Ask HN: Review my startup (overlay events data layers on charts)
My partners and I recently launched Chartelligence, a Google Chrome extension that helps overlay data layers on top of Google Analytics charts, and we'd like to hear what you have to say about it.
Our base assumption, as we've experienced from our own online businesses, is that business metrics are often influenced by events (both external and internal to the business), which are usually not trackable, and are hard to visualize on charts. In other words, charts often answer the question of "how are my metrics trending", but fail to answer "why does the chart trend like it does", and the answer to the why part is usually an event that triggered a trend change.
So right now our extension overlays events data layers on top of Google Analytics charts, and also on Quantcast charts. And one thing that we see as powerful, is that data layers can be public, and so shared between similar businesses. You can see for example the case study we put on the site, of how the data layer of "Google Panda Updates" can be correlated (or not) to traffic changes on several sites.
This is a first stage of a broader vision we have, of helping any chart consumer answer the basic question of "why does the chart behave the way it does", and we have some ideas of how to take this forward, for example automatic correlation of data layers to chart changes.
We'd love to get some input from our fellow HNers -- What do you think about the idea in general? Do you see yourself using it? Do you have any suggestions or feedback?
Link: http://chartelligence.com