Email Me
Measure This! No Ruler Required.
Monday, March 29, 2004End the One-Page Site Visit
From Bryan Eisenberg at ClickZ and FutureNow.
End the One-Page Site Visit
... According to WebSideStory's StatMarket data published this week:
- 74 percent of visitors reach sites by direct navigation (type the URL) or bookmarks.
- 16 percent of visitors reach sites via links from other sites.
- 11 percent of visitors reach sites via search engines.
WebSideStory's CMO, Rand Schulman, observes, "The days of Web users randomly 'surfing' to sites is ending. Now more than ever, people know exactly where they want to go on the Web. This does not mean search sites or other Web links are now less important, because users still have to initially find a site before they can bookmark it. However, having a site worth returning to is becoming increasingly important to businesses."
If thousands, even millions of unique visitors think of your site as the one that could meet their needs or solve their problems, why do most leave after the first page or two? Why do conversions continue at an anemic 2-5 percent? Do you offer a solution or product that could meet the needs of more than 5 percent of your market? Can visitors find that solution on your Web site? Do they understand your offer's value? Was it made at the right time? Are you sure they're coming back?
Finally and most important, if you had the opportunity to engage one on one with each of your visitors and each honestly expressed her needs or wants, what percentage would you be able to satisfy? ...
[ClickZ]
Sunday, March 28, 2004Web Analytics and RSS
Traffic Stats and RSS. An interesting thing happened recently. I was playing around with Andrew Grumet's tool based on the information in Share Your OPML and discovered that a number of people still subscribe to old feeds. This has direct impact on what stats can look like. [TNL.net weblog]
Locate IP Addresses
NET: Atelier Web IP Locator v1.0.
http://www.atelierweb.com/iploc/index.htm
- 833K
- Win98/2k/XP
- FREE
{IP locator} Enter IP addresses to retrieve information including country, city, ISP, and start / end IP addresses. You can enter up to 100 IP addresses and search for them. The resulting information is useful for locating Internet visitors or sites that send spyware (I have a list of sites to block and a couple of them only list the IP address). It's also for producing localized content, redirecting visitors, analyzing raw Web logs, and producing spam-filtering software. Even use it to learn about IP addresses and the information they provide. [Meryl]
[Lockergnome Windows Fanatics]
Weekend Blogger
weekend mode....
[jenett.radio] Wednesday, March 24, 2004Get Better Rankings on Google With Weblogs
Get better rankings on Google with weblogs.
Lee LeFever: Case Study: Using a Weblog to Achieve #1 Rankings in Google.
Most of this stuff matches my own experiences as well.
[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
Tuesday, March 23, 2004Web Access at 75 Percent
This should not surprise anyone. The hysterical 'digital divide' crowd needs to find a new trumped-up topic to occupy their time.
Nearly three of four people in the United States have Internet access at home, Nielsen/NetRatings said on Thursday.
In a February telephone survey, an estimated 204.3 million people, or 74.9 percent of the population above the age of 2 and living in households equipped with a fixed-line phone, had Internet access, up from 66 percent in February 2003.
"In just a handful of years, online access has managed to gain the type of traction that took other mediums decades to achieve," said Kenneth Cassar, director of strategic analysis at Nielsen/NetRatings.
Women were slightly more likely to be Web surfers than their male counterparts, the company said.
Internet penetration for women aged 35 to 54 was 81.7 percent, compared with 80.2 percent for men in the same age group. For the 25 to 34 age group, Internet usage was 77 percent for women and 75.6 percent for men.
"Women make the majority of purchases and household decisions, so it's no surprise that they are utilizing the Internet as a tool for daily living," Cassar said.
