At last week’s Business Insider Startup 2010 event in New York City, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley talked about his company’s options as they weigh acquisition offers against huge rounds of funding.
One of the things he’s most excited about — assuming Foursquare stays independent — is the possibility of offering something like “Google Analytics, but for local merchants.” Google Analytics is a free website statistics package that lets site owners know who is visiting their sites and when, what they’re looking at and how they got there.
Foursquare is already providing much of this detailed information (including names and Twitter/Facebook links — something Google Analytics users would kill for) through their business dashboard. The one element they’re missing is what Google Analytics calls “Traffic Sources.” This is one of the most valuable parts of Google’s offering (or any web analytics package) because it gives website owners a way to know what advertising and referral channels are sending the most visitors and how profitable those visitors are.
Foursquare could easily start tracking this information by adding an optional question at checkin asking “What brings you here today?” The options could be as simple as:
- I’m a regular
- I was sent here by a regular
- Looked nice/stumbled in
- Radio/TV/Billboard advertising
- Web advertising
- Foursquare special
The big question is whether or not users would be willing to take a couple extra seconds to offer this information to businesses without any real benefit to them except the knowledge that it might further expand the business’ use of Foursquare specials. So we ask you, would you be willing to answer a simple, optional question about your “referrer” when you check in that would be shared with the business?
Loading .../Flickr photo CC licensed by Jon Gow
No related posts.
