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Do you know which of your posts have been viewed most? Which categories (if your blog supports them) are most popular? How about where your visitors are geographically situated?

If you use Performancing Metrics to monitor how your blog is being viewed, you do. I use them, and I’m learning a lot about my readers’ interests.

Today I’m going to look at my ‘Post Views’, i.e., which posts (articles) are attracting the most reader attention. We’ll begin by looking at the default Performancing Metrics script. I use WordPress as my blogging engine so my default script reflects the WordPress API. If you use another blogging engine (such as Drupal or Moveable Type) I’m going to assume that you can translate the concepts in this article into code for your specific blogging engine.

DEFAULT METRICS SCRIPT

When I first signed-up to use Performancing Metrics, here’s the script they gave me (please note that the line numbers are for our reference only and are not part of the original script):

01    <script type="text/javascript">
02    <?php
03    global $userdata;
04    if ($userdata) {
05        echo "z_user_name=\"" . $userdata->display_name . "\";\n";
06        echo "z_user_email=\"" . $userdata->user_email . "\";\n";
07    }
08    ?>
09    z_post_title="<?php the_title();?>";
10    z_post_category="<?php $c=get_the_category();echo $c[0]->cat_name;?>";
11    </script>
12    <script id="stats_script" type="text/javascript" src="http://metrics.performancing.com/wp.js"></script>

Please notice line number 9 (“09”). That line populates a javascript variable called ‘z_post_title’ with the result of a PHP call to a WordPress function called ‘the_title()’, which returns — yes, you guessed it! — the title! You may be wondering, as I did: what title? of the page? of the post? of the archive? of the category? of the search results?

Hm… welcome to the confusion that would soon dominate my blog-metrics world. You see, WordPress’s ‘the_title()’ function returns the title of the current blog post. Which is absolutely perfect if we’re looking at an individual post. The challenge here is that not everyone who visited my blog was visiting individual posts. Some people came to the home page and read entire posts from there… others came through search engine results and went right to the post itself or, in some cases, were directed to the category archive or a monthly archive on my blog.

MYSTERIOUS POPULARITY

After using the default Performancing Metrics script for a few weeks, I found myself viewing my ‘Post Views’ panel with some surprise: posts that I thought would be more popular with my readers sometimes appeared as though they weren’t popular, while other posts that I thought would be less interesting seemed to be getting a lot of unanticipated attention.

Here are a couple of screen shots showing my first week’s Performancing Metrics using the default script for a WordPress blog:

Please notice that every post being counted in this ‘Post Views’ panel is identified only by the the post’s title, i.e., the_title(). There’s nothing at all wrong with title-only nomenclature but as we will soon see, it’s hiding some rather significant details.

It turns out that calling WordPress’s ‘the_title()’ function from any page with more than one post on it — whether the blog homepage, or a category archive, or a date archive, or even a search result — will return only the top-most post’s title on the current blog page.

As I thought more carefully about the mysteriously skewed popularity of my posts, I realized what was going on. This is a subtle point that came upon me as an ‘aha!’ moment and if you haven’t already had the same flash of insight, hold on to your hat!

Let’s say I write just 2 posts a day. I check the online news sources for interesting items. I find one and write about it, publishing to my blog sometime around 8:00am. It’s a real gem of a story and I think to myself, “Wow! My readers are gonna LOVE this!”

About 30 minutes later I find another interesting item. It’s not nearly as significant as the first post I made just a half-hour earlier but I think to myself, “This is kinda cool. It’s not as important as the first post today but maybe some of my readers will find the less-intense content refreshing.” So again I write and publish a post, and off to work I go.

At the end of the day I check my Performancing Metrics numbers on the ‘Post Views’ panel and what do I find? Only a few people seemed interested in the first post but a whole lot more seemed to visit the second post.

I feel a bit confused by these numbers. Do I not really understand my target audience? Do I think I’m writing for one audience but am really getting the attention of another altogether? It seems inconceivable to me that my readers would prefer the second, less-intense post over the first one.

But numbers don’t lie, and there before me are the cold, hard facts. How can I argue with numbers?

DETAIL BEHIND THE NUMBERS

Well, I can’t. And upon further reflection I realized that I didn’t have to.

That first post had been the top-most post on my blog for all of about 30 minutes, while the second post had been top-most on my blog for the remainder of the day — of course! no wonder the numbers looked like they did!

Here’s the subtle but very important conclusion: every time someone visited my blog’s homepage, they would have a chance to read both stories but… the default Performancing Metrics script would capture ‘the_title()’ of the top-most post on the page and tally a view for that, and only that, post.

