When a WP blog shows off on its sidebar the following:

or worse,

without any additional information, I start asking: “What exactly does that mean?”

If a blog stats are presented in this fashion, the numbers look like a block of meaningless information.

Blog Stats widget dialog box

I know this may be hard to swallow, but that is the truth.

Let me just backtrack a little bit and elaborate before someone starts calling me names.

1. Currently, there is no method which can claim to produce web statistics with 100% accuracy. And the resulting numbers are dependent on what methodology is applied to generate those numbers. The fact that even Google has to explain the terms used in its analytics and how the Google numbers are calculated shows the difficulty in coming up with commonly accepted standards. You may wish to check out this page as an additional background.

2. Without being critical, WordPress.com in its Support page provided not enough information as to what the Blog Stats numbers are. Perhaps, to others the numbers need no explanation? Or perhaps there is another related Support page which I missed? I certainly don’t have the answer to that.

3. Again, without being critical, the same WordPress.com Support page says that we, the bloggers, can choose which word to use in describing the numbers. The two popular words, according to WP, are: “hits” (which is the default label in the Blog Stats widget dialog box), and “views”, the label “views” being more consistent with the label “Total Views”, used in the Blog Stats Dashboard | Summary Table.

4. The use of “hits” was okay, and even a buzzword, many many years ago. Is it still okay to use “hits” these days without defining what you mean by “hits”?

5. In technical terms, “hits” is not “visits” nor “views”. “Hits” are the number of files served when a web page (no distinction here between WP “post” and “page”) is requested from a server. A graphic, an icon, a banner and all sorts of files that make up a page are, technically, “hits”. For example, when you opened this page, the server’s log should have recorded at least 40 “hits” just on the bullets, icons and images alone displayed on this page.

Given this background, where does that leave us if we want to show off our WP blogs stats?

You may have other ideas, but right now I can think of only two things we can do to correctly show off our WP blog stats:

1. Stick to using “Views” to label those numbers. I will not use labels like “hits” or “visits” if I were you. In the absence of additional information from WP, these labels may be inaccurate information. You may be describing the numbers something that they are not. In the Blog Stats dashboard, the numbers are labeled “views”, remember?

2. Disclose the period covered by the stats. Again, the numbers are pretty much meaningless unless the period to which they relate is described. Here is an example to show how futile and frustrating it is to read blog stats crafted using the Blog Stats widget:

If you are the owner of this blog and you know that your blog stats are for 12 months, no problem. You know what your stats stand for. But if you are a visitor of this blog and you don’t have that same information, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? What do these 3,000 views represent? Are these yesterday’s views? Or perhaps, last week’s? Or last month’s? Or, last 12 months’? And how do I compare the “popularity” of this blog with another blog with only 1,500 views but I know that this other blog has been online for only 2 months?

Any suggested wordings?

By the way, I am not fond of showing off my site’s stats whether here at WP or in my company’s websites. We also do not display in my company’s websites any stats counter or meter. But if I were to show off my blog stats on the sidebar, I would probably disclose the numbers this way:

or something like:

A little bit long, you think? But no one will argue the suggested wordings are not misleading. And they are easy to understand.

Again, in a worst-case scenario too, you can present a screenshot of your blog stats dashboard plus some other information about your blog to prove that the blog stats you are claiming are factual. That is, if someone starts questioning your numbers and you need to show proof. About your friends being very pleased? I am sure your friends would be happy to come to your rescue and say they are pleased with your blog!

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End Notes: The WP Blog Stats inside my blog’s dashboard is an excellent tracking and management tool. With the Blog Stats, I learn a lot about my blog. But when used as a widget and without additional information about the numbers displayed on the sidebar, the stats are meaningless. Did I step on sensitive toes with this post? I hope not. But if I did, that’s a risk I take.
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I didn’t think I would become so business-minded when I decided to open an Etsy shop to sell the art that was beginning to pile up in my spare room.  After all, doing artwork was fun — exhilerating even.  What I didn’t understand was how huge Etsy is.

There are thousands of artists on Etsy, and the challenge is to get people, more specifically, buyers, to look at the stuff in your shop.  So far, I’ve learned that you have to list new objects pretty much every day to stay visible.   Second, I’ve found that experienced sellers are generous with support and tips if you ask.  I browse through a few shops every day and identify the ones that are impressive, either with their art or with the way they have presented their art.  I convo these guys, telling them specifically what I like about their shop.   I have now joined two etsy teams – Collage Etsy team and Melange Etsy Team.  Being on a team gives you a connection to artists who have similar artistic and marketing interests. 

