Live Blogging Session #2
Why the Numbers Matter
You cannot manage what you cannot measure.
Three Blog Types:
Ad supported—makes money for selling ads, affiliates or pay per click
Business blog—blog generates leads or sales
Other— everyone else
Numbers Everyone Needs to Know
Visitors—number of people who visit the site.
Uniques or Unique Visitors—does not count repeat visitors
Page Views—number of actual pages viewed
Bounce Rate—Number of people are “one and done”
Top Pages—content that gets the most traffic
Referrers—who sends your site traffic
Keywords—what words are being used to find your website
Knowing your top content helps you know what people are interested in so you can create content they want.
Analytics Tools
Log Analyzers—track requests to your web server
(Analog, AWSats, SmarterStats, Webalyzer, Urchin, WebTrends, Click Tracks, etc)
Script Based—track when script or pixel are accessed *more accurate data*
(Google Analytics, Yahoo Analyitics, Omniture, WebTrends, Click Tracks)
Mike Recommends
If you have mad money, Radian6+Webtrends.
If you don’t:
Yahoo Anaytics + time
Yahoo is real time. Google is not.
Real time matters if you start getting lots of traffic.
It’s important to use something that is screening out bot traffic.
Ad Supported Blogs
What You Need to Know
Page Views—by author, topic, day of week
Impressions—how many ad views your site shows
CTR—ad clickthrough rate
CPM—price per thousand impressions
EPC—what you make on average when someone clicks on an ad
Comparative Rankings
Compete, Alexa, Nielson NetRatings
Use numbers to set prices and make your blog appealing to advertisers.
Advertisers will use comparative ranking sites to
EPC = Advertising Income / Ad Clicks (try calculating by author or topic)
Proj. Income = (Proj PV/1000) (CPM) or Proj. PV x CTR x EPC
ROI = 1 – Cost/(Income-Cost)
Business Blogs
Goal is leads or sales.
What You Need to Know
Top Pages
Conversion Rate—number of people who turn into leads or sales (don’t edit – include everything)
CPA – Cost per action: what it costs to get a lead or sale
ROI – the bottom line is what really matters
*Use a contact form so you know which leads found you through your blog.
What Business Blogs Do Not Need to Know
Conversation Rate
Conversation Depth
Authority
*It’s all about leads generated so the engagement & authority is irrelevant.
The idea of a business’s blog enhancing the brand value is bogus if the leads/sales generated aren’t increased.
Okay, this is the point where I realize that I’m not a business blog and I no longer care. Here is where I started playing on Facebook and Twitter and forgot to take notes. It’s also where my uber late night and early morning caught up with me. I’m eating Milk Duds and trying not to think of lunch. My bad.
Other Blogs
What You Need to Know
The usual: PV, UPV, Bounce Rate, etc
Conversation Rate—how many comments you get per post
Conversation Depth—Do you get big or little comments?
Authority—how important is your blog?
Authority
What makes a blog credible—the people in your audience
The right audience—depends on the blog
Finding your authority
1. Social Media Authority—focus is on influence (values links, conversations and aggregates like Technorati, Radian 6-Style, Google Centric)
2. Traffic—focus is on readers & numbers
Secret to Gaining Influence:
Write blog articles others will blog about
Make friends with other bloggers so you will talk about one another’s posts on your blogs
Use outrage. It works.
There’s no differentiation between good authority or bad authority.
The power of Radian-6: It exposes relationships. It’s expensive but worth it!
This is my first attempt at live blogging. I need to take notes and this seemed like the best idea, given the topic. These are my raw notes as they happen. I’ll come back later to fix obvious typos and errors, but if I decide to expand on anything I heard, it would be in a separate post. To quote my girls, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.”
Heather,
Great post. Very important topic and well summarized approach. Thank you for sharing and for the Webtrends+Radian6 mention.
Jascha – Webtrends
@kaykas