Both articles may’ve been read… neither one might’ve been read… perhaps only one or the other was read but I couldn’t tell from the Performancing Metrics tally because a view to my blog’s homepage was equivalent — from the Metrics standpoint — with a view of that post alone.

By now you might’ve guessed that if a reader were to have visited that second post’s page, the tally would accrue just as it had for visiting the homepage when that second post was top-most on the page. This effect was magnified even more if a day went by where I didn’t post at all: the last post from the previous day would seem to jump off the scale in popularity with every visit to my blog’s homepage.

TWEAKING METRICS FOR DETAILS

Although I’ve made my living as a software developer since the mid 1980’s, web development hasn’t been a part of my job description. If I was going to attempt to modify my default Performancing Metrics script so that it would give me finer distinctions in the numbers it tracked, I was going to have to learn the PHP scripting language. Specifically, I was going to have to research the WordPress API functions that I’d need to call in order to get this increased granularity that I desired from my Metrics numbers.

If all that I’ve described makes sense to you so far… if you’re nodding your head up and down in agreement that you also want to benefit from this additional level of detail in your Metrics, then let me tell ya: have I got a solution for you!

It took me a few days of reading and experimenting with PHP and with WordPress function calls. I often interrupted a co-worker who was much more experienced with PHP than I was, in order to get an informed sense of direction or a quick answer to an otherwise newbie question. The result of all this time and effort is this modified version of the original Performancing Metrics script (it is a mixture of javascript and php; for those of you unfamiliar with either or both, let’s discuss questions in the comments vs. me trying to anticipate questions and answer them here; this, in order to keep the article as brief as possible — thanks in advance for your understanding!):

001    <script type="text/javascript">
002    /* --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
003        2006-03-31~rch: use custom title and category labels to distinguish between actual page
004        visits and accidental visits previously tracked when an archive (homepage, search, monthly
005        or daily archives, etc.) are browsed; script developed with help from I.McFadden.
006    
007        original code:
008
009            z_post_title="<?php the_title();?>";
010            z_post_category="<?php $c=get_the_category();echo $c[0]->cat_name;?>";
011    
012        new code:
013    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */
014    
015    <?php
016        if ( is_home() ) {
017    ?>
018            // adds "Homepage (" prefix and ")" suffix to post title, and
019            // sets category tracker to custom string (in this case "~HomePage"):
020            z_post_title="Homepage (<?php the_title();?>)";
021            z_post_category="~HomePage";
022    
023    <?php
024        } elseif ( is_single() ) {
025    ?>
026            // just prints the title all by itself while setting
027            // the category to the first one listed in the POST's
028            // category array
029            // NOTE: this is the default Performancing Metrics behavior.
030            // --- TO DO --- is there a way to list all categories assigned to
031            //               a post such that all categories, collectively, are
032            //               being tracked by Performancing ???
033            z_post_title="<?php the_title();?>";
034            z_post_category="<?php $c=get_the_category();echo $c[0]->cat_name;?>";
035    
036    <?php
037        } elseif ( is_category() ) {
038    ?>
039            // adds "Category: " prefix and prints only the category of
040            // the PAGE (vs. of the POST); no title printed because seems
041            // irrelevant to the tracking of category views vs. specific
042            // post views:
043            z_post_title="Category: <?php the_category();?>
044            z_post_category="<?php single_cat_title();?>";
045    
046    <?php
047        } elseif ( is_search() ) {
048    ?>
049        // adds "Search: " prefix and user's actual search term(s), while
050        // setting category to custom string "~Search":
051        z_post_title="Search: <?php echo wp_specialchars($s);?> (<?php the_title(); ?>)";
052        z_post_category="~Search";
053    
054    <?php
055        } elseif ( is_month() ) {
056    ?>
057            // adds "Month: " prefix followed by the actual date that, for
058            // my taste, is formatted as "31 March 2006", and sets Category
059            // to "~Month":
060            z_post_title="Month: [<?php echo date("d M Y");?>]";
061            z_post_category="~Month";
062    
063    <?php
064        } elseif ( is_day() ) {
065    ?>
066            // adds "Day: " prefix followed by the actual date that, for
067            // my taste, is formatted as "31 March 2006", and sets Category
068            // to "~Day":
069            z_post_title="Day: [<?php echo date("d M Y");?>]";
070            z_post_category="~Day";
071    
072    <?php
073        } else {
074    ?>
075            z_post_title="(?<?php the_title();?>)";
076            z_post_category="~Unknown";
077    
078    <?php
079        }
080    ?>
081    // end change.
082    
083    </script>
084    
085    <script id="stats_script" type="text/javascript" src="http://metrics.performancing.com/wp.js"></script>

In contrast with the earlier ‘Post Views’ panel we saw, here’s how Performancing Metrics now labels my blog’s numbers:

Whereas before every entry was a post title and nothing more, now these descriptors include context markers like “Homepage (” in front of the title to show, when a user viewed the homepage, which post was at the top of the page at the time. It also shows things like when a user has viewed a date-driven archive by prefixing either “Month: [” or “Day: [” in front of the post title. Similar results are obtained if the user views by category or by searching for something.