At this point, the biggest challenge for me as a new Etsy shop owner is learning to use internet technology to bring in customers.  It seems that a successful seller must build a network of sellers.  The old adage – there’s safety in numbers – could be rewritten in the virtual age as “there’s visibility in numbers.”

Knock-knock. Who’s there? Someone with the IP address xxx.xxx.xx.xxx. What does that mean? Why is the person choosing to visit a particular website over another? What are they doing while visiting the site?

These are questions that analytics can help answer. As a result, analytics are increasingly becoming a go-to resource for websites to garner necessary insights on how users interact with their content. I have previously blogged about analytics because they are important and becoming increasingly so as time goes on. With that being said, this post is going to focus primarily on attempts by Google to harness the power of analytics for people who are not expert web designers.

The main resource behind the Google Analytics tool is the Google Conversion University. In essence, the compilation of materials is similar to that of an institution of higher learning focused solely on analytics, what they do, how to apply them and how to make sense of them. The Conversion University contains:

• two hours worth of video tutorials
• video segments range between three and ten minutes each
• collectively provide powerful knowledge for users to apply towards their own purposes

Considering the depth and breadth of features offered through Google Analytics, I am going to touch upon only a few of the most recent additions I find intriguing. User engagement is one example of recent refinement. Since every website is unique in its own right, it makes sense to measure analytics that reflect data which is catering to the websites needs. Up to recently, engaging a user typically meant them placing an item into an online shopping cart or registering for a mailing list. It was a pretty limited definition of engaging. Now, Google Analytics has moved beyond these regimented standards. Websites can define their own definition of measuring user engagement. Examples include:

• time spend on a page
• number of pages viewed
• comments posted on a page
• link use for accessing more in-depth knowledge of material teased from the original page

Clearly, much greater customization is available thanks to these newer analytics featurs.

Advancing analytics customization even further, analytics can now be tailored to generate specific titles upon users based upon a set of predefined actions. For instance, if a user visited a website and viewed an animation of the weather forecast, a tag can be assigned to that user labeled something like “weather”. Now, website designers can look at the data collected from numerous “weather” users and compare patterns of the way users rely upon website resources. Did they commonly move to other pages after viewing the weather animation or did they leave the website completely? Perhaps there is a trend for these users to check out the entertainment section of the site when the weather forecast for the weekend is pleasant. If so, can content and advertising be altered to better reach these users? These are just a couple of the specific resources that now exist with Google Analytics.

In order to understand what they do and how they can be best be applied, Google now offers tutorials on Google Conversion University. In fact, if you are interested in not just learning about these resources but want to prove that you understand their application, try taking the Google Analytics Qualification Test. This test is used to determine if a user knows enough about analytics that Google is willing to grant them a certificate to reflect this fact. I plan on taking advantage of this opportunity in the near future. If only I could have Google Analytics show trends in my daily routines where extra time exists for watching the tutorials……maybe someday.

Woke up to an email thread that had taken off.

We need to amp up “inventory.”

That’s page views.

What does it mean that Twitter now has lists? How does that change the game?

I’m interested in all this stuff. Really, I am. Besides, it’s what keeps everything going.

But some days it all makes me so tired.

I don’t care about inventory. Views. I don’t care about how many people list me. How many people follow me. How many people subscribe to my RSS feed. Whether I’m reciprocating enough, promoting enough.

I just want to write.

Oct.23 – The authority announced to have 220000 page views of their "e-Government Idea Box" in a week. It started on Oct.14 and will close Nov.14. At the noon of Oct.21, in the top hit chart, 1: On-line SNS, 2: Introducing RSS, 3: Utilizing Twitter and so on, there are.

J <http://japan.cnet.com/news/media/story/0,2000056023,20402278,00.htm>

This Q&A with John Mayer by New York Magazine’s pop culture “Vulture” was pretty dang funny, to say the least.  I only happened upon it after one of my Twitter followers sent out a tweet that Mayer had threatened to sodomize female journalists.  As both a fan of Mayer and as a radio professional who has played his records since the beginning, I had to click on the link in her tweet.  As I started to read the Q&A with Mayer, I began to realize the joke, but my Twitter friend hadn’t and instead was upset with Mayer.  She had taken his words literally when he said, “I’m going to forcefully sodomize your editor.”

