GoSquared: Get to Know Your Visitors

GoSquared combines web analytics, CRM, and live chat features on a single platform to help online businesses grow faster.

Bringing together tools that have historically always been separate from each other enables growth teams to understand who their website visitors are, so they can better convert visitors into leads and then customers.

Seeing precisely how users interact with your pages helps you better understand their needs and tailor your offers accordingly.

Businesses of all sizes can use GoSquared to connect with their visitors and gain direct insights to improve customer experience.

The solution has three core features designed to help you drive more traffic and convert it into customers: Analytics dashboards, Live Chat, and People CRM.

What is happening, right now

The Now dashboard provides a real-time overview of what is happening on your website.

It shows traffic spikes and dips as they happen and allows you to see which sources are driving the most traffic. For example, you can see if someone influential on Instagram is currently talking about you, or if visitors arrive on your site after clicking search engines listing results.

This feature also lets you see which pages are more popular and enables you to jump on sections as they get attention.

How trends are evolving

The Trends dashboard has the same interface as the Now dashboard but shows what has been happening on your pages historically, rather than in real-time.

It provides all the content metrics and audience data you need to understand how your website is operating, over a selected range of dates.

The ability to observe past tendencies helps you compare specific data and evaluate long-term performance.

People CRM: Get to know your visitors

People CRM centralizes all the information about your visitors and customers on a single interface and makes it searchable. It provides a unified profile for every contact, combining activity across all devices, as well as information from external tools.

Since this feature integrates with most applications you already use—like MailChimp, Zendesk, Drip, Slack, or Zapier—you can import data easily and stop making manual entries.

GoSquared automatically updates each profile with visitors’ latest actions, including browsing activity, the emails they have sent or received, and their interactions on social media.

How?

People CRM uses automatic data enrichment and automatic session stitching techniques to build each unique profile. It searches the web for user’s social and company data (ie. Facebook, Linkedin, etc) and tracks all of your user's on-site activity, across all their devices, before they even sign-up.

This creates in-depth profiles for each customer or prospect, which helps you keep track of where your users came from, what their budget is, what they’re looking for and when they’re ready to buy.

People CRM can even spot the users which look most likely to buy and notify your sales team immediately. It saves you time by automatically nurturing leads, ensuring that each customer gets an equal level of attention and care.

Instantly connect with your audience

GoSquared Live Chat is an in-app and on-site live messaging tool. It allows your users to connect with members of your team directly from your website. You can reply to your visitors immediately using the mobile or web app.

Live Chat also allows you to trigger personal messages instantly based on specific events, such as when customers make a purchase, change a setting, or upgrade their plans. This way, you can reach out automatically with a personalized message at the perfect moment, which helps you maximize engagement.   

As GoSquared believes that a continuous history of communication between a visitor and a team member offers the best experience for both parties, you can always retrieve all the information about your conversations in both Live Chat and People CRM.

How many people are really visiting your website?

Some analytics and CRM solutions merely estimate or sample data, which provides a blurrier overview of website performance—like trying to drive with a steamed up windshield.

GoSquared tracks every visitor, every page view, and every event to give you a full picture of your site’s performance. In this way, the platform focuses on the real people behind the page views.

The GoSquared solution can tie up several page views, devices, and sessions into one unified profile, showing precisely how many visitors are using your site.

The company believes that online business should be more personal. By seeing and connecting with users behind the page views, you can offer a better, more personalized service.

The platform’s smart technology accurately shows if visitors are browsing, scrolling, and actively engaging with your content. As soon as a user leaves your site, GoSquared stops counting so you can see precisely how long they stayed online.

Some analytics tools estimate the time visitors spend on web pages by calculating the time difference between two page views, which can provide highly inaccurate numbers.

Having numbers you can trust, and knowing exactly how many users interact with your site at any given moment can impact everything, from expected advertisement revenue to server allocation.

GoSquared’s accuracy helps several companies save thousands of dollars a month.

When they started using the solution, video game developer, The Creative Assembly realized that their previous analytics were in some instances over-estimating the number of visitors by more than 600%. “The results were immediate,”  Lead web Developer Alistair Martin says.

From hobby to thriving business

There are very few real-world examples of teenagers who launch their startups while still in high school, but GoSquared is an exception to the rule. Along with friends James Taylor and Geoff Wagstaff, James Gill founded GoSquared when they were all only 15 years old.

The company started as a completely random project in 2006. The guys got inspired by the Million-Dollar Homepage, a website where British student Alex Tew sold each pixel in a 1000 x 1000 pixel grid for a dollar each.

The concept was simple: advertisers could buy pixel blocks and display a logo or an image of their choosing, with a hyperlink.

Tew, who created the site to raise money for his university education, aimed to sell all of the pixels to generate a million dollars. The page quickly turned into an Internet phenomenon, and within four months, Tew became a millionaire.

Gill and his friends admired Tew’s idea but didn’t agree with his page design. So, they decided to create GoSquared, a homepage selling square advertisement spaces for a recurring fee.

At the time, they had limited knowledge about the Internet and web design, no one was visiting their page, and they made no profit. Upon realizing that no one knew about their page, they launched a blog as a way to build an audience and a community. Their posts, which mostly focused on design, started getting visitors to the site, and Gill and his partners began making lots of connections in the design community.

From there, many other design-related blogs and sites wanted to put these square ad placements on their pages. The GoSquared founders progressively turned their homepage project into more of an advertising network, allowing people to put the square ads on their sites.

A control panel gave customers information about their placements, such as ad traffic and a website log. Most of the feedback the guys received was that while customers were not making any money from the ad placements, they really loved the analytics view and the ability to track their website performance.

Gill and his colleagues heard this feedback so many times that they decided to stop working on selling ads and shifted their focus to selling an analytics product.

They developed the platform substantially over the years and eventually evolved to become a solution that combines analytics, CRM, and Live Chat to help growth teams increase conversion on websites.

Today, the London-based company has thousands of customers across diverse industries and over $600 000 in annual revenue.

Gill, Taylor, and Wagstaff believe that the best way to create the right company and product is to take the time to build a solution that people will love and will want to pay for.

It is not about launching a product as fast as possible. While they have had opportunities to raise more capital in recent years, the GoSquared founder’s main goal has always been to build a sustainable business by providing simple, easy tools that people love using.  

Nothing drives Gill and his co-founders more than seeing people from amazing companies love their product and use it every day to do their jobs better.

13 years and counting

Its founders may still be quite young, but GoSquared is one of the oldest players on the web analytics market.

The company’s focus on accuracy and attention to detail, as well as its revolutionary combination of features, have built its reputation in the industry over the years.

Gill and his partners keep looking for opportunities to improve their product and to help more and more businesses succeed.