I thought that was pretty useful for my purposes. I also realize that there’s probably a lot more that one could add to this script to polish and tailor it even more so if any of you PHP or WordPress or javascript gurus want to build on this, or refine it further, I welcome your changes.

That’s all, folks! Enjoy!

On monday there will be some scheduled, planned maintenance being performed on some of the core Metrics backend. For most of you it shouldn’t cause much inconvenience, but so that you know what’s going on, and in the interests of being as open about the system as possible, let me tell you what’s going to happen and why…

What’s Going to Happen

• At 10am PDT on Monday, Metrics will go offline for 30-60mins while a file system copy of all the databases is performed.
• When that’s done, Metrics will come back online. During this time, and throughout thewhole operation, data will continue to be collected.
• The next 6-12hrs will be spent running a conversion script to move us to a new database schema (more on why later..)
• During this time, processing (turning raw data into meaningful statistics) will be stopped, and once the above task is done, it takes about 6-12hrs to fully catch up again.
• Everything should then be back to normal

Why We’re Doing This

The difference between theory, and real live data is vast. Now we have around a months worth of real data to analyze, we’ve found that we can make improvements to the system that just hadn’t been noticed in the theory part of Metric’s development.

We’d like to make those improvements for the good of the system, and hope you’ll bear with us during Monday while this work is done.

What Comes Next?

A few weeks down the road, there will be another tweak similar to this. I’m hoping we can also learn from this and fine tune the process so it has even less impact on users, but i’ll have to talk to you about that nearer the time when more info is available.

Thanks everyone…

My webzine,loadedpun, is dedicated to finding out the latest information in online video in all of it’s forms. It’s an arduous task. Like most bloggers, I follow hundreds of blogs and sites in my RSS feeder, skimming for content that catches my eye and sparks an post idea.

One of the problems with this approach is that I tend to rely too much on just a few sources. How do I find the information that few are writing about? I’ll tell you how I get around this.

I use tag searches. In del.icio.us, I use my inbox to search for tags on relevant topics. The inbox queries are then made into a feed which I follow in my RSS reader. These are good for skimming to see what others are tagging in the area I’m interested in. If a particular user name keeps coming up in the results, I know that they are interested in the same things I am and I add them to my inbox search.

Many social bookmarking sites have feeds that are tag specific and you can often find things that don’t come up in del.icio.us although they may not be as prolific. For these, I utilize FeedBlendr.

With FeedBlendr, I can combine several tag feeds into one which I can then label with the tag I am searching. I have a feed for “videoblog”, for example, made up of tag feeds from magnolia, furl, blink, etc. I can also mix in variables, combining searches for “videoblog” and “vlog”.

The best place I’ve found for doing this type of feed search has been Technorati. Most bloggers tag their posts with Technorati tags so the feed I get comes directly from the people producing the content rather than readers who choose to bookmark and tag it. Think of it as going to the source.

If your site is specific to a particular topic, try out these tips and let me know how they work for you.

-Anne

Yes, you read the title correctly. A self-described Adsense junkie has decided to seek help. Step 1: Admitting you have a problem.

For me, that problem was having a sizable portion of my income come from one company. The problem was the constant worry of a click attack and getting booted without warning. The problem was no good backup plan to monetize (YPN? could make up maybe 20%). And the problem was not understanding the details of how and why I get paid how much I get paid (smart pricing).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I looooove Adsense. It’s by far the best way to monetize content on many niche topics. But, looking back, I should never have invested so much in business models that have the above problems.

The other option

Now, I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture. I’ll give it to you straight. Affiliate marketing is hard. And most blogs do not lend themselves to be monetized well with affiliate ads.

From my own tests in the past, I knew about these challenges in monetizing blogs with affiliate links. Affiliate links just didn’t fit most of my sites.

So I started from square one. What type of site would work well with affiliate monetization? The answer (and I’m not saying it’s the only answer, but it’s the answer I found) is to build sites around the buying cycle.

Compare:

1) A blog about trends in VoIP, including security issues, industry news, regulatory news, etc.

2) A blog about VoIP products for consumers, including reviews of the latest VoIP wireless phones, headsets, routers, etc.

#1 is a dream for Adsensing. I get ads for VoIP, which pay well, and who cares if they ever convert? But if I put up affiliate links, the revenue is terrible. I don’t see conversions. Most of my visitors are enthusiasts or geeks who want news. They aren’t shopping.