Here’s what might have happened.

An editor gave her writer questions to ask Mayer that were absurd.  But how absurd are they really?  In an age when what we post online is driven by page views and how much audience we can gain, the NY editor didn’t really make a mistake here.  The Q&A has me blogging about it and, earlier in the week, my twitter pal was up in arms about it.  So that’s two people driving traffic to the NY Mag site.

It seems to me like the editor thought she may get Mayer to say something controversial and newsworthy about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. The questions asked seemed like attempts to snag something newsworthy to drive traffic to the site by asking serious questions.  We see TMZ.com do it all the time in their videos.  But the plan doesn’t always work when you ask a celeb a question like this.  Usually, they have no opinion or nothing newsworthy to say.

C’mon, editors, like you’re really going to get well-coached stars to say something to give you a hot story?  Mayer would rather say something smart ass about sodomizing you than take a Nobel question seriously.  He’s got a record to promote, so he’s not going to say anything to piss off his red state or blue state fans.  To me, this just seemed like an attempt to compete with TMZ gone wrong.

We’ve hit the saturation point with celebrity news and gossip.  How are we going to do it differently?

By not falling victims to trends or by copying what everyone else is doing.  But there’s also one vital thing to do.  If you’re going to cover celebrity news for a living, it doesn’t stop  when your 40 hours a week are up in the newsroom.  You don’t walk up to Mayer and ask him dumb questions like he’s a stranger you have no respect for.  Do your research.  And when I say “research,” Google doesn’t count.

You have to live this stuff.

You lifestyle has to be celebrity/entertainment news 24/7/365.  You can’t miss a thing.  Mayer fans know he’s a smart ass with dry, sarcastic, rude humor.  The fans also know he loves to liberally dish out his unique humor to journalists.  The editor and her writer would have known this if they’d been fans, or had at least watched Mayer on some TMZ videos verbally sparring with paparazzi and journalists.  The guy’s current single is about, “who says I can’t?”  Well, what do you think you’re going to get when you hit him up with your tape recorder at a party or on a red carpet?  Who says I can’t smart-ass this journalist chick who didn’t do her homework on me?

I’ve got clients to serve who want news on Mayer’s new album.  I’m not going to waste 2 minutes with him by asking him lame questions.  Tell me about “Battle Studies.”  (She did at least ask about that after asking a bunch of questions that annoyed him.  Way to go to build rapport…)

You never know where a conversation will go anyway.

I talked to Mike Kennerty of the All-American Rejects last week about how the band was getting back on the road after Tyson Ritter had emergency knee surgery.  Somehow we got to talking about a few different subjects, which was really cool and unexpected.  It wasn’t an exclusive; a lot of us got to do press over the phone with members of the band.  So we all had the story about them going back on tour.  But I know I got a couple of other tidbits out of him that will be exclusive to my Westwood One clients only.

I get what I get from people by doing my own thing and not trying to be like everyone else out there.  I treat artists with respect.  In Kennerty’s case, he was calling from London on a day off.  How would you like a bunch of strangers asking you questions for a few hours on end on your “day off?”  Exactly.  This is why you get so much more as a journalist just by being cool with people.

Anyone can put up a blog and start trying to compete with TMZ or Perez Hilton or whomever in online celebrity news and gossip you idolize.  Some of us were doing celeb news before it grew to what is currently is online, which is a massive echo-chamber.  I did it in radio first and I still do it for radio.

How do you do entertainment news today and stand out from the crowd?  How do you not fall victim to the echo chamber trap?  How can you do music news and still compete with countless blogs all writing about the same thing at the same time?  Should we even call it “news” any more?

Disclosure: I am a “New York” magazine subscriber and long-time fan of the online site.  Opinions expressed on this blog do not reflect that of any of my various employers.  I have also bought every John Mayer album I’ve ever had.

It is amazing to see how a global event like Eurobaskets needs to be organised in all matters.

I have talked to our client Nick Marzoli, responsible for IT at FIBA Europe, about the organization of Eurobaskets. See the most interesting aspects in the short interview below.

++++ Interview ++++

Andrea Otto: Spain is the European champion and Serbia is in second position, but the game with the most views on the website www.eurobasket2009.org was the preliminary round, Germany against Russia. Did you expect that?

