Most of the time, when an analytics score is delivered, users are met with an apparently arbitrary number, like in Klout, HubSpot Graders, etc. I enjoy the perspective, but don’t always know exactly what all of the factors really mean. Back end “special sauce” algorithms make many of the scores determining factors in how well you’re “using them,” but they don’t usually help users understand exactly what to do if they want to change anything about performance.
This is where Yottaa stands out from any other free web analytics service. They offer an understandable, and research driven way to look at a web page’s performance. Yottaa provides a Yottaa Score out of 100 as a form of quick analysis, as well as a deep-dive into how this score was created. They are able to do this by putting all data in one big pool, instead of separating it.
As Yottaa founder and CEO Coach Wei told me, “Our approach is to look at web performance as a ‘big data’ problem and in order to solve that problem, we take a Search Engine approach.”
Wei explained what this means for how Yottaa pulls data: “In this model, Yottaa Insight crawls websites, continuously collects data and mines that data in order to provide our customers actionable insight for their web applications and site performance.”
Yottaa measures a number of important page performance metrics to help sites determine how to improve overall performance. These categories include page load time, global reachability, complexity, and YSlow score. Additionally, the metrics system gives site owners insights into how their website is working on a global scale.
Within each category, a measurement is taken from Washington, Dublin, San Francisco, London, and Singapore. Also, a time line is given for what part of the page (images, headers, etc.) loads when, and how long they each take.
Page Load Time
This measures two major areas, time to display, which is how long it takes a the page to look like the site, and time to interactivity, which is how long it takes the page to fully load and be functioning.
Global Reachability
This category measures three key areas. How long it takes the page to look up the domain name, or how long it takes to resolve your DNS name when it is not cached anywhere in the system. It also measures how long it takes for a browser to connect to the webserver. Lastly it looks at how long it takes to download content from the webserver.
Complexity
The complexity data is made up of three parts, the page size, the assets (total number of files that the browser must download in order to display this page), and the number of domains referenced with the web page.
YSlow Score
YSlow is a Firefox add-on tool that Yottaa has integrated into their site that analyzes Web pages for performance on a wide variety of rules that are important for high performance pages.
Yottaa users can also “benchmark” their site’s performance in these categories against competitor’s sites directly.
Another area where Yottaa differentiates itself from other analytics tools, as well as avoids the constant question of why not just use Google Analytics, is by integrating with Google Analytics.
Wei told me this is important to customers because it allows them to assess the data from a business perspective. He told me, “Using OAUTH to connect with Google Analytics, Yottaa allows a user to correlate performance data with business metrics.”
For example, customers could use this feature to see whether improving site performance correlates into a higher conversion rate, or decrease bounce rate.
The combination of unique, and in depth performance methods, with the ability to see a direct application in business sets Yottaa apart from other Web analytics companies.
Yottaa is based out of Boston, and Bejing, allowing for a worldwide presence, and helping ensure users establish their performance metrics from a international scale.
