GigaOM » Collaboration

You Blog, But Does Anyone Care?

Dawn Foster — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:00:56 +0000

I’ve noticed that bloggers tend to fall into two camps: the obsessed, who want to know everything and constantly monitor analytics for their posts; and the people who don’t really worry about who reads their posts and rarely check analytics. For a while, I was one of those obsessed people who constantly checked analytics, but lately, I’ve been busy, and I’m finding myself falling into a state where I rarely remember to look.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s a good time to take a step back and look at some data to see which of your blog posts have been getting attention and which ones have been mostly ignored. You can do so much more than taking a quick look at your standard analytics package. Here are a few tools and tips to give you a deeper look at whether people are paying attention to your blog posts.

Web Analytics

A standard analytics package, like Google Analytics, is a great start, but make sure that you delve deeper than just checking out the simple graph showing how many people visited your blog. Here are a few of the things that I like to look at:

Traffic sources that show how many people found my blog from various other blogs, web pages or search engines.
Keywords to see what people were looking for when they landed on my blog.
Which blog posts got the most visits.
“In-Page Analytics,” which provides a graphical view of where people are clicking on the page.

Feed Analytics

Most web analytics track hits by using a snippet of code on your page in order. Feed readers don’t execute those little chunks of code, so you’ll also want to use a feed analytics tool, like Feedburner, for example. This gives you a better idea about how many people read your blog through a feed reader, and you can get access to information like how many people viewed a post in your feed, whether they clicked on any links, etc.

I get a very different picture from the people who read my feed than from those who visit my blog. For example, every couple of weeks, I do a short post on my personal blog with links to blogs posts that I have written elsewhere. These blog posts get almost no web traffic and are rarely posted to Twitter, but they get a lot of views in my feed, and people often click the links to my other blog posts. You might be surprised by how your feed data differs from your other analytics.

PostRank

PostRank is a nifty little tool that looks at which of your blog posts got the most attention on a wide variety of social networks. You can see how many people posted your content, or commented on it, on Twitter, Google Buzz and dozens of other social media websites. It also gives each of your posts a score between 1 and 10 , which is a great way to see at a glance which of your blog posts were interesting enough for people to want to share them.

Twitter

There are a few tools that make it easy to see which of your blog posts are getting attention on Twitter. If you shorten your links with a tool like bit.ly that has built-in analytics, you can see how many people clicked on the link and who retweeted it. BackTweets is another great service that searches Twitter for a URL and finds any shortened links to that URL, regardless of who shortened the link and which service they used. This is a great way to see when other people are posting links to your blog posts.

Blog Search

Google Blog Search also has a nifty little feature that lets you see any blogs that link to your blog simply by entering something like this into the search box:

link:gigaom.com/collaboration

You can look for posts linking to a website, blog post or section within your blog – basically, anything you can define by a URL. You can then sort the results by relevance or date and even filter by certain dates or timeframes, like most Google searches.

What are your favorite tools or tips for taking a deeper look at whether people are paying attention to your blog posts?

Photo by Tilemahos Efthimiadis used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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Track Engagement With PostRank Analytics

Simon Mackie — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:00:38 +0000

Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking who’s visiting your site and when, but how do you track things like the number of people discussing your content? PostRank (a company that we’ve covered previously) aims to provide that capability with its new PostRank Analytics service, which launches in public beta today. I was lucky enough to have access to the private beta over that last couple of weeks, and it looks to be a useful service, particularly for bloggers.

If you’ve used Google Analytics, PostRank Analytics will feel familiar, although it has a nicer-looking design. Once you’ve logged into the service, you get an overview of your site’s stats via a Flash-based chart (you can select to view last week, last month, last three months, or a custom period).

One thing that is different from Google Analytics, though, is the metrics you can track using the app. Not only do you get to keep an eye on your page views and visitors (PostRank Analytics will pull this data from your Google Analytics account, if you have one, for increased accuracy), you can also track “Engagement,” which is an aggregate score based on many times your content is commented on, how often it’s mentioned on Twitter, how many comments it has on FriendFeed, how many people bookmarked it using Delicious, etc.

