I Spy Analytics review

We review I Spy Analytics, an iPhone app that spies on your website’s visitors and reports back to you on a daily basis

It’s so easy to have a web presence these days that most all of us keep some kind of blog, Facebook page, fan site, forum or even an Internet shop. They might not all be updated regularly, or you might choose to document every thought you’ve had about an obsession, but pouring out our minds into easily consumed web snacks is a part of everyday life.

Just having a web page isn’t quite enough, though. What we also need is a marketing strategy, and regardless of what kind of website you’re maintaining, it’s important to know people are visiting. Google Analytics is, naturally, the de facto standard for snooping on those who feast upon your internet ramblings, and I Spy Analytics aims to bring those all-important figures to your iPhone.

And we’re not just talking about a counter, which clocks up a new number each time the page is loaded. Proper analytics are used to, well, analyse each visitor and help you to figure out how to get more of them.

Firstly, I Spy Analytics logs into your Google account and brings up a list of web page profiles you’re currently tracking. There’s no limit to the number of websites Google will monitor for you, and the app is happy to pull in any profiles you’ve chosen to set up. You still need to add any new profiles through Google’s settings, but once they’re hooked up they’re immediately available within I Spy Analytics.

There’s a lot of data gathered by Google Analytics, and although its graphs are very neat and readable, making sense of it all isn’t the easiest task for the novice statistician. If anything, the data is far more accessible through I Spy Analytics than it is on Google’s page, mostly because it’s categorised far more neatly through menus rather than a full-screen layout.

Everything from your visitor’s choice of web browser to their country of origin, how long they remained on the site and where, and how they got there is included in the app. It also creates its own graphs, which can span varying allotments of time from a day to a month, so you can figure out when the peaks and troughs were in your web presence.

And because there’s so much data streaming in from Google, I Spy Analytics offers a great set of dashboard customisations to provide you with the information you want, and no more. It’s all still accessible, but the landing screen when the app opens can be thinned down or filled up to show the statistics that are most important for your requirements.

Although the leg work is all performed by Google, rather than I Spy Analytics, this app is a superb way to view the data scraped together by the internet giant. There are a ton of paid apps for the iPhone that bring Google Analytics onto the iPhone, but for the casual-to-reasonably serious user, I Spy Analytics is all you’ll ever need.

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