Marketing
Visits, Bounce Rates, Time on Site and Other Disasters
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 06/21/2008 - 12:57A while ago, I installed Google Analytics on my website. However, there were some problems with the configuration, so I never went back and checked it, until today. A bunch of interesting things jumped out at me on my first reading of the Google Analytics. According to Google, the top source of my visitors is EntreCard, making up about 50% of my traffic. Coming in second was Google searches making up 17% of my traffic. 13% of my traffic came directly. Blogexplosion, Twitter, Yahoo, BlogCatalog and Facebook were the other major sources.
My overall bounce rate was 87%. All of my Search Engine Optimization friends are likely to say uh-oh when they see a number like that and roll their eyes. However, I think people may be looking at bounce rates wrong. Bounce rates are the number of times people come and look at a single page, and then leave without looking at other pages.
If you are a company trying to sell product online, or if you are a candidate hoping voters will spend time learning about you and getting involved in your campaign, your bounce rate can be very important, especially if you have a splash page.
Yet if you are a blogger, a high bounce rate may not be bad at all. People come, read your blog post, and move on to whatever they are looking for next. 92% of my traffic from EntreCard bounces off to the next site. Actually, I don’t view that as bad at all. It means that 8% of the people who visit the site via EntreCard spend time to read other posts. People coming from Google or Yahoo bounce about 80% of the time. Twitter is giving me a bounce rate of 84% and Facebook is at an astoundingly low 67% bounce rate.
To me, what is more important is how much time do people spend reading material on my site. Interestingly enough, people coming from BlogCatalog lead the ranks in average time on the site, at over 2 minutes. The overall average is just under a minute. BlogExplosion comes in with the lowest average time, of just 11 seconds. I may have to rethink my use of BlogExplosion. EntreCard does well enough with the average time of 36 seconds.
Perhaps, this is in part because I’m not on any of those speed dropping lists. EntreCard speed droppers talk about trying to drop 300 cards in fifteen minutes. That works out to be three seconds per visit. Canny Granny commented in one of those discussions about how she likes to actually read the blogs that she visits. I imagine she puts a lot of time into her writing and likewise hopes that people spend time reading what she writes.
There are a lot of good reasons to spend time reading blogs that you through EntreCard. They provide a great snapshot into life. BlueStem Winery has a stunning picture and story of their son and daugher-in-law’s house which was hit by a tornado. A Changing Life has pictures of flooding, and My Interesting Files has remarkable photographs by a wedding photographer in China during the earthquake.
Yeah, you can measure website traffic in terms of visits, bounce rates, and how long people spend on a page, but these metrics pale compared to moments of real life as they get captured in blogs.
It seems like Pisio got that part of my interest in blogs in their review of Orient Lodge. If I spent a little more time on the general layout of my page, in part following Pisio’s suggestions, I could perhaps decrease my bounce rate a little bit. I might get around to that some day, but right now, my writing is more important.
Content and Advertising Strategy - EntreCard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/10/2008 - 10:07Yesterday, I read a great blog post about a daughter and her mother as they were leaving a hospital. Whether or not you’re interested in the relationship between good content and advertising, you should go out and read that article.
I stumbled across it as I was reading various blogs I found with EntreCard. EntreCard, like many other emerging sites ends up having a lot of people currently writing blog posts about their thoughts and experiences with it, as well as how they use it. One popular discussion is how people find sites on EntreCard. Do they follow the advertisements? As a person that both advertises using EntreCard and has others advertise on my site using EntreCard, I would encourage everyone, especially EntreCard users to follow the advertising links.
Wandering through BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, and EntreCard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/01/2008 - 09:54Perhaps the Internet hasn’t really changed things all that much from when I was in high school over thirty years ago. Back then, the thing to do was to go down to Spring Street to hang out and see friends. There were two competing hangouts, Colonial Pizza and Pizza House. Each one attracted specific cliques. There were also places to just hang out on the street and events at the college hang out at.
Instead of hanging out with a specific clique, I would wander from one group to the next. I always felt like a bit of an outsider, an interloper, but was usually accepted, even though I might not have been told all the inner secrets of the cliques I visited.
