About a month ago Alibaba bought CNZZ and brought this China grass root web analytics tool to the attention of the public. Its popularity among Chinese webmasters may make outsiders wonder how great it can be compared with Google Analytics, which is free and popular too.

IP & Page View Oriented

Starting from its birth, CNZZ has been used by the medium and small webmasters, who own websites with limited traffic and try to sell advertisers with Page Views, hence the traffic or IP address and Page Views are the key indicators of the website performance. The tool was developed based on the two major metrics, on which webmasters keep their eyes 24/7.

With limited traffic, Webmasters spend much time in tracking and understanding the individual visitors via CNZZ to find out how many times the IP visits the site, when was the first time it visits, and via which source it arrived to the site, etc.

This information is insightful if you want to understand specific visitors, however it will become too bulky to go through each log when your site accumulates tens of thousands of visitors, and a multi-dimensional web analytics tool that can segment the data through different metrics will be much more powerful.

Single-dimensional Metrics

Most metrics that CNZZ use are single dimensional, which means you can hardly do data mining with a group of metrics. The only 2 dimensional metrics it supports are Search Engines with Keywords, Visitor’s Territory with and Visitor’s ISP.

The former function is very useful in fulfilling the basic needs of any webmasters doing SEO, however it is also very common as most web analytics tools support that too. The latter one is not that much value to do data-mining with ISP as metrics.

Real-time Data

The most recent data you can get from CNZZ is from 15 minutes earlier. This is a legacy from when the tool was developed, i.e. to meet the needs of the grass root webmasters, who spent a lot of time in monitoring the limited data, and wanted to know what is happening with their traffic so as to take action within the day. This is a big plus for CNZZ, considering Google Analytics provides data from 24 hours earlier.

Obviously CNZZ is not powerful as Google Analytics when it comes to data-mining, but it does have certain beauties that go along with Chinese webmaster user behavior. After the acquisition by Alibaba, funds will be pumped into the company, and functionality will surely be improved.