Comments on: Good traffic, bad traffic, silly traffic, traffic traffic

By: Blogs Worth Reading: April « Unique-Frequency

Blogs Worth Reading: April « Unique-Frequency — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:42:28 +0000

[...] Good traffic, bad traffic, silly traffic, traffic traffic – In case you still think hits is the be all and end all. [...]

By: Reilly

Reilly — Sun, 04 May 2008 01:39:25 +0000

Yes, but I'd like to be able to do so from a reader's perspective, as well. I think Google and HBX do a good job of this on the publisher side, but because of cookie limitations it's never really completely accurate. On the reader side, nobody is doing this besides Google that I know of — and I think some people get a little freaked out by this, too.

By: Eric Berlin

Eric Berlin — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:49:34 +0000

Thanks so much Daryl! The trick in the end is finding your topic(s) and then engaging people on that topic consistently and well. If you do that you'll probably tend to bring in more repeat customers over time.

That doesn't mean that it's easy though — far from it !

By: Eric Berlin

Eric Berlin — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:47:46 +0000

It's always a challenge, figuring out how to explain to site visitors exactly who you are and what's going on very very quickly — and trying to do that for an insanely wide spectrum.

I wonder if Godin's “silly traffic” argument applies here though: do you think the people coming in to read the farewell e-mail to coworkers via search traffic are going to tend to be people who might convert to return visitors for your more typical web 2.0 topics? I wonder if the effort is worth it, or like Godin suggests you might be better served spending time/resources on making your regular visitors happy.

I'm not sure what the right answer is, by the way. Please try and stop back into OMC though and let us know how it's going.

By: Eric Berlin

Eric Berlin — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:43:39 +0000

How I translate this — and please tell me if your thinking is different Reilly — is this: I'd love an easy / free metrics package that gives me page views, uniques, and return visitors per story, and then nicely breaks down how all three of those groups arrived at my site. I'd then want to be able to see compilations of data versus individual “drilldown” stats, and finally have pretty graphs and charts for everything.

I know that Google Analytics does some and perhaps all of this, but it does take some expertise and know how and in some cases real technical skills to yank the exact data that you want out.

By: Daryl Tay

Daryl Tay — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:31:23 +0000

Congrats on 200, Eric. I've been asked the question between hits vs subscribers a couple of times and I definitely agree that subscribers are much more powerful because they WANT the content from your blog and are willing to be repeat and engaged visitors. I'd take them over random hits anytime.

By: Hutch Carpenter

Hutch Carpenter — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:15:50 +0000

Eric – I just posted something with a similar sentiment. I'm suddenly seeing a rise in hits for an old post related to tips on writing a farewell email to co-workers. These are search-generated hits, on a topic that differs from the web 2.0 content that's on my blog.

My simple response is to post a message to these visitors on the blog, letting them know what the blog is about and inviting them to look around. It's something of an experiment right now. My home-grown visitor conversion experiment. Maybe I'll have to be a little more innovative.

By: Reilly

Reilly — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:18:41 +0000

In the print world, a lot of magazines are judged by how many pages go unread by their audience (a lower number is better, obviously). This isn't something that non-direct response environment can handle, but editors get a good idea of what people are reading and not reading.

The web is somewhat similar. I've read (I think) at least 40% of all Seth Godin posts on his site. That's a lot.

It would be interesting if this was a useful metric for users and site owners. I guess Google already knows this (knows everything about my search history), but it's not useful info between forms. In other words, what if onlinemediacultist could map:

- X return uniques, who have on average consumed (_) amount of all OMC pages, over (_) days

And what if me, as a web person, could map:

- where I've visited, (_)% of (_)site, when

This is probably way more complicated than it appears in my head, but your post seemed to trigger something in me that I think would be valuable: a better way to understand usage on both sides of the equation.