College was much the same as I would drift from one gathering to another on the weekends. I probably came a bit closer to finding groups that I identified with, yet the pattern was the same. I found myself enjoying the works of Hermann Hesse with themes of the solitary wanderer, and one of my best friends from college often compared our relationship to that of Siddhartha and Govinda.
Some of the discussions of the past week have brought me back to these thoughts as they relate to the Internet, another recurring theme for me. The announcements of the lists of credentialed bloggers for the Democratic National Convention have riled many of my friends. It seems to many of them that felt they were rejected because they were in a clique different than the clique selected to cover the convention. As the wanderer in the group, I suggest that people try to step away from their cliques.
How many people do you know that read just DailyKos, or local progressive political blogs? How many people do you know that read just the right wing equivalents? What about the Mommy bloggers who only read other Mommy blogs? The members of Tribe.net? Salon.com? The search engine optimization folks and the make money quick online folks? The pet bloggers?
It seems like the different cliques from high school and college years ago have replicated themselves in the blogosphere.
Now, if you are a Mommy blogger or a pet blogger whose goal is simply to talk about how your little one is doing and you are happy that your friends and relatives are hearing the stories, then this post is not for you. You have found your place and it is a very good place.
Yet if you are a political blogger or a marketing blogger, I want to toss this out as a challenge to you. What are you doing to expand the circle of people listening to what you have to say?
Part of the power of the Internet is that it enables more of a discussion. How much are you reading what others have written? How are you incorporating this into your own writing? When you use tools like
BlogExplosion is set up nicely for expanding connections. You are randomly taken to different sites and have to stay at the site for at least thirty seconds to receive your credit. While your there, you might as well read the blog post, and maybe interact a little bit with the site. I like visiting sites on BlogExplosion that have EntreCard and MyBlogLog. It provides a double or triple win as I drop my EntreCard and show up in the recent readers list.
When I use MyBlogLog to explore the blogosphere, I normally follow the links of recent readers. It matches my style of wandering and often seems to put me in touch with people that wander in similar ways. I’ve learned a lot from these new friends. Sometimes, I will visit people who have added me as a friend in an effort to keep the friendships active and alive. Other times I may search for people who have been tagged as interested in a specific topic if I want to spend time within a specific set of communities.
My use of EntreCard is similar. Typically, I click on the advertisements from one blog to the next, until I finally reach a blog that I’ve already read. Sometimes I start off from the people that have recently dropped cards on me. I try to visit as many of these people as possible. I also try to visit those who have dropped the most cards on me. Sometimes, I go to the advertising section and check to see that I’ve dropped cards on the most popular. However, if I’ve followed the chains of advertisements, I usually catch these sites anyway. I like to make sure that I visit the site of whomever is advertising on my blog as well.
I’ve gathered lots of EntreCard credits and am just starting to use them for advertising. So far, I haven’t had a lot of luck with my ads. Should I advertise on the hugely popular and hence very expensive sites? Should I advertise on the less popular and less expensive sites? Should I advertise on new sites? I’ll explore different strategies.
The problem with all of these ways of visiting other sites is that it takes time. Do I take time away from Second Life? Do I spend more time in Blogexplosion or EntreCard? How do I balance the time visiting other blogs with writing for my own blog? I try to get at least one post up every day.
Even the blog posts that I write follow the wandering approach. The serious niche bloggers tell me that I have to pick a niche and write just about that niche. Yet being the wanderer that I am, one day I’ll write about politics, another day about Second Life, and then group psychology, technology, marketing, law, family stuff, or anything else that strikes my fancy. It’s not great for building community, but hopefully some of the posts build can build bridges. Perhaps it is part of my own hobo code or other marks to point fellow wanderers in helpful directions.
Well, I guess that’s my comments for this morning. Now, it is time to set off and wander a little bit more.
#cfp08 A Human Face and Due Process Online
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/23/2008 - 07:44If I were to summarize the ‘Activism and Education Using Social Networks’ track at Computers, Freedom and Privacy yesterday, I would boil it down to putting a human face on advocacy organizations and seeking due process online. What was most interesting was that during the discussions, I watched these processes happen online.
