Continuing our features on GoSquared customers, I sat down with Stewart McGrath, CEO and co-founder, of Squixa. The company are based in Australia but help companies all over the world improve the performance of their websites. Squixa use GoSquared to provide an analytics dashboard to each of their clients and to track global performance. I put a number of questions to Stewart about why GoSquared was the perfect analytics solution for measuring websites where high performance is essential.
Why did you start Squixa?
My co-founder Daniel Bartholomew and I were working for a large ecommerce organisation in Australia. I was CIO and he was website Technical Lead. We were spending a lot of time and money working on performance for a high volume ecommerce site.
Working on website performance can be both commercially and technically frustrating. From the technical side performance improvements made can yielding diminishing returns as new browsers and applications are released.
Organisations have commercial conversations internally about where to best spend scarce development resource. Everyone pays lip service to faster websites and performance but a cross function team often would agree to spend time changing the colour of buttons — they wanted to stick with something tangible they could understand.
Companies enter long term contracts with content delivery networks and that is frustrating — that’s not how it’s supposed to work. We figured adressing these aspects of website performance was probably a problem for a lot of people.
So we built Squixa, a cloud-based platform that does all the web performance best practice, deals with CDNs and takes five minutes to setup. Squixa makes it super simple to start improving your website performance.
The sites we support range from small media sites through to some of the largest Australian ecommerce sites. These clients see the direct tangible benefit of having a faster website. People in the media space enjoy the benefit of more pageviews and more engaged time. Ecommerce sites enjoy more sales, it’s simple.
What do your customers love about Squixa?
People primarily love three things about us. Number one is the ease with which they do business with us, both on the technical and commercial side. Secondly, is the outcome: they get a faster website. Thirdly, our customers love the support we provide.
How do you use GoSquared?
We wanted to build tools into our customer portal beyond just performance measurements. GoSquared fits our reason for being perfectly — simple but powerful.
When connected to the Squixa platform, our customers do not have to do anything to install GoSquared. The Squixa platform takes care of the whole process.
We know some of the analytics our customers get from the GoSquared dashboard is available in something like Google Analytics but we know it won’t be as easy to read and for these sites, it’s not as accurate as GoSquared either.
For Squixa, GoSquared is another piece of value we provide to our customers.
Why do metrics matter to your business?
We are a metrics driven organisation. We make decisions based on metrics. Our customers are interested in what their customers do on their websites. GoSquared provides a simple interface and powerful information. For Squixa, GoSquared is another piece of value we provide to our customers.
GoSquared is simply more accurate for telling you who is on the website.
How do you use GoSquared for monitoring your network of sites?
We’ll open GoSquared to see what’s happening on a customers website. We have a lot of things we count in the background and we use GoSquared to monitor users on a site, the pages being visited in addition to our performance metrics. We look at things like performance by browser for example.
What are the specific challenges in your market analytics helps you tackle?
On of the most common problems websites encounter with performance is when the number of users of a website rockets. One of the benefits of Squixa is we alleviate those common traffic problems. We’ll see a client’s traffic rocket up from a marketing campaign or PR event and we can see that clearly in GoSquared and know that at the same time, the site stays stable.
We are a metrics driven organisation. We make decisions based on metrics. GoSquared provides a simple interface and powerful information.
Why do you use GoSquared?
We prefer GoSquared over other tools because the presentation is intuitive. We set up GoSquared for our customers and they can see the data visualised straightaway.
The other feature that matters for us is that GoSquared is simply more accurate for telling you who is on the website. The tracker loads at the beginning of the session for every user and it doesn’t use an algorithm to estimate large traffic volumes like other tools.
For an ecommerce site, uptime and performance directly correlate with revenue for a given day.
In GoSquared, the most important metric for us is number of users — it’s the best indication of activity — and we need a real-time view of exactly what the traffic is at any moment.
And for our higher traffic sites, GoSquared gives us an immediate health check for the site. For an ecommerce site, uptime and performance directly correlate with revenue for a given day.
What does the future hold for Squixa?
We have a bunch of new features coming. We’re exploring different ways of optimising our clients websites. Our reason for being is to make website owners’ lives easier. We want to provide more options for giving people a faster website with no effort. We keep working on ways to automate working around the performance problems people have.
We love GoSquared.
Stewart McGrath is CEO at Squixa. You can find our more about their clients and performance solutions here.
Results
- GoSquared installed on over 75 client websites giving each customer access to easy to use analytics.
- Squixa need analytics from GoSquared to accurately assess site performance.
- GoSquared provides an instant health check for ecommerce sites to ensure stability and uptime are maintained.