Nick Marzoli, FIBA Europe: I assumed that it would be a preliminary round. During the preliminary round up to 4 games are played in parallel, which means that basketball fans cannot follow all the games on television – then the live web scores become a good alternative. With regard to the Germany vs. Russia game being the most viewed, I do not entirely understand it myself. One reason may be the time. The game was played on a weekday at 16:30 when very few people are at home watching television. However, this is only one possible explanation. The exact number of visitors changes with every game and every championship; depending on how popular the sport is in their country and how successfully their team plays. For example, in Lithuania, basketball comes before football. This is why I always find analysing the number of visitors very exciting.

Andrea Otto: “After the game is before the game,” said Sepp Herberger, a German football legend. This certainly applies to the organization and your duties around the IT of FIBA Europe. What planning and preparation time goes into a project such as eurobasket2009.org?

Nick Marzoli, FIBA Europe: Indeed. I have been in contact with Lithuania since last year regarding the European Championship 2011. Of course, it is now only a rough first draft. This lead time is very important for us so we can also align ourselves with the various agencies and service providers. Every 2 years the championships take place in another country, which means new terms and conditions on the ground for all of us. This of course relates to online projects in addition to many other areas.

Examples include ensuring the IT infrastructure in the halls, from good working conditions for over 1,000 accredited journalists to data and statistical services, accreditation systems and much more.

Andrea Otto: Were there any technical or other incidents during the games?

Nick Marzoli, FIBA Europe: Absolutely not. The site was 100% available. The traffic is difficult to predict and can have extreme peaks, especially in the sports business.

This means rescheduling its capacity every year. Thanks to NTT Europe Online, and the experience we have gained over the years, we can completely rely on the infrastructure and avoid any incidents.

Andrea Otto: 8 million visits, 30 million page views. These are surprisingly high numbers. Are you satisfied with the overall result?

Nick Marzoli, FIBA Europe:

The numbers are as expected, on the same level as in 2007. A large increase was not expected because the hype around the event in the host country itself, Poland, was significantly lower than in Spain in 2007, who had become world champion the year before. Another reason is some of the great names such as Dirk Nowitzki or Andrei Kirilenko were missing this time. Therefore, I am satisfied with the overall result. For Lithuania 2011 I expect a significant increase as it will lead to qualification for the 2012 Olympics.

Thank you for the interview.
www.eurobasket2009.org
www.fibaeurope.org

Thanks for the support everyone.  When I started this I wasn’t sure if anyone would be reading it.  At the very least I supposed it could serve as a personal online recipe book.  I never thought I’d have over 1,000 page views views in a month and a half’s time.  Thanks again for your continued readership and all the great feedback.  This has been a wonderful outlet for me that I hope I can maintain in the months to come.  Cheers!

With 95 standard reports and a wide variety of custom reports that you have the capability of creating in SmarterStats, it’s hard to tell which are the most important to keep an eye on.  Most people really only need to keep track of 3 or 4 reports including:

1. Monthly Visitors
2. Visit Length
3. Referring Sites
4. Top Pages

Your first step is to login to SmarterStats (if you need the URL, let me know).
If this is your first time logging in, you will be asked to setup a couple of preferences for your dashboard.
On the dashboard, you will find a Views and Visits chart, Bandwidth Usage Graph, Top Pages list, Top Referrers list, Search Engines chart and Top Search Phrases list.  These items will display typically an overview of your last 7 days unless you selected otherwise in the preferences.

Now let’s navigate to the Monthly Visitors report.

On the left side of the page, click on the (+) next to Visitors, click on Monthly Visitors in the menu that appears below it.  It will most likely show you the past 7 days again here, so in order to change that click on the “Show Date Ranges” link at the top right below the calendar.  Click on the calendar icon to the right of the start field, select the day, do the same for the end date and then click the Get Report button.  If you need to go back to another month, there are icons at the top for that.  You will see colums for Visits, Unique Visitors, New Visitors and Return Visitors.

• Visits:  represents the total number of times people have visited your website.
• Unique Visitors:  represents any number of visits from the same computer.
• New Visitors:  represents a visit by a computer that has not yet been to the website in the time period of the report.
• Return Visitors:  counted when a computer that has already been to the website before returns.  In order to see this data, you must select a date range of at least 2 months.

Now let’s check out the Visit Length report.