[Wired News]
A Mental Model for Persuasion Architecture
A Mental Model for Persuasion Architecture. Can't really get a grip on what we mean by Persuasion Architecture? Then think of a book. [GrokDotCom]
Saturday, March 20, 2004Seven Conversion Rate Concepts for the Final Exam
Seven Conversion Rate Concepts for the Final Exam [ClickZ]
Always Consider the Source
Visitors arrive via different search engines, keywords, or ads. Understanding this helps convert them. What message prompts prospects to visit your site? Do they arrive and immediately find what they came for? Why does the message get them to click? How do you echo the message's relevance on your site? Does the message qualify buyers or disappoint searchers? ...
Know Your Audience
Each person must be sold differently. Invest time up front planning hyperlinks and the words around them...
Buy From Your Site
How easy is it to buy from you? Pick a task on your site and try to follow it to its end...
Consider Persuasive Momentum
OneStat.com reports 54.60 percent of Web site visitors look through only one or two pages on a site before leaving...
Make the Next Action Obvious
Visitors must first orient themselves. Don't make buying difficult. Do make the next step obvious...
Provide a Reason to Click
When do prospects delve deep into your site? When they see value in your offer. Provide it by anticipating their questions and answering them on the spot. This can be done in the immediate copy or through a hyperlink to the answer...
Conversion Reflects Action
Conversion reflects how well you get visitors to take the action you desire. There are two sides to this. The macro side is your overall objective. Every site should have at least one final objective...
Tuesday, March 16, 2004Estimating RSS Readership: One Suggestion
Estimating RSS Readership: One Suggestion. RSS feeds are undoubtedly becoming an increasingly popular way for people to keep up with what's new online. But just how popular are they becoming? That's an important and tricky question.Some recent articles and weblog entries have been touting the popularity of RSS feeds. These are great, and I'm happy to see them. However, I think there's an important part of the puzzle missing from this enthusiasm: How might publishers figure out how many people are really accessing their content via RSS?...
(Full story, with excerpt and links...) [Contentious Weblog]
Web Metrics Versus Web Analytics
Web Metrics Versus Web Analytics. by Jim Sterne Ask for a definition of “Web metrics,” and those in the know will not hesitate to explain. But be prepared to hear different stories. [Current Articles from MarketingProfs.com]
Was It Better Ads? Or Better Analytics?
Was It Better Ads? Or Better Analytics? Yes, online advertising has changed and evolved over the past few years. The primary reason companies failed then and succeed now isn't due to changes in advertising. It's changes successful companies are making when approaching the Web. Defining desired behavior, identifying success metrics, setting goals; in short, a more evolved approach to analytics.[ClickZ]
Monday, March 15, 2004More on Conversion Rates
Without Conversion Rates, You Don’t Know if You’re Mickey Mouse or Mickey Mantle. by Steve Jackson The conversion rate on a Web site is easy to measure. Unfortunately, businesses too busy concentrating on their bottom line most often overlook it. [Current Articles from MarketingProfs.com]
RSS: Doing The Robot
More on RSS and web analytics from Chad Dickerson, CTO at InfoWorld
Via Feedster, I picked up Sean Gallagher's response ("The RSS ego bubble") to my recent post about InfoWorld's RSS request trends. While the robot-like activity of aggregators is certainly a factor in looking at the numbers (as I noted in my original post), I think some of the information in Sean's post was misleading and deserves further discussion.
I've been involved in hands-on analysis of web server logs at some extremely highly-trafficked web sites over the years, so I dutifully noted the robot-like behavior of news aggregators in my original post:
I realize that the characteristics of RSS aggregators' requests are different than those initiated by regular users browsing your site -- aggregators behave more like robots or spiders. But I still think this is significant.
Sean responded:
Sure, it's significant. But does Chad really understand the difference?
Yep -- I wouldn't have mentioned the request characteristics of news aggregators in my initial post otherwise, but it's certainly worth a deeper discussion with more useful and defensible data points.
