Can we discern winners in the SaaS accounting stakes or is it too early? Unpacking web analytics data can help. Taking a leaf out of CloudAve’s book, but perhaps not being as artistic, I ran a DoubleClick AdPlanner analysis for some of the better known names in the SaaS accounting market and threw in a few oddballs to see what emerges. A few I tried didn’t register a blip on Google’s robots. The results are interesting but need reading with caution:
Taking unique visitor and total visits as your benchmark, it should be no surprise that QuickBooksOnline and FreshBooks are miles out in front of the remainder. FreshBooks recorded 830,000 uniques (inc cookies) generating 2.2 million visits. At the bottom of the scale, FinancialForce managed what seems a meagre 11,000 uniques but then it is very much in early stage growth. One surprise for me was WinWeb which only weighed in with a total of 48K uniques.
But it is when you look at how much time people are spending on the site that a different picture starts to emerge:
e-conomic and Intacct scored relatively low in the visitors’ numbers but scored highly in the ‘time on site’ stats, averaging over 20 secs each. What that tells me is that regardless of the absolute number of visitors, those that are visiting are doing a lot more ‘work.’ It is interesting that e-conomic is not well known in the UK but has a significant footprint in the Nordic region. Relatively speaking, Xero and FreeAgent are getting a lot of friction once people hit the site. But it is Xero that has the combination of relatively high visitor AND time spent on site values that would suggest they’ve found a winning strategy. But is it? Twinfield appears to score low on both sets of measures but in looking at the detail, it is clear they have some SEO issues.
As you might imagine, you can look at the stats in several ways. It is a topic to which I will return in another post.
Notes:
- I hid NetSuite’s numbers because they were so far off the scale that it made reading the graphs almost impossible. Suffice to say, they’re getting a lot of traffic and people spend a lot of time on their site!
- Remember that the DoubleClick stats are there as a guide for ad planners. While they give an indication of traffic and activity, their primary purpose is not that to which I am applying some logic, other data and a lot of intuition.
- All stats are as at Jan 2010
Disclaimer: Using any form of web analytics is fraught with issues. Vendors will cherry pick those that favour their position. Different analysis tools provide what at times seem wildly different results. However, by tracking even the wrong measures, patterns will emerge that are useful in working out how the market is moving and its direction of travel.
Update: Chart 2 needed updating because I ommited to include the QBOL numbers. It doesn’t change the general tenor of what I am asserting but I’m surprised no-one picked it up !!
