filtering experience has been rolled out across the platform, and enables users to make data-driven decisions and get granular insights on visitor trends, preferences, and behavior.
What's more, users can take any filtering fields they activate, and turn it into a template that can be used across their website(s). This will save you time, making it far easier to move around the platform, and to only look at data that is relevant to whatever work you are focusing on.
This new feature enables users to set Visitor Segments based on specific attributes:
Each of these criterion offers a range of sub segments, providing you with an almost endless list of possible visitor segments as you can see from the following examples:
Visitor segments are simple to create. And once done, they can then be applied throughout the platform with a click of a button.
Users can use this tool to build audience segmentation insights based on cross-sectional characteristics, and to deliver more targeted marketing messages that will drive more sales and return more business rewards.
This makes it a mighty tool, and one that will become even more useful once the custom dashboard feature is launched next month.
You can find the Visitor Segments tool in the Website Settings section of the TWIPLA platform.
Up until now, users were all welcomed by a standardized dashboard that provided an overview of key website statistcs. However, we have long wanted you to be able to create custom dashboards that display the metrics that are most important to your business.
The first version of this feature will be arriving soon, and will be available initially for subscribers to our Pro Plan - so upgrade your pricing plan if you think that it would be useful for your business!
With it, you'll have the following functionality:
Crucially, you can also share your custom dashboards with contributors. So if you have colleagues, teams, or partners that have different goals, you can now provide them with custom reports that are completely relevant to them.
What's more, this gives you far more control over the data that others can see on your website. So if you employ multiple agencies that focus on different parts of the market, you can make sure that they only see what you want them to see, and hide the rest from sight.
But we're not stopping there, and here's a preview of what you can expect from future iterations:
This is a another big one, and something that our users have wanted for a while!
This is the first version of our new eCommerce module, and will be initially rolled out to our standalone users and Analytics-as-a-Service clients.
In a nutshell, this module will provide all the statistics that matter for people who are running an online store. And once they've set up their store events, these insights include:
And as you'd expect from TWIPLA, these eCommerce insights will all be filterable. This functionality will include the possibility to filter by:
Our developers have really surpassed themselves here, making it possible for users to now view data points for certain report blocks from different angles.
Put another way, this links TWIPLA's many functionalities together like never more, enabling users to jump between data analytics tools faster. So if you're looking at a line diagram for example and want a table visualization of the same data, you can now do this with a single click.
Our advanced website intelligence solution will enable anyone to grow their website quickly - all while staying data privacy compliant!
Back in July, the European Commission certified a new US DPF, and US businesses have until October 10th to self-certify with this program if they want to legitimately import EU citizen personal data into the country.
This event came as a surprise to many. It's no secret that the US has found it difficult to create a data privacy environment that meets strict EU criteria, and many believe that this agreement won't be able to withstand the legal challenge that Max Schrems is planning to lodge.
And three months on from thiis adequacy agreement, doubts remain about whether policymakers will ever reach an agreement that will protect internet user data enough given the US government's right to access on request.
So read more about the ongoing EU-US data privacy transfer saga.
Switzerland may never get round to filling in the holes in its cheese.
But it's finally fixed the holes in its data privacy framework, with Switzerland's revised Data Protection Act coming into force at the beginning of September.
This legislation has aligned the country closer with strict EU data privacy requirements and further tightens the global network of laws thar protect internet users.
So read more about the Swiss Data Protection Act, and its implications for analytics users.
Norway. It's fairly difficult to find anything bad to say about the country unless you're a fan of winter sun. But, with this recent decision by Norway's data privacy authority, they've gone up further in our estimations.
In fact, it makes the Northern Lights a beacon for global data privacy efforts, with Meta being hit by a brick every day until it implements new measures to protect the personal data of Norwegian residents. Take that, Zuck!
At TWIPLA, we're always happy to see companies held to account for misusing personal data. It's also taken a while for this to happen. Meta are huge, and its good to see them finally hauled over the coals for their fragrant disregard of user data privacy.
But this could also be a moment of powerful precedent. For, the European Data Protection Board could easily facilitate other EU countries following suite with fines against Meta of their own if it endorses the decision.
Read more about Meta's fines in Norway.
