I saw a video interview recently with Alex Tew of calm.com

Alex Tew along with Michael Acton Smith (think Moshi Monsters) have started calm.com – a fascinating idea and a really beautifully put together site.

Really smart sites and ideas tickle my interest so I decided to look under the hood and see if beauty is more than skin deep. Here’s a summary of my thoughts:

Using Google Analytics AND Optimizely for online measurement

We can see both the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) and Optimizely scripts in the page source.  Nice, solid measurement AND testing being used in such a young startup is super powerful.  The investors in calm.com should have great confidence in these essential tools being used at such an early stage in the site’s lifecycle.

Tasty markup

We really liked the markup on the site.  There is a little too much inline scripting to be perfect but, hey, this is a month old startup – let’s not quibble too much!  For example, the comments used in the markup are nice and tidy:

“<!– Google will often use this as its description of your page/site. Make it good. –>”

” <!– Speaking of Google, don’t forget to set your site up: http://google.com/webmasters –>”

So, it won’t necessarily move the decimal point on the revenue report but these little things matter.

Use YouTube

YouTube has a massive infrastructure tuned to deliver video content.  Calm.com is a site that delivers video (and audio) content as a key product.  DUH!  Put the two together – a really nice efficient marriage.  The YouTube API usage is nice – this would fit in nicely to the digital measurement strategy too…Hmmm!

How could this get any better?

Minimised javascript would make an already light site even lighter and go some way to protecting intellectual property – a #win for startups.

Move the GATC up to the head of the page for more precision and accuracy.  The GATC is looking good otherwise with the domain already set ready for sub and cross domain tracking.

Full parallel tracking in GA and Optimizely is easily implemented. The richness of data in both camps needs to be ‘off the scale’ for maximum return.  ButwWhy dual track in two systems? Put simply, you need to KNOW that the metrics you’re recording are trustworthy.  Running two independent, parallel tracking systems offers the potential for digital analytics calibration in real time…  Furthermore, GA is a great tool to use to show ROI from all online channels – this is clearly another #win for a startup.  As the startup matures and the business becomes multi-platform, GA scales (think GA Premium) with the business and technology requirements.  Not that Optimizely doesn’t/can’t do this but experience shows that GA is an ideal weapon for a growing company.