Internet Marketing Blog

Flickr Has Stats

I got my wish. Or I've got part of my wish, anyway.

In September, I asked why I couldn't get usage statistics with my social networking accounts like Facebook and MySpace.

Flickr added basic statistics to the Pro version of their photo sharing service last week. Now that gives me tremendous incentive to pay the $24.95 annual fee for a Pro account.

A Pro account will show you page views, which sites are linking to your Flickr photo pages, how people are finding your photos within Flickr, and what search terms people are using to find your photos using the search engines. Search Engine Land has a detailed breakdown on how the stats work.

This is the first time we've had readily available usage statistics for photo sharing sites, which help a great deal in understanding how people use such sites.

Separate The Blog Wheat From The Chaff With Comments Heat Maps

How To Evolve Blog Commenting In Three Easy Steps

I've been thinking about social media a lot lately  and how people interact with Web 2.0 technologies and services themselves as well the other people who use those services.

In particular, I've been thinking about the comment function of blogs. And how to improve that function.

As a football nut and a die-hard Vikings fan who still reads everything about the team despite their abysmal record this year, I spend a lot of time on Vikings blogs, especially the Star Tribune's superb Access Vikings blog by their beat writers Judd Zulgad and Kevin Seifert. 

I'm sure it's one, if not the, most popular Strib blog. There is certainly a lot of participation by its  readers. A post from yesterday about Daunte Culpepper coming back to town boasts 162 comments.

I often read the comments because there's some very good stuff in there, but wading through the crap and the banter from one reader to another is usually a waste of time. Separating the conversational wheat from the chaff is a problem for all blogs with a lot of reader participation, not just Access Vikings.

Step One

I'd love to see some smart programmers at Six Apart or Blogger or some open source guru create a plugin for WordPress that would do this: Allow me (as a registered user of the blog in question) to annotate the blog post and apply highlighting and/or my own comments in the form of, say, a sticky note(s) that I can place anywhere on the page.

Step Two

It would also have a function like the fantastic ClickTale service that gives you a "recording" of each site visitor's behavior on the page by following mouse movements. I often, for instance, click and drag my mouse over text to highlight interesting text. I don't know why I do it, but I do. That behavior could be captured.

Step Three

Combining ClickTale recordings with the sticky notes data should give you enough aggregate data to create a heat map for that page.

Apply heat maps to the blog comments and, voila, as a blog reader I've got a quick visual representation of the relative "interestingness" of blog comments. And as a blogger, I'd get extremely valuable data on how people were interacting with my blog.

Perhaps someone could come up with a semantic solution that analyzes the text of blog comments and the frequency with which blog comments refer to other comments or commenters to determine "interestingness."

However it's arrived at, we sorely need a solution and it seems to me that the technology is probably already in place to create it.

Meta Me: My Lifestream Through Google Analytics

Now that Google is increasingly owning everything online, they ought to start thinking about integrating their Google Analytics service into everything else they own not called AdWords.

In addition to analytics, the Google accounts and services I use include Webmaster Tools, Local Business Center, iGoogle, Alerts, Gmail, Talk, Docs, Notebook, Calendar, Maps, Maps for Mobile, Earth, Picasa, Groups, Page Creator, Reader, Bookmarks, Shared Stuff, Blogger, FeedBurner, AdWords, AdSense, Checkout, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Orkut, Video, YouTube, Desktop, Mobile Search, GOOG-411, Google SMS, Web History, Trends, Suggest, Sets, and Toolbar.

I'd like to get statistics for all of these products and services to analyze how and how often I use them. I admit, it would be a huge step for a lot of people to surrender and personally identify all that data about themselves and entrust it to a megacorporation.

Services such as Tumblr and the most recent Google acquisition, Jaiku, allow account holders to plug in the RSS feeds from all of their various online accounts, from your blog to YouTube to digg to Flickr and Twitter and display the content you create in one "lifestream" to which friends (or strangers) can subscribe. The emergence of the notion of, and services catering to, lifestreaming suggest that the idea of sharing your entire electronic life is gaining a foothold in the popular consciousness.

Certainly, user statistics for all these services are being collected by the service itself, though that data is not necessarily personally identifiable. Why not allow people or organizations access to their own data?

The payoff could be huge for both the user and the organization. Say Google runs with my request and integrates Analytics into all of their products and opens up the user data to their users. The analytics of how you behave online could prove invaluable to those users in terms of finding ways to use their time or services more efficiently or in hundreds of other ways we have yet to fathom.