Over on the left side in the Visitors menu your going to click on Monthly Visit Length to view this report.  Your data show will be for your latest selected date range, so that may or may not need to be adjusted.  You will see two columns on the report; Visits and Visit Length.  I like to pull at least the last 90 – 180 days so I can see the trend on this report.

• Visit Length:  the number of seconds that a visit lasts on average for the date range.

Moving on to the Referring Sites report.

Click on the (+) next to Referrals, click on Referring Sites in the menu that appears below it.  Once again you will need to check the date range at the top and adjust as necessary.  You will see columns for Rank, Host and Visits.  This particular report includes search engines and individual websites.  If you want to see the referals from just the search engines you would click on the (+) next to Search Engines on the left and click the Engine Breakdown link.

• Host:  the website from which visitors to your website came from.  A value of “no referrer” represents a visitor typing your website address directly into their browser, using a bookmark or following a link from an email message.

The final report you will want to check out is the Top Pages report.

Click on the (+) next to Files, click on Pages in the menu that appears below it.  As with the others you will need to check the date range and adjust if needed.  You will see columns for Page, Page Views, Visits and Bandwidth.  For most of you the first item will simply have “/”, which is simply your websites homepage.

• Page:  a website generally contains a collection of different pages that are accessible and viewable via a web browser.  SmarterStats considers the following extensions to be pages:  .ASP, .ASPX, .CFC, .CFM, .CFMX, .CFML, .CGI, .HTM, .HTML, .IDA, .IDC, .JHTM, .JHTML, .JSP, .JWS, .MHT, .MHTML, .MV, .PHP, .PHP3, .PHTM, .PHTML, .PL, .SHTM, .SHTML, .STM, .WML, .XDL, .XHTML and .XML.
• Page Views:  a successful request for a file on your website that is considered to be a page.  Views generated as a result of an error are kept separate.
• Bandwidth:  the total number of kilobytes that were sent to people visiting your website.

For all of these reports, if you want to see more data, change the chart type used, apply filters, etc., you can use the drop-down menus on the right side below the calendar.  Remember to click the Get Report button if you change any of these items to generate new data based on your criteria here.

You should receive an email on the 1st of each month with a rundown of your website statistics from the previous month.  If you are not getting that email, please let me know ASAP so I can get that resolved for you.

Cindy Spencer 

Oct.9 – MITI announced to start proposal collection site named "e-MITI Idea Box" with Salesforce CRM Ideas. The association wants to hear what’s the ideal e-Government based on nation wide.

It’s a kind of experimentation site, will open Oct.14 and will close Nov.14.

J <http://www.itmedia.co.jp/enterprise/articles/0910/09/news076.html>

A língua espanhola é a terceira mais utilizada na web, com cerca de 131 milhões de internautas, perdendo apenas para o inglês e o chinês.
O dado foi levantado pela Funredes, uma ONG dedicada à difusão de novas tecnologias na América Latina, que ainda analisou que o espanhol é o quinto produtor de conteúdo na rede, atrás de inglês, chinês alemão e francês.
Segundo informações da agência EFE, o uso da língua espanhola na internet decolou após a entrada de imigrantes hispânicos nos Estados Unidos.
A comunidade latino-americana é responsável por 10% das páginas web em espanhol que são criadas. Cerca de 56% desse conteúdo é produzido na própria Espanha, que também cria páginas em português e inglês.

Colaboração de Fernando Bamberg @flickr.com/bamberg86

Reflets de France Cidre

I’m really happy to see so many people reading the Super Gîtes Blog. Within three months we’re already hitting the first 1000! Amazing! I appreciate your interest in the blog, so whoever is Mr. or Ms. One Thousand: PLEASE reply to this post immediately and you’ll receive a bottle of Reflets de France Apple Cidre. If you are not from the Netherlands I’ll transfer you the value of a bottle of this cidre through Paypal.

Happy reading! Merci beaucoup!!

Even to someone like me who enjoys browsing over site statistics and testing the accuracy of the resulting metrics, understanding an Alexa traffic rank is not an easy task.

Except for the fact that the Alexa traffic ranking system is based on information generated from Alexa toolbar users and that “A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of Reach and Page Views” plus some kind of “data normalization” which also are not explained, there is not much information about the Alexa ranking system.

In its FAQ, Alexa also stated: “Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the past three months of global traffic according to our diverse data sources, and are updated weekly.”