In his post, Sean extrapolates the importance of InfoWorld's RSS request trend based on the 63 users he estimates visit his site daily (50 who use a browser and 13 who use news aggregators). InfoWorld's sample is a few orders of magnitude larger, and includes a broader mix of regular browsers, aggregators, search engine spiders, etc. so I think a closer look at our usage patterns might be more useful to the larger community.
As anyone who has analyzed lots of web server logs knows, the overall web measurement picture is a bit complicated by robots, spiders, proxies, etc., and RSS measurement is no different. (The issues in counting RSS subscribers were summarized quite well by Tim Bray back in May of last year, for those who are interested in digging deeper.)
However -- I think Sean's emphasis on the robotic behavior of news aggregators is a bit overblown and depends too heavily on a scenario where the average aggregator is updating every 15 minutes, an assumption that is not borne out in InfoWorld's server logs. In InfoWorld's case, the most popular news aggregator among our users is Radio Userland (check this out), and you can only configure it to fetch feeds once per hour. Considering that fact, the 100 potential requests per day that Sean suggests is off by a factor of at least 4 for our largest body of aggregator users.
The whole world doesn't use Radio Userland, so to be fair, I picked 5 random IPs of NetNewsWire users to get a rough estimation of how often they request our Top News feed (the subject of my original post) in a 24-hour period: 49, 48, 6, 48, and 48. I'm not a NetNewsWire user myself, so I downloaded and installed it only to discover that the only choices for update frequency are: 1) manually, 2) every 30 minutes, 3) every hour, and 4) every four hours. Sean's 100-requests-a-day scenario depends on a NetNewsWire client updating every 15 minutes. Hmmm. I guess you could manually update every fifteen minutes via the "News->Refresh All News" menu, but my random tests suggest that most users update every 30 minutes. 100 requests per day for a feed would seem to exaggerate NetNewsWire's behavior by at least a factor of two.
Requests from RSS clients certainly exaggerate requests to some debateable degree; however, there are some notable corrections in the other direction. In the case of web-based aggregators (Bloglines, Feedster), you have the opposite of robotic behavior -- the RSS aggregator acts as a proxy making a single request for a pool of users. If you don't have substantial numbers of subscribers using the web-based aggregator, this won't matter so much, but we do. As I investigated the effect of services like Bloglines on our Top News RSS feed numbers, I was able to determine our subscriber numbers from the User-Agent string available in requests from Bloglines' server:
Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 981 subscribers)I'll admit, I hadn't realized before that Bloglines included subscriber numbers in their User-Agent string (others already knew), but how cool is that? In any case, I also checked to see how often Bloglines' server requested our Tops News RSS feed last Monday -- 23 times. The ratio of subscribers to requests is about 43:1 right now, and the gap is widening every day.
(Another interesting technical aside -- as our RSS requests have grown quickly, we have noticed increased server loads at the top of the hour as aggregators "wake up" to pull feeds. Not a huge problem for us right now, but the surge has roughly the same characteristics as a distributed DoS attack and could eventually present trouble for really huge web sites unless aggregators become a bit smarter. I was working at CNN.com when IE4 and its Active Desktop with various CDF "channels" was released, and boy was it active. CNN.com and CNNSI.com were default channels in the new browser. All the newly-downloaded IE4 clients absolutely pounded our servers with requests for CDF files. It was a big pain, and I wish I could remember how we dealt with it.)
Finally, the discussions about print and online publishing business model disruptions created by RSS are nothing new to us at InfoWorld (see here, particularly comments from Matt McAlister, our online GM). We're experimenting with various business models around RSS like everyone else who needs to pay the bills, but ultimately we're focused on giving users valuable content in the format they want, and the growth in RSS requests is an indication that we're getting it at least partially right.
[Chad Dickerson]
Tuesday, March 09, 2004RSS Tipping Point
This from the CTO at InfoWorld. Chad thinks this is significant. I think their experience was significant long before their RSS hits exceeded their home page hits. If their site is similar to that of my employer, only 50% of entry hits are on the home page.
