Being a guy very interested in web analytics, I made it a point to see the Blog Audience Measurement session here at the Blog Business Summit. The focus is on how we qualify and quantify our efforts blogging or for advertisers sponsoring blogs.
I wasn’t familiar with the two speakers coming into it, which were Andru Edwards and Tris Hussey. They both have a publishing background opposed to a web/blog analytics background, so I thought it’d make for an interesting discussion.
They started out discussing that blogs are tough nuts to crack with analytics because:
- RSS metrics haven’t been figured out yet (I partially disagree, Feedburner does a pretty good job)
- Blog reach goes beyond unique visitors
Then moved on to all the factors that build blog traffic:
- Posting frequency – It matters a lot, they definitely see traffic rise when posting frequency rises.
- Do blogrolls matter? – Andru says yes, Tris doesn’t think so much
- Links out from your blog help. They bring other bloggers to come see the blog linking to them.
- Sourcing other bloggers and referring to their posts. Also brings in aggregators like Techmeme.
Next was what kinds of tools bloggers can use to watch traffic:
- Blog Metric Tools – Some of the server log tools are AWStats, Urchin, Analog, and Clicktracks. They also commented on how hits are generally worthless as a statistic, unless you really are interested in how many files are being requested. Someone mentioned HitTail, which I hadn’t heard of yet and now want to review.
- Javascript Tools – Some of the javascript based tools are Performancing Metrics (which they demo’d), Measuremap, MyBlogLog, Google Analytics.
The next topic of discuss was the tools we can use as bloggers to measure our blog’s reach/relevance/popularity:
They did point out that most of these are flawed in their methodoligies in one way or another. Scoble specifically pointed out that he doesn’t like Feedburner because you’re giving up control of your subscribers and your feed to Feedburner, and if they ever went out of business or decided to something weird you could lose all the subscribers to your feed. A valid point, but there are some ways to use Feedburner and also keep control by doing .htaccess redirection.
The summary of this chat was really that there is no silver bullet. There isn’t anything in blog/RSS analytics that tells you everything you need to know and tells it accurately.
An audience member added another point, “I don’t care about how many page views or visitors I really get. I care about getting the right visitors, the influential visitors, or the potential customer visitors. How can I tell who’s who?”
For as far as analytics have come, there’s still a long way to go.
You left out Ferodynamics 😉
I did? I’ve never heard of Ferodynamics, but it looks like your blog, and it confuses me because it doesn’t have anything to do with this post or topic.
Basically, I graph out SE queries by blog post over time with a custom plugin that I wrote, which coincidentally boosts traffic at least 10x. Think “keyword metrics” “keyword assets”
One thing you can do with my tool, at a glance, I can show you which posts are getting SE traction (over the last x days) and which ones aren’t doing anything.
I was thinking that I could sell the whole system to a big blog network, which would most likely 10x the traffic of the entire network. What most bloggers don’t realize is that Google/Yahoo/MSN send tons of traffic to blogs–it’s very good traffic too. Another nice thing about SE traffic, it doesn’t fade away like Digg, Delicious, and all that. You can take a blog from a steady 100 visits/day to a steady 1000 visits/day simply by having all the relevant keywords that relate to your topic/theme.
A great title for a blog post is only 1 “hit” for the indexing robot. There are hundreds, thousands of variations on something that you think would be very specific. And don’t forget, those misspellings and grammar errors stretch the long-tail for miles! And chances are, a typical blog post only has one or two good keyword-searchable keyword-matchable phrases, and it’s not like you can plan which phrases those will be. This is why you need good keyword metrics mapping tools (aka ferodynamics) to see at a glance what is working and what isn’t, in realtime.
Getting the right phrase sandboxed before the next guy could result in hundreds of *thousands* of visits/month. If you don’t keep an eye on your incoming queries, you might miss such a phrase, passing up an incredible opportunity.
It’s a WordPress plugin and I’ve kept it a secret until now. I could just give it away, but that would somewhat reduce its effectiveness. For about a month I’ve been wondering who would most benefit from this tool, who I could sell it to, etc. I would use it myself, but I don’t have enough content built up.
I believe a TechCrunch or a B5 type of blog network would most benefit from using my plugin. I’d be willing to work out some kind of exclusive contact with one or two networks, that way I could work on the tool full-time, support it properly, customize the hell out of it for specific purposes, add new features, add more value (the endless visualizations you can do with keyword asset data.) Why pay me to work on this plugin for your network of blog sites? Because you’ll see an amazing increase of traffic, especially if you already have a lot of posts under your belt. Of course there will be copycats (I’m starting to see some already), but that won’t affect you nearly as much as the next guy, because your keyword renderings will be exclusively designed by me, and nobody else will have this code. Copycats will end up pushing almost everyone to do something like what I’m doing (so get in early), but they won’t copy me exactly, that would be pointless, for obvious reasons.
So I figured this would be a good place to make my little announcement, considering you’ve got a good spot on Techmeme today. I’m willing to work with a big network on a “trial” basis for a while, if you’re serious, so you can really see how it works. Of course it might take a few weeks to see your traffic increase dramatically, but you will see it. I think most big networks will have a full-time person working on something like this (like an SEO weatherman), because the traffic increase is very significant. Do you think I’m right?
I was there and was going to say something but didn’t want to get into a big fight about it…my question is I don’t get why scoble hates feedburner but likes wordpress.com. They both are ways to outsource aspects of content management, but feedburner is actually more open beacuse you can : keep your url, and also redirect to them so you can leave any time without anybody noticing. Theheck, wordpress.com gives you way less control….I use both and could care less because they’re both great, and really, isn’t gmail also outsourcing your mail? Isn’t typepad outsourcing your audience? I don’t get it.
That’s a valid point BC that the reason Scoble didn’t like Feedburner should be the same reason he wouldn’t like WordPress.com, yet that’s what he uses for blogging. If I see him today I’ll ask him about it.
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I daily check my site of visits by counting background image loads. I can also do spot counts of a particular post by checking how many image accesses there are to an image used in that post.
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