With GoSquared, you can see what you need, get on with it and it’s pretty enough that looking at this data doesn’t have to be boring. You can’t underestimate the value in that.
Buffalo are an independent web design agency based in Brighton that have built a stellar reputation for producing innovative work for the web. They have an international roster of clients including Greenpeace, AT & T, Getty Images and Channel 4. Buffalo have been using GoSquared on their own award-winning website builtbybuffalo.com and with their clients. I caught up with founder Dan Griffiths to chat about what makes their approach unique and what their clients look for in an analytics product.
How did Buffalo start?
I started a company with two other classmates after university – we built Flash games for public sector and local companies. I got headhunted to a company in Southampton but soon realised it wasn’t the place for me. I had a few contacts for work and I thought we could make the leap to find the first project. So myself, a designer and developer did a couple of freelance projects together to test the water. Our first project was an ecommerce store in 2006 and since then it has really been steady. We’ve built up on word of mouth only. We don’t do any other marketing —we just make nice sites that people like. We try to look after our clients and be ethical in how we treat them.
What do your clients really love about you?
In terms of what makes us unique, we’re still super passionate about the work even though I’ve been doing this for over ten years now. I still enjoy it. I still live for building web projects and looking after clients in the ways that we do. We also look after the business side of things. Sometimes clients come to us with a blank sheet of paper —maybe a very loose idea— and we help them with the business concept and the revenue model. That’s not something that many agencies do without extra cost to the client. And then the things that other people do but not really everyone. We do rapid prototyping, wireframing and such. We’re not agile for the sake of being agile; we get stuff done and it happens to be well received by the clients and our peers.
What’s your core focus?
The web is what we like and what we’re good at. We don’t do iOS apps; we try to build mobile versions of sites. We have partners who specialise in the iOS stuff. We also never got into print design —we are focused on web rather than being a “full service” agency.
What is the work that you are most proud of?
We did a great project recently with AT&T and HBO. A project where you guessed what HBO programme people are talking about in a jumpcut video. We worked with BBDO New York who made the amazing videos. For us it was a lot of JavaScript work and a fair amount of back-end development. We built a separate mobile version that supported a ton of devices. We also worked with an agency in London on a project for Greenpeace that got nearly half a million petition sign ups. We’ve also made lots of ecommerce websites that we’re proud of.
That’s how we see GoSquared —providing that clear view.
Why do you recommend GoSquared to your clients?
I’m trying to get everyone to only go with you for analytics, or if not at least in addition to Google Analytics. I find GoSquared much easier to use; it’s much easier to get a quick snapshot. To be honest that is all most people want. They don’t want intense detail. We recommend things to our clients that we know will genuinely help them. We’ll have clients who don’t know what Google Analytics is and are put off by the interface. With GoSquared, the user sees it tracking three or four stats but those are the ones they care about. That’s how we see the product —providing that clear view.
And you’ve experimented with our new Ecommerce Analytics?
I see this idea of stats very clearly visualised and your new conversion dashboards [Ecommerce Analytics] that are really useful for our clients. It’s ecommerce where you really need the data to tell you quickly what is going on and what is working.
The companies we work with sometimes have a few bricks and mortars shops but the majority of sales are online. They use analytics and revenue to dictate what they buy. Where their traffic comes from and how they get there; this really influences how these guys run their business.
Google Analytics does ecommerce tagging on the front-end and that can cause a lot of issues. People have lots of JavaScript issues with transactions that go through the ecommerce system but are missed on the analytics. By integrating with the API on the backend like GoSquared does, that stuff shouldn’t happen.
What’s most important in analytics for your clients?
With GoSquared, you can see what you need, get on with it and it’s pretty enough that looking at this data doesn’t have to be boring. You can’t underestimate the value in that. If you look at Google Analytics, it does the job but most people don’t use the functionality. They don’t even need it. It’s hidden behind layers of tricky UI and makes you feel like you’re scrambling to find even simple things.
It just grew and grew. GoSquared gave us a really fun and exciting way to view that growth…
What are the most useful features for your team?
We got fully into GoSquared when we launched our latest site design eighteen months ago. At the time, the design got a lot of recognition in the design community and generated a lot of press. It won a few awards, was nominated for “Site of the Year” and naturally this drove a ton of traffic. We were easily enjoying 400 concurrents at one point. It just grew and grew. GoSquared gave us a really fun and exciting way to view that growth and the directors were checking it on their phones.
The breakdown by browsers and devices is really useful. If we compare our GoSquared stats to a clients, you’ll see we have a lot of Chrome users —our audience is full of early adopters. With some clients you’ll see a substantial IE6 audience. They can see what the (substantial) cost would be if they stopped supporting it.
With our sites, engagement time and bounce rate are important and we like how you measure them. In the office, we have our GoSquared stats on big screen TVs in the office. For us that works really well and it’s something that a few clients have adopted recently. It is nice to see the peaks and troughs.
What does the future hold for Buffalo?
We’ve expanded to a team of ten. We’re working on larger projects. We’ve got a bunch of new work going live this summer. Brighton is a great place to be for us.
Dan Griffiths is Managing Director at Buffalo. You can explore the agency’s work here.
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