The payoff for Google is massive and obvious in that they would accrue a gold mine of user behavior data, the knowledge from which they could then apply to their existing and future products.

Further, with Google's foray into the productivity software business, the resultant integrated system could form the foundation for a largely automated time recording system to calculate time sheets in the background, saving businesses a lot of lost time and productivity.

And that could the mother of all cash cows.

Will Google's Video Ad Network Expand The Embeddable Web?

Steve Rubel argued yesterday that web site traffic metrics are increasingly irrelevant "So debating which sites drive the most traffic is really meaningless."

I think he will eventually be proved right, so I agree with his assertion that we need a new way to measure Internet activity. One primary reason for this is that content is becoming radically decentralized, so it is no longer nearly as important to drive people to a given location on the Web.

Google's recent announcement that they will include YouTube videos in their AdSense advertising network will go a long way toward decentralizing video content. Video content providers will be able to earn money by placing their videos in the network and web sites will be able to earn money from hosting the ads.

If   you want to get me going on a rant, bring up the fact that many organizations prohibit embedding of their video. As I've said before and I'll no doubt say again, prohibiting embedding is nearly always against the content provider's best interests. 

Most local television news sites now host videos of their broadcasts but most also prohibit embedding of that video, offering a simple hyperlink as their concession to "sharing." But the conversation happens elsewhere, primarily at blogs or other online forums. Bloggers would happily embed newscasts when discussing current events. Embedded newscasts provides easy and free product placement that builds brand awareness for the local network affiliate.

Happily, Google has just provided monetary incentive for content producers to allow embedding of their videos and that should help spread the love.

I Want A Healthy Serving Of Statistics With My Social Networks

I live and die by statistics.

I use Google Analytics and Webmaster, Statcounter, Performancing Metrics, MyBlogLog, Feedburner, AddThis, ClickTracks and other for that very reason.

I've got great statistics for my web sites, blogs, and RSS feeds; so why can't I have them for my social networking and media sites?

The video sharing sites like Google Video and YouTube and Metacafe provide basic statistics on viewership for a given video. That's helpful but not enough. But at least it's better than the social networking sites, social media, and social bookmarking sites.

Most of these sites do not even have a function for adding code to your account and even if they do, as MySpace does, they do not allow you to add JavaScript code so that rules out using third party web analytics services such as Google Analytics to do the job. 

There are plenty of very good reasons to prohibit people from posting JavaScript code to their social sites, foremost among them the risk that someone will (and people will) post malicious code that will effect users who visit that page.

I understand. So instead, why can't the MySpaces and Facebooks, and LinkedIns, and Flickrs, and del.icio.uses and Twitters of the world give me those stats themselves.

I doesn't have to be anything fancy; the basics would do just fine: Number of unique visitor by hour, day, week, month and year, how they got to my page and where they came from, and if they used a search engine, which one did they use and what search phrase brought them to me.

That's all I ask. I might even be willing to pay a little for the service.

Right now, the only indicator of how highly trafficked your social media account is, are the number of friends or contacts you have or how many outside sites are linking to your page. But that doesn't count how many people are actually visiting your page. You could go out and find a bunch of friends but they may not ever visit your page again after the initial friend approval.

The volume of comments you get on your content is a better indicator of popularity and engagement with your page but that still offers no concrete numbers.

I want to know a lot more than that and I don't think I'm alone.

So here's a plea to the social networking and media sites please add some basic statistics to your services before some smart developer figures out a way to provide that service through a JavaScriptless widget.

Google Conversion University Video

Google does a great job at producing instructional and educational video. This one was released yesterday by the Google Analytics team and was shot at the first Google Conversion University event. Analytics is Google's free web site traffic statistics service. I love it; it's got amazing depth and sophistication that allows you to analyze in detail how people are arriving at and using your site. This video gives you a nice overview of the service:

See also:

• Google Analytics Video Tutorial

Google Analytics Video Tutorial

I preach the virtues of robust traffic measurement all the time. I have been using Google Analytics since it was rolled out as a service and I absolutely love it, especially since they've adopted the new interface.  Conversation Marketing has uploaded an excellent series of video tutorials for Google Analytics web site statistics services. If you aren't already using Google Analytics, I highly recommend looking into it. The following superb tutorials will take you through the ins and outs:

Google Analytics Tutorial 1: Setup

Google Analytics Tutorial 2: Essential Stats

Google Analytics Tutorial 3: Digging Deeper

Google Analytics Tutorial 4: Goal Tracking

Google Analytics Tutorial 5: SEO Analytics

Google Analytics Video Tutorial 6: Visitor Segmentation