Given this minimum traffic tracking period, I wonder how a blog like mine ~ although barely two weeks old ~ was able to attract a traffic ranking. Is it because my blog is hosted by WordPress.com, and Alexa is biased to WordPress.com-hosted sites? I don’t think so. I know of other sites hosted by WordPress.com which have been online for many months now, yet they are still showing an Alexa “No Data” status. I am certain that some people are visiting those sites. (Note: The small Alexa image on this page shows “No Data” for Alexa which we could only surmise that Alexa did not like to make its traffic ranking public.)

I think I will stick to metrics like unique visits, page views and the like in gauging site traffic performances. At least, these figures are easy to understand, and I can explain the figures to other people.

But I cannot say the same thing with Alexa’s traffic ranking. After all, according to Alexa, if a site traffic ranking is beyond 100,000, the figures are statistically meaningless. For a site traffic rank to be statistically meaningful and reliable, a site should be close to the top rank. Quite a tall order, isn’t it?

Alexa’s statements read as follows:

Sites with relatively low measured traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. Our data comes from many various sources, including our Alexa users; however, we do not receive enough data from these sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful. (However, on the flip side of that, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its rank.)

With many websites that are not even close to the top 1,000 or even 50,000 (let alone #1), I wonder why advertising placement agencies even bother to look at a website’s Alexa traffic rank!

FoxNews , Post Tribune, &  The Courier News published this deansguide article 9-8-09

Google is the most influential force behind the proliferation of social media. Yet many of us think we know everything or close to everything we need to know about Google. In an eye opening article by Search Engine People’s Ruud Hein “20 Things You Don’t Know About Google” you can learn something new and in most cases be very surprised at what you did not know. Here is Ruud’s list and my impressions.

20 Google Facts

1. Adwords accounts for 99% Google’s annual revenue; dg: that seems obvious but we are just warming up

2. Google’s advertising revenue in 2008 was $21 billion; dg: incredible and more than I imagined!

3. 1.35% of the US’ Adwords advertisers make up 80% of Google US ad revenue; dg: this goes beyond the 90-10 rule

4. Adwords as we know it used to be called Adwords Select. The top banner position was sold old school style through a program call Adwords Premium; dg: I did NOT know that fact

5. The first Adwords Select ad was in 2000 for live mail-order lobsters; dg: you have to start somewhere, a precursor to WebVan?

6. Google’s pricing mechanism where the winner pays the runner up’s price was devised to prevent super-inflated bid prices but the second-price auctions resulted in higher prices for Google right away; dg: brilliant strategy

7. In 2009 Google began showing ads based on their previous online activities. User patterns are segmented in 20 categories and roughly 600 subcategories; dg: this will continue to expand and be refined

8. In 2008, 80% of 80,000 typo-squatting domains in the US alone were funded through Adsense; dg: that is a bit alarming

9. Google’s query forecasting models are founded in their efforts to understand and predict Adwords pricing and click patterns; dg: again this will continue to be refined

10. Although it doesn’t like to talk about using user data, Google cross references everything. “We have temperature data, weather data, and queries data, so we can do correlation and statistical modeling.”; dg: this is part of the power and “secret sauce” that makes Google

11. In the last 10 years Google’s latency has gone from 1000ms to 200ms.

12. In the last 10 years Google has made seven major rearchitecture changes.

13. Compared to 1999 Google’s index is now 100x larger but they update it 10,000 times faster; dg: growth and speed continue to be a Google staple and it is another building block that keeps them ahead of the other search engines

14. Google cataloged its trillionth web page in 2008; dg: with one trillion cataloged web pages will any company ever challenge Google’s supremacy in the search industry?

15. To translate one sentence Google does a million lookups in a multi-terabyte data structure.

16. To punish itself for artificial link inflation (paid links) Google penalized itself in 2009 by lowering the PageRank of it’s Japan domain from PR9 to PR5; dg: why not across the board?

17. Since January 2009 Gmail regularly beats YouTube in market share by US visits and is the 2nd most popular Google property; dg: very surprising considering Youtubes viral capabilities

18. The 3 largest traffic drivers for Gmail are Google, Facebook — and Yahoo! Mail…; dg: oh yea Yahoo helping Google is a bit like the Red Sox helping the Yankees–hard to understand

19. To encourage developer teams to move to new servers Google uses auctions where teams bid how many extra computers dedicated to their service it would take for them to move; the lowest bidding team wins.

