Today our vineyard and winery management software became an offical Xero Add-on. Woot Woot!
That in itself is great news and we are really excited to get working with such a great piece of software and it fits our long term philosophy that we don’t make accounting software, we make winery software.
But what really interested me was watching what happened to our sales site after the Xero team tweeted a welcome with a link to our site. I recently found the Real-Time features that are in Beta in Google Analytics.
When the first tweet went out I started watching the real time visitors, what they were looking at and where they were coming from. I could not look away. I felt like a possum in the headlights of an on coming car, or mesmerised like when you look at a fire.
As I watched, I saw ripples go out, as the original tweet from the API team was re-tweeted from the main Xero account then other people picking up on it. You could see each tweet reflected in a modest wave ( OK ripple ) of visits to our site. Firstly mainly in NZ, then to San Francisco and from there are few more visits from around North America. Then a couple of folks picked up on it from Australia and you could see a ripple of visits from around Australia. As I watched the map below evolve and change I could imagine using it as a proxy for the referral network of Xero, (the UK of course is asleep, and not everyone neeeeds winery software, but it doesn’t hurt to have a few subscriptions lying around just in case).
Here is a shot of what it looked like unfolding, you can see the per minute ripples then a lull, then someone else would retweet and there would be another brief flurry of activity:
The referrals area updated with the different referring domains of the various URL shortening services like t.co, ow.ly etc so you can loosely tell which visits were from which tweet. The ‘Right now’ number floats up and down with it tapering off if there has not been a request in the last minute or so from the same browser session.
Anyway if you are running a site where you care if you are getting noticed, you should definitely check out the real-time features in Google Analytics it is compelling.
