Often a topic of discussion: How do you measure the success of your social marketing efforts? The most common idea I have heard over the last year is to wrap all of your efforts up in to one word, “engagement”. And in this meaning, engagement includes, visits to your site, how many unique visitors, how often they came back, how log each visit session is on average. All of these are pretty basic web traffic measurements. However, if you add to these the measure of the number of people posting, commenting, and re syndicating your content you gain greater insight. At least that is the goal.
Their is a race out there to not only to establish an engagement measuring platform but also to simply define what engagement measurement is.
PostRank.comhas taken a step in that effort. PostRank.com website clearly states that is aims to “measure audience engagement” Interestingly it has begun to dissect what online engagement is and how measure different areas of engagement.
The 5 C’s of Engagement
Creating
Critiquing
Chatting
Collecting
Clicking
Who knows if they have it right., but it is interesting to see the evolution of engagement metrics.
Post Rank integrates and measures via the following:
RSS Feed Analytics similar to feedburner
Integration with RSS Readers including Newsgator, Google Reader, Trawlr, Daisy Feed, FetchIt! and more
Simple integration with major blogging platforms, Blogger, WordPress Typepad
An API and developers section of it’s website.
What is not clear after my limited browsing of the is does this scale? Can this be easily implemented into a network of blogs or a large scale community that goes beyond blogs and includes, forums, galleries and so on. Either way it will be interesting to follow and see how it evolves. Postrank has a BETA program for “Feed Analytics”. Go here to sign up.
Looking at the new whitehouse.gov I have to say I really like the site. While clicking through the site I noticed it was architected in a fairly sophisticated manner. Very clean URLs (http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/georgewashington/), no enormous query strings, key-terms and description set up. Very clean code with minimal in line Javascript and css based navigation and more.
So here’s the question: Does whitehouse.gov really need to be optimized for search engine indexing?
More surprising things on the site.
The design / layout and navigation is contemporary, sophisticated and well thought out
Categorized Syndication of headlines
RSS feeds for Agenda, Press, News, Blog, Gallery and Video Media RSS!
This ties in to my recent post on the importance of relevance (relevant) to the individual. I can follow the RSS how I want to.
There’s a robots.txt file but it really isn’t blocking anything
No xml sitemaps? I was betting there would be one given the other seo efforts
Looking at the source code there is a good use of jquery (my favorite library) and Thickbox! Codey Lindley should be proud.
And what are they using to measure website traffic? Webtrends. I wish Icould get a look at those reports. Especially today.
I have been looking for a javascript flip effect like this for a long time. It has finally arrived, and on my favorite javascript library no less. Flip! http://lab.smashup.it/flip/# I have a feeling we are going to see mac-like flip animations all over the place in the near future.
Someone recently brought up the topic of website usability to me . In terms of the business value of including website usability into the development process and even selling it as a feature to customers.
This reminded me of the video, It is a bit old (Apr. 11 2007) but still very interesting.
When you hear all of the items / issues to take into consideration when building a web application for a company like google or yahoo it is amazing they ever get completed. Even more amazing that so many of their applications work so well.
Thanksgiving 2.0 has not yet arrived. Looking around it does not look like the parade will be streamed online. Here are a couple links to poke around on.
AheadofIdeas.com was just launched by Dan Bevarly. The blog will focus on the use of technology to power governement, governent 2.0, citizen engagement and more.
Mashable just announced this years Open Web Awards (http://mashable.com/openwebawards/home/). This is the second annual Open Web Award contest following a successful first year. Last year I saw several people discussing the awards and several friends / colleagues nominated from large scale social networks to niche blogs.
There are many web awards, why is this one different? People nominate sites and anyone who signs up can vote.
This is much more like a peoples choice award.
Anyone can nominate any site that fits into one of 26 categories. Because this is Mashable the entrants and categories focus on social websites/applications/widgets.
Recently I was asked to look over a friend’s company web traffic for “fun”. I was happy to do it out of curiosity and to be helpful. They asked me to review the traffic because they were unsure of what they were seeing and after reviewing it myself I am not sure what I am looking at either.
While poking through the stats I noticed that 75% of their traffic was direct. As in 3 out of 4 of their website visitors landed on the site by punching in the domain perfectly. This seemed odd so I compared it to some other sites I have managed that are similar in size and industry and marketing efforts. What I saw was that typically each site has a more distributed source list of referral sources. Typically 40-45% percent of referral traffic coming from Search Engines, 25-35 % direct traffic and the remainder from other websites.
Digging deeper I noticed that the bounce rate for the site was quite high. (On average 75% or greater)
Hmm, 75% of the traffic is direct and 75% or more of the visitors leave immediately regardless of the page they entered the site on. Something is not right here.
To gather more information I looked at what sites out there were referring traffic. I found one or two paid referrals / purchased a banner advertisement which was expected, but beyond that I found hundreds of random websites driving traffic to this website. So I wanted to see what these sites were. They were clearly spam sites, porn sites and sites displaying nothing but Google ad sense.
So here is the questionable data:
75% of all traffic is direct (this is not a big internet brand but a small local business with basic SEO in place)
75% or greater bounce rate on every page
The slim search engine traffic it does receive is only coming from MSN (This is strange considering the small market share of MSN compared to Google or Yahoo.)
Overall Traffic, in terms of visit session is up about 60% this year.
Of course the client is happy to see the higher traffic numbers but based on what we are seeing is this traffic real?
My initial thoughts are that one of the following is happening:
This is a poor linking strategy / scam – meant to boost website traffic figures but without regard for traffic quality.
The reporting is set up incorrectly- This is possible and it would explain the high numbers for direct traffic and the high bounce rate. However, it does not explain the odd referring websites
This is site is a true anomaly – receiving a lot of direct traffic from people that did not want to visit the site and leave immediately.
Based on what I have seen in the reporting and what I know of the company managing this site, I believe this is a paid linking strategy boosting traffic number but harming the clients brand and understanding of their own efforts.
If anyone has any similar experiences let me know. Have you seen website traffic referral distributions like this before? Are these stats telling tale signs of paid linking? Can anyone explain how a site indexed in all major search engines only receives traffic from MSN?
Just passing this link around. www.Stormpulse.com is a great site to take you hurricane tracking anxiety/obsession to a whole new level.
Stormpulse.com
It can show all the projected models, the history of a hurricanes path and distances to major cities from the eye of the storm over time. All of this is presented in a google maps style interface.