20. In 2007 Google announced it will award $20 million to the 1st private team which builds a robot — and puts it on the moon; dg: my money is on Mark Cuban who is never shy about a challenge or the type of publicity this challenge would generate

I was reading this article in Media Post titled: The Death Of Search and started thinking. I’m not an SEO or SEM expert, but do use SEO techniques in my work (I have friends and colleagues I call when it gets complicated)  so I usually just glance at these types of articles, but this one caught my eye because I am noticing something similar happening too – the subtle shift in page views.

For one thing, in the blogger outreach world, we tend to focus more on total social media presence rather than page views when selecting bloggers for outreach. Really, what’s more important – 10,000 page views on a blog or 10,000 followers on Twitter or Flickr or Youtube? What combination of page views, RSS feeds and social media accounts is most powerful?

Secondly, as this article mentions, because often content hides behind walls, search engines aren’t always able to grab the content. Furthermore I would add, especially as concerns Facebook and Twitter, how much does actually reading the content count versus just seeing the headline? From a marketing standpoint, if your brand name is in the headline you are getting the exposure you need. When it is tweeted out you can count Re-Tweets, but not the passive audience that actually saw the tweet but didn’t click on the link or retweet.

Obviously, we have tools that have been around for years to measure impressions. As page views become harder and harder to calculate, we’ll go back to using offline tools or perhaps the online version of them to see how our programs shape up. That’s not a bad thing.

When you write a small blog about a small topic like crochet you hardly expect to make any waves.

So, yesterday when I posted up the photos of Walter the Giant Squid at Tamarama, I expected thirty or so facebook friends to click across and have a little smile at my handy work. Well, you can imagine my shock when I opened up my dashboard and found several hundred hits staring me in the face. It took me a while to figure out how, or why, all these complete strangers were spontaneously dropping by to say hello. But finally I got there, and saw this, to my surprise and delight!

Thanks so much, WordPress, for featuring Walter and I on your front page for a day. And thanks to everyone who said something nice when they visited.

I’m still grinning from ear to ear. These giant animals take a while to create, but I’m planning another shoot with Walter this weekend (hopefully this time with all 8 legs and 2 tentacles in tow) and I’m also starting work on a giant grasshopper.

And in the meantime I have a few little side projects to share with you along the way. So, to all my new friends out there, please drop by again soon!

Well, that’s my target for this week!

after last thursday’s *astronomical* page views of over 70 {eek!} the past few days have been… bleak… about 5 views a day. crap!!

So if you could just somehow hint my blog on your blog, twitter page, etc… I shall be grateful!!

Hopefully I won’t be stalking you if you don’t link me and promote my page….

oh and on a separate note, I am closing down my forums that I’ve created over the past few months/years.  Just wanna concentrate on my life now – moving to Dublin, finding my Irish man, having a well-paid job…. I just wanna get out of this rut, sooner rather than later….

nite y’all!!
xxxxx

Last week’s Research Brief from the Center of Media Research, which I should disclose I’m a big fan of, discussed various findings related to the effectiveness of advertisements in offline media, specifically magazines, to drive traffic to the advertiser’s site. It inspired me to leave the following comment:

I’m mildly surprised that magazines so clearly outperform TV when it comes to driving traffic to the web, as well as mildly concerned that our obsession with accountability might force us number-crunching marketers even deeper into campaigns driven by questionable metrics with limited relevance for campaign success.

The good:

It’s good to hear offline media are driving online traffic, just like online campaigns are driving in-store sales, simply because it proves the concept of true interactivity and validates the right for online and offline media to co-exist.

The bad:

The supposedly infinite measurability of online media really resulted in a campaign-unhealthy focus on CTR as the key engagement metric, which is fine if your goal is to generate clicks and not sales. The much discussed disgrace of the online display ad, though proven to strengthen brands and drive search, clearly is one of the more famous victims of this trend.

The (possibly) ugly:

What motivation do users have when they go from magazine ads to the advertiser’s web site? What other ways could they take to accomplish the same? Which page will they visit and how qualified will their visit be relative to the campaign goal?

The (possibly) beautiful:

If marketers are able to appropriately weigh web visits as one of many effects of magazine ads, and are clear about the correlation with the campaign goal, then this is a good metric for campaign success.

It won’t address the fact, though, that consumer behavior is fundamentally changing, their decisions are influenced differently, and therefore, the contribution of a web visit as part of the funnel is the nut the marketer really needs to crack.