Eric spoke about the new ACLU Blog, “because freedom can’t blog itself”. He spoke about the difficulties in working out the policies of what could get written by whom for the blog. He noted the contrast between traditional advertising, expensive, glossy, and not reaching the younger generation, and online content. He noted that sites like Facebook, MySpace and Flickr are not all that fancy in their graphical design, yet it is the user generated content and the first person perspective that is so compelling. As he spoke about this, he brought up the ACLU’s Flickr page, which to my surprise, included a picture of a good friend of mine. I quickly posted a link to the Flickr photo on my friend’s wall in Facebook. Ah yes, the power of the personal.
We broke into hands on sessions and I spoke with many different people. A neighbor, who is active in town politics and works for Yale was there and I spent some time talking with her. A friend of one of the conference organizers from Tribe was there and we talked a little bit. I showed a few people Second Life and talked about the role of Second Life in disability rights advocacy.
This led me to a fascinating discussion with Dr. Linda D. Misek-Falkoff from the United Nations and the Center for Cross-Cultural Understanding. She spoke about RatifyNow.Org, a website to support the global grassroots efforts to ratify the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She has a wonderful set of videos of people in the U.N. talking about the convention. She also understood the importance of putting a human face on large organizations. She took a quick video of me saying hello to ambassadors and activists fighting for the rights of persons with disabilities.
The afternoon led to a brainstorming session where the topic of social network service providers failing to provide adequate due process was discussed. In particular, Facebooks tendency to ban people automatically because they try to send too many messages, add too many friends, or similar activities. A friend of mine was recently banned this way, and has gotten nothing but automated responses to his requests. A few of us are talking about setting up a group to address this issue.
As this discussion was going on, I received a Twitter from Andy Carvin about Ariel Waldman’s blog post about Twitter refusing to uphold its Terms of Service. Specifically, the post centered around Twitter failing to deal with harassment issues.
At a previous session at CFP there were some great discussions around the issue of cyber-harassment and it will be a topic of one of this morning’s sessions. Around an hour later, a bug report was reported on GetSatisfaction and the blog post got Dugg. The next hour saw the article make the front page of Digg and an hour later Jason Goldman of Twitter responded,
Twitter does not get involved in these disputes between users over issues of content except in limited circumstances. Twitter is a provider of information, not a mediator. Specific physical threats, certain legal obligations, privacy breaches of specific types of information (e.g. SSN, credit cards), and misleading impersonation are some cases where we may become involved and potentially terminate an account.
This only added fuel to the fire. Evan Williams of Twitter twittered.
Note: Before joining a mob, you might want to check if everything they're saying/assuming is true.
This too, fueled anger at Twitter, already under lots of criticism for its spate of recent outages. It is worth noting that 12 other people noted on GetSatisfaction that they have the same problem, almost as many people as work for Twitter.
About three hours after this, Biz Stone, stepped in and said
The fact that so many of us can have differing opinions without having even reviewed the content we're discussing highlights the difficulty of this issue. In fact, Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals. Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter nor a crowd would do well.
All of this returns back to the issue of due process. The fact that so many people are so concerned about this highlights the importance of the issue. Biz states, “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content.” This harkens back to the issues of Section 230 and communications utilities not being liable for content.
Yet it misses a very important point. Twitter, like Facebook and Second Life, which have also have similar issues, is not just a communication utility. All of them are communities. They are communities dependent on privately run communication utilities. These communities lack recourse to any sort of due process.
Biz’s comment about determining the line between update an insult not being something that either Twitter nor a crowd could do well seems ill advised to me. Someone needs to make that determination. Twitter can try to do it. Twitter can encourage the crowd, the community, to join in the effort to determine the line. If that doesn’t happen, the line is likely to be repeatedly brought to the courts and to legislatures to be decided. Either that, or the community will simply move to some other communications utility which provides better recourse to due process. None of those options seem particularly good for Twitter.
The activism panel at Computers, Freedom and Privacy spent time struggling with putting a human face on organizations and in seeking due process in online communities. The ACLU seems to understand these issues very well. Let us hope that corporations like Twitter, Facebook, and Linden Lab makes some progress on this topic as well.
EntreCard Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/20/2008 - 07:22Recently, I added EntreCard to the mix of tools that I use with my blog. It has driven a nice mix of new traffic to my site and has brought me to several other very interesting sites. Yesterday, they announced some nice changes to their site as well as introduced a few that I didn’t see in the announcement that I like even better. So, it is probably a good time for me to talk a little bit about what EntreCard is, and why I like it.