Trust Delaware to punch above its weight. It may be one of the smallest states in the US but this little blue hen chicken just grew teeth!
On September 11th, it became the 12th state in the Union to roll out GDPR-like personal data protection legislation since California introduced CCPA back in 2018. What's more, its law is the strictest of them all!
The act certainly has its critics, but its arrival is still great news for internet users and data privacy advocates!
So, learn about Delaware's new data privacy law.
Our advanced website intelligence solution will enable anyone to grow their website quickly - all while staying data privacy compliant!
Adobe Analytics is installed on just under 250,000 active websites. This is obviously far less than the 2.5 million websites blessed with TWIPLA. But they're a big name away from the world of analytics, and the popularity of their PDF reader means that they're probably attracting many users based on brand awareness alone.
And as with any website integration, it's important to know what using Adobe Analytics means for GDPR compliance. The company claims that its analytics does meet the requirements of this EU data privacy law, but a closer look - and we've done a deep dive into the integration - says otherwise.
So learn more about the GDPR compliance of Adobe Analytics GDPR compliance of Adobe Analytics.
July's website intelligence news roundup was the first to bring together our research on the GDPR compliance of popular website integrations, but let's pick up where we left off.
SurveyMonkey has long been the go-to online survey tool for a great many of us. But the landscape has changed, and users need to know how well-suited it is modern data privacy legislation.
This article looks at how compliant it is with GDPR, the strictest of these laws. It will also run through the data practices that users will need to adopt to ensure they don't run into any legal issues.
So, learn more about the GDPR compliance of SurveyMonkey.
Just before our rebrand and website migration temporarily stopped us from being able to publish new articles, we did a deep dive into the website analytics options that are available for Wordpress users.
It proved to be highly interesting work, highlighting both the shortage of privacy-first options and the prevalence of companies that claim to be data privacy compliant when they are actually nothing of the sort.
So read our report on the privacy-first analytics options available for Wordpress users.
As you no doubt know if you've read the previous article, Wordpress has a real shortage of privacy-first analytics options.
Not that this is necessarily Wordpress' fault. It's an issue that affects all content management systems. But for users, choosing a non-privacy-compliant analytics platform will undoubtedly cause problems in the future, and limit their data capture today.
So we decided that our readers could use some reviews of the nine privacy-focused options available to them.
Read our reviews of the 9 best privacy-focused analytics plugins for Wordpress.
Weebly and Wix are two of the biggest website builders on the planet. And who knows, maybe they'll extend their dominance cosmically once Elon Musk gets around to installing Starlink on Mars.
Here at TWIPLA, we've obviously been fans of Wix for a while. In fact, our platform was first introduced as a Wix-only integration. And if you're a Wix user, we've recently updated our TWIPLA for Wix installation guide.
But away from Wix, Weebly is also an excellent contender.
Both website builders are great, and particularly so for those of us who don't exactly have a PhD in coding.
If that sounds like you, and you're mulling over which of the two is best for you, then you'll no doubt want to understand their strengths and weaknesses before making a decision.
So learn more about how Weebly and Wix compare.
Weebly's a strong website building platform, even if they've been going through a bit of a stagnant period since being bought by Square. We can guess that they're trying to work out how to make this platform viable without impeding on their own eCommerce store builder.
Still, Weebly remains a great example of how something relatively complicated like website building can be made super easy with the right development - something that we recognize ourselves in here at TWIPLA.
If you've got a Weebly site, or are considering opening an account, then we've written about how you can start building it properly.
Read about how to build a successful website with Weebly.
And of course, you'll need website analytics to direct your website development once its live and welcoming guests. You can do this with the help of TWIPLA, and we've recently updated our Weebly installation guide that will help you to get the platform up and running.
Our advanced website intelligence solution will enable anyone to grow their website quickly - all while staying data privacy compliant!
As you can see, there's been no shortage of activity here at TWIPLA since the last website intelligence news roundup back in July.
There's the rebranding, website overhaul and an impressive range of new features.
And further afield, we've seen many new global data privacy laws. This points to a standardization of legislation around the strict model found in the EU, and it won't be long before every blade of grass in the world falls within the scope of these laws!
But that's it for September.
Stay tuned for the next website intelligence news roundup next month!
Thanks for joining us on this journey and happy analytics!
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