RSS consumers are begging you to send them information. They are the power-users that you really want. They don't want to wait until some marketing email czar decides it is time for another blast. They are begging you to send them information as soon as you have something to say. They don't want to wait until your "once a month" newsletter or your "twice a month" email blast. They want to know now if you have anything new to say. As far as I'm concerned, it can't get any better than that.
Ever since we began publishing RSS feeds at InfoWorld, the requests for our home page had always exceeded requests for our Top News RSS feed. Not any more. Over the past several weeks, requests for InfoWorld's Top News RSS feed have regularly exceeded the requests for our home page. This has been going on long enough now that we're certain that it's permanent. I think it's a big deal.
During the business day, we track hour-to-hour performance (using a combination of shell scripts and Analog) and in any given hour, about 8 of our top 10 most requested files are RSS files. The actual numbers are proprietary, of course, but I can say that we have seen significant growth in overall RSS requests just in the past several weeks.
Feels like a tipping point to me.
(I realize that the characteristics of RSS aggregators' requests are different than those initiated by regular users browsing your site -- aggregators behave more like robots or spiders. But I still think this is significant.)
[Chad Dickerson]
Friday, March 05, 2004Accurate Analytics Require Cookies
Effectively tracking site visitors is extremely important for gathering accurate site-activity metrics. Over the last few years, cookies have gotten almost as bad a reputation as the more well-known chocolate chip variety (my personal favorite) have among the diet conscious. The former has a reputation for invading privacy; the latter for expanding waistlines. [ClickZ]
Thursday, March 04, 2004Tracking User Navigation Methods By Logging Where Users Click On Web Pages
Tracking user navigation methods by logging where users click on web pages. Michael Angeles has written a truly excellent blog entry on using logs to determine the effectiveness of navigation. This is a must-see entry due to the concrete research, and fascinating results. To quote: I need some way of exploring alternatives...
[Column Two]
Stalk Your User
Stalk your user. This article is from quite a while back, but Jeff Veen wrote about contextual inquiry. To quote: Contextual inquiry is an increasingly popular method for discovering this information. Also known as ethnographic research or field studies, the idea is deceptively...
[Column Two]
10 Steps to Measuring Web Site Success
10 Steps to Measuring Web Site Success. by Jim Sterne Here is the handy-dandy Sterne How-To Guide for measuring the success of your Web site. [Current Articles from MarketingProfs.com]
Good Experience: The Page Paradigm
Good Experience: The Page Paradigm. In my nine years of working on the Web's user experience, a lot has changed online - but one thing that hasn't changed much is the way that users navigate websites. Back in 1999, I proposed the "Page Paradigm" to describe this near-constant usage pattern; it still holds today... [Tomalak's Realm]
Wednesday, March 03, 2004Lessons Learned in Web Analytics
Lessons Learned in Web Analytics. debbie’s blog reports, “WebTrends NetIQ has just released their Lessons Learned in Web Analytics in 2003 report. Download the 36-page PDF here. It’s mostly a paean to WebTrends as an analytics tool. But you’ll find some useful nuggets. Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs & International Trade used the “average view time” statistic to figure out which pages on their site were too long. Then they cut the copy to make for a quicker read.” By meryl@lockergnome.com (Meryl). [Lockergnome’s Technology News]
Traffic Stats and RSS
Traffic Stats and RSS. An interesting thing happened recently. I was playing around with Andrew Grumet's tool based on the information in Share Your OPML and discovered that a number of people still subscribe to old feeds. This has direct impact on what stats can look like. [TNL.net weblog]
Tuesday, March 02, 2004Site Analytics: 'Why' Is as Vital as 'What'
When I wrote in this space about using behavioral data to calculate exit ratios and pinpoint site problems, I got a bushel of e-mail from attitudinal data devotees asking: What about surveys? Customer feedback? Questionnaires? Don't they count?
Well, I was getting to that. [ClickZ]