When measuring success of any campaign, the applied metrics need to be specified in terms of the extent to which they contribute to the campaign goal. In other words: What is the value of a click and what is the value of the page view relative to new sales or conversions?

Like any good American, I am was an avid consumer contributing to the machine that is our economy.  Although I’ve spent thousands on unfavorable purchases, the one thing I got out of my time bidding on eBay is the ability to know when to post my own auctions to maximize my page views, watchers, and eventually bids and revenue.

In order to be a seller, you need to understand how a “good American” functions when it comes to shopping.  Here is the checklist I go through to post, let’s say, a high end Nikon camera lens:  Nikon Nikkor f/2.8 AF-S VR.

• I post the auction on Thursday, around 2:00PM PST.  Since eBay auctions will end at the same time on your end date, this allows buyers in Hawaii (11:00AM) to be included in the bidding war at the crucial last minutes right before they go to lunch, buyers in New York (5:00PM) to be in hot pursuit right before their day is over, and buyers in California (2:00PM PST) to also hop on after digesting lunch.  These times generate the most “foot traffic” on eBay and will assure that you will get the most action.
• I make sure the Thursday I post on is either a Thursday at the beginning or middle of a month as to coincide with payday for people on salaries.
• When I post my auction on Thursday, I make sure that it’s a five day auction.  Three days is too short (I will get into that in a bit) and seven and ten days is too long.  In anticipation for their payday, eBayers browse auctions on Thursday and Friday at work.  Hopefully, they come across your auction, see the low start price and if they don’t bid, they will “watch” your item.  This initial seed or interest will grasp your buyer’s attention and hopefully keep them interested throughout the weekend.
• By having a five day auction that started on Thursday, this will have the auction end on Tuesday.  Why not a three day auction?  No one wants to get into a bidding war on the weekend let alone sit in front of a computer! Many sellers are improperly informed that they will get action on the weekend.  This is incorrect as many people will be out with friends, family, at the beach, at the movies and could care less about your auction.  They have too much fun stuff going on to care.  When they’re at work, they’re looking for reasons not to work.  Enter your auction.
• When your “watchers” and “bidders” return to work on Monday, they will see in their email boxes that either
  a.) they have been outbid (bringing them back to your auction site) or
  b.)the item they’re watching is ending soon (also bringing them back to your auction site).
  With Monday blues and hopefully a dash of competitive spirit, your potential bidders will be clamoring to entice the beginning days of their work week with some consumer therapy.  Shopping cures blues and thus a five day auction is perfect to entice bidders on a slow Tuesday at work.
• Search through completed auctions and see how the product you’re about to sell gets higher amounts of bids/revenue.  The most important thing to look at is how they worded their title.  Remember that buyers heavily rely on the search engine in eBay to find what they’re looking for.  I saw that I got many more hits on “Nikon 70-200mm” as opposed to “Nikon 70-200″.  This is crucial information that allows me to anticipate more foot traffic on my auction.  It would be a shame if they missed your auction due to it being worded unfavorably.  **This also means that you might be searching completed auctions improperly.  Always try searching for your item via eBay’s category option.
• Start your auctions at rock bottom prices.  After researching my lens, I see that all bid based auctions (omitting buy it now and best offer auctions) completed successfully with decent action as long as the starting price wasn’t ridiculously high.  By setting your start price at say $1.00 on a $2,000.00 item, the general interest and amount of “watchers” will increase in the first few days.  People are always looking for a bargain and they always hope this auction will slip by at a much lower price than it’s value.  However, with multiple watchers all thinking this, supply and demand will play into effect in the last few minutes of your auction.  Trust me.  You will not end up selling your $2,000.00 lens for $150.00.
• Offer free shipping.  You will get people who value that and hence bid more feverishly on your item.
• One more thing… posting around the beginning or middle of May allows you to be able to target consumers who will be receiving their tax returns.  Americans see this as free money and spend it frivolously.  Hopefully on your lens.

I followed these guidelines with my auction on the lens (except the tax refund thing).  While most similar auctions ended selling between 1,400-1,800 a pop, my lens sold for $2.020.00.  My lens garnered 699 page views, 97 watchers, and 20 bids.

Hope you found this post to be insightful as you begin to pawn off all your high end electronics that have been gathering dust in your room.  This is also good information to know as a consumer as well.  Use this information to take advantage of sellers who post their items as a three day auction on Monday morning at 3:00AM.  Good luck!