The only free website visitor analytics tool in the industry, LeadAnalyzer, was built on Google Cloud Platform (aka, GCP) at Leading Solutions Co., Ltd (aka LS). We asked their company president, Yoshimasa Nakata, for an overview of LeadAnalyzer and about developing their systems on Google Cloud Platform.

First, can you give us an overview of the free website traffic analysis tool, LeadAnalyzer, and your company’s services?

At Leading Solutions, we provide B2B services focused on digital marketing strategic planning, website creation and digital marketing outsourcing.

LeadAnalyzer is a tool we released to support increased sales efficiency for such B2B companies. They can check visiting company overviews or access histories by email just by tagging their company websites with a tag issued when they register to use LeadAnalyzer. They become able to conduct efficient sales activities when they know the extent to which companies visit their websites.

Why did you build LeadAnalyzer on GCP?

We originally developed LeadAnalyzer as our own company-built tool. We started small-scale, then enhanced its functions little by little while incorporating customers’ wishes. However, we foresaw issues arising surrounding performance with concerns about the server’s ability to process large volumes of log data and the need to spend a lot of time on system maintenance though it was not our main business, when combined with an increase in customers or function diversification.

Also,  we’d been providing LeadAnalyzer to our own customers but were considering offering a free B2B version open to the public. We found out about Cloud Ace’s GCP Systems Development Service and made enquiries when  searching for a systems development company to partner with us and recreate LeadAnalyzer.

One company gets tens of thousands of monthly views, but we were a bit concerned about the load on the server when views increased from several thousand to several tens of thousand. However, we decided to go with Cloud Ace’s Systems Development Services when  it was explained that Google Cloud Platform would have no problems on the performance side and that BigQuery could collate and analyze log data more cheaply and faster than other data analytics tools. The deciding factor was that, after building the system, we could  leave its operation and maintenance entirely in Cloud Ace’s hands, allowing us to concentrate on maximizing results from our main digital marketing business.

What were the benefits of using Cloud Ace?

One benefit was the fact that we could entrust everything to Cloud Ace, from LeadAnalyzer’s specifications details to development, operation and maintenance.

BigQuery was proposed when we were discussing GCP’s introduction to rapidly analyze large volumes of log data with no worry of the Google App Engine server, which automatically handles the load from sudden increases in front-end hits, failing. We didn’t have specialist knowledge in this field, so it was a great help to have technical support when considering specification details or performance problems, especially between the specs verification and development stages.

We were able to concentrate on discussions surrounding LeadAnalyzer’s release about what kind of service to offer customers. We’re thinking about expanding LeadAnalyzer functions in the future, and we don’t have to worry because we can ask for advice about functions as they become necessary at each separate stage of development, as well as about development plans, including future expansion.

I feel that Support Web Systems and G Suite (formerly Google Apps)  meet our needs well for sharing information, and provide a kind of all-in-one service from discussion of specs to development, operation and maintenance. This has made it easier to handle from our perspective,  because if we’d chosen another development company then development and maintenance would be broken down separately and things wouldn’t have been so smooth.

Final thoughts

What are your plans for expansion? 

We currently offer only a free version of LeadAnalyzer but we see ourselves offering a fee-paying version in the future. This version would be integrated with other major CRM tools and incorporate AI into enhanced analytical functions in order to improve its user-friendliness for customers. On a practical level, analytics would be conducted based on data stored by LeadAnalyzer with enhanced marketing functions or automated integration of data with those major CRM tools I mentioned earlier such as Salesforce or Sansan, which would, for example, enable the changing of page content in response to the size or type of company viewing the website.

Also, we’d like to enable views from G Suite spreadsheets in order to quickly check large volumes of log data stored by BigQuery. Practically speaking, we’d like to have the basic functions developed so as to apply detailed data filters from our side as necessary. We’ve used G Suite before so the benefit of that is being able to create useful tools such as these and merge them with Google’s services.

One would think that we’d need to spend money straight away to make some of these small changes mentioned earlier, but G Suite has removed that need and the high flexibility is close to how it would feel if we were developing the system in-house.

We’d like to get more people to use LeadAnalyzer and support our B2B marketing so we can gradually improve its functions.

This is a translation of an article published by Cloud Ace, Inc.
Available online: https://www.cloud-ace.jp/case/detail16/

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