Hit the “Analyze” tab to see a list of recently published posts, together with traffic and engagement stats for each of them, and individual scores based on number of Twitter mentions, bookmarks, etc:

Drill down further by clicking on a post title to bring up the “Analyze Story” page, which features traffic and engagement charts for that particular post. You can also get to these pages from the timeline on the Overview page.

Usefully, the “Analyze Story” pages also contain a “conversation feed,” which brings together tweets, comments, blog posts and bookmarks related to that content, so that you can see — at a glance — what people are saying about your content.

You can also choose to receive a daily “Concierge Report” in your email. In its current iteration, I don’t find this to be that useful, as it just contains basic page view and engagement stats — it would be better if it was customizable, like the reports that Google Analytics can generate.

While I’d like to see more detail on how the “Engagement” score is actually calculated, and think it would be useful to be able to get separate charts for stats like Twitter mentions and Delicious bookmarks, I’m adding PostRank Analytics to my toolbox, because it provides data that’s not available elsewhere. If you’re interested in getting a better idea as to what’s being said about your content, and where, or if you’re just a stats geek, PostRank Analytics is definitely worth checking out. It’s free during the beta; sign up at analytics.postrank.com.

Let us know what you think of PostRank Analytics in the comments.

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Filter Your RSS Feeds with Yahoo Pipes

Dawn Foster — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:00:28 +0000

Celine Roque wrote a great article about how to fine tune your RSS subscriptions and prune them down to the feeds that provide you with the most value. I spent some time over the Thanksgiving holiday reviewing my feeds and getting rid of the poor performers, which really helps me get more value while spending less time in my RSS reader. However, pruning is not enough. I also use quite a few filtering techniques to further reduce the clutter.

My favorite filtering techniques involve Yahoo Pipes, which looks and sounds much more complicated than it is. Jackson West described Yahoo Pipes pretty well when he called them “hard to grok, but snazzy“; however, Yahoo Pipes doesn’t have to be quite so difficult for people to understand. The first time I looked at Pipes, the interface scared me away until a friend of mine gave me a very quick demo that showed how easy it was to use. After using Pipes for while, I gave similar demos to help other friends get started and even recorded a 2 minute introduction to Yahoo Pipes that shows how to use Pipes to filter RSS feeds. How complicated could it be if I can explain it in a 2 minute screencast?

Here are a few of my favorite filtering techniques that I use to find the most relevant content.

Filter high volume feeds. Many of the big technology news blogs have a huge volume of stories in the feed. The aggregated feed for the entire GigaOM network, for example, contains dozens of posts every day. I have a hard time finding the content relevant to me when I have to sort through a large number of posts, so I use Pipes to search these stories to find the ones that matter to me. The example pipe below shows how to filter the entire GigaOM network feed down to the few posts containing certain keywords.

Example: Filtering high volume feeds

Aggregate and filter less relevant content. There are certain categories of blogs that have outstanding content, but they rarely publish posts that I want to read. For me, this is true of industry analyst blogs. While I really want to hear about the latest research in online communities and social media, most of the reports published are on topics that are not interesting to me. The Pipe below is one that I use to aggregate 17 industry analyst blogs together into one feed while filtering the posts for a few keywords relevant to my interests.

Example: Analyst research blogs filtered for social media

Find the posts everyone else is reading. For news junkies like me, it helps to be able to find the posts that are generating the most buzz. PostRank, a service that used to be called AideRSS, simplifies this process by finding the most talked about posts from any RSS feed. I often use PostRank in conjunction with Pipes to rank and filter posts at the same time. The example below ranks the posts here on WebWorkerDaily with a feed containing only the posts that are generating the most conversation.

Example: PostRank for WebWorkerDaily and feed for the top posts

WebWorkerDaily PostRank

Both Yahoo Pipes and PostRank have an option to get the output as RSS, so I make sure that the results from these tools make it into my RSS reader. With these more efficient filtered feeds, I can remove some of the aggregated and filtered source feeds from my reader. By using these filtering techniques to further prune my feeds, I plan to spend less time catching up on feed reading and more time working, exercising, or spending time with friends and family.

What are your favorite filtering techniques?

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