At any given time, the vast majority (98%?) of people on the Web aren’t shopping for something. And getting a conversion out of those people is extremely hard, since you have to get them over the first step (“what is this product? do I even want it?”).

Now, if you can get a lot of traffic from the 2% — the shoppers — your job is easy; they know what it is; they know they want it; so show them their options, and let the merchant take care of the rest.

Newfound confidence

So let’s revisit the problems I had with Adsense:

1. having a sizable portion of my income come from one company.
2. the constant worry of a click attack and getting booted without warning.
3. no good backup plan to monetize
4. not understanding the details of how and why I get paid how much I get paid

With affiliate marketing, I get:

1. income coming from many different merchants
2. no worry about click fraud — no conversion, no revenue
3. plenty of backup plans (I won’t bother in a market if I can’t find multiple affiliate programs)
4. I understand how each and every affiliate relationship works. It’s spelled out in the contract terms and the payout is predictable.

Yes, it feels pretty sweet.

But it’s not for everyone. If you can’t (or don’t feel like) creating content that’s geared towards the buying cycle, you’re going to find it much harder to get conversions. And if you have an established, respected blog, the thought of starting a new one in ‘the buying cycle’ might make you tired just thinking about it. But if this stuff is feeding your family (or yourself), my advice to you is to get on it, and pronto!

p.s. Sorry I didn’t give more concrete examples of sites/niches, I normally like giving examples… I just didn’t want to reveal my niches 😉 But if you want some examples of blogs geared towards ‘the buying cycle’, you can check out Manolo’s Shoe Blog or Digital Photography Blog.

p.p.s. the alternate title for this blog entry was: “Affiliate dollars… they just taste sweeter”

Last weekend some of you noticed we were having some issues with processing data — it was an embarrassing cock up on our part, the processing engine wasn’t restarted after a reboot of all the systems and we failed to notice for like 10hrs! 🙂 But, as I hope you also noticed, as soon as it became apparent that something was amiss, it was all hands on deck, and eventually we got the system fully functional again with no loss of data, and began back processing to catch up.

This went ok as a “quick fix”, but some longer term planning has been the top priority for some days now, as quick fixes only go so far, and the overall stability of the system is more important. At the end of the day, a quick fix here would be like most anywhere else, just the illusion of “fixed”, and not truly very helpful.

The optimization of queries, processes and several seriously heavy duty servers take a little time, so this post is just to let you guys know that if you’re seeing a few oddities in your reports over this week, it’s all in a good cause, and no data is being lost. While we have over eight million records being logged every single day though, the optimization process has to be handled very carefully, so will take a little time.

Optimization was always the plan, we just need to do it now, not later…

We always expected to have to optimize the system when we had real data running through it, and it was always part of the plan. We just didn’t expect to have to do it quite so soon after launch. With over 5000 blogs being tracked, we’re about 3x as far ahead as we expected to be at this stage which is cool on one hand, but a bit of a pain on the other as resources need to be moved around a reprioritized accordingly.

I hope that answers a few of the questions im seeing in the forums, and that you’ll bear with us for a few days while we get some long term solutions in place as opposed to quick fixes.

My apologies for any inconvenience, you will of course be the first to know when things change.

One of my theories for a while has been that Google Adsense is bad for blogs and bad for bloggers. Chasing Adsense clicks leads bloggers into making changes that are not good for the audience, the blogger or the long term good of the blog. Metrics is providing what I think over a longer term might be conclusive evidence with my favourite blog.

Since I first started testing Metrics with my blogs I have seen a trend that other than one or two exceptions, the best performing posts for Adsense clicks were the worst performing for comments. It seems on my blog at least I have to choose between “ad clicks efficient” and “stickiness”. Does this sound familiar? Take a look at your metrics and let me know.

In my case the posts that achieved the most clicks were very product detail focused. I am talking about reviews, gossip about future products, technical details of products and product feature glossaries.

What about the maximum comments? They are posts that spark discussion, controversial, interesting news, posts where people have ideas or opinions. They don’t get any ad clicks but the comment threads have lasted long after the initial post has gone from the homepage. They tend to be light on product details and heavy on “what does this mean to us” – not great contextual advert keyword fodder.

So should I change my blog to attract more Adsense clicks? In theory I just need to post more about products?

Well even if I wanted to go down that road for a start Darren Rowse already well serves that part of the niche very well. He posts most days an excellent round up of the product news.

Secondly I didn’t start the blog to attract adsense income, although every little helps, it was mainly a way of growing my knowledge of the subject and keeping my hobby interesting to myself and my friends. Changing to suit Google performance does not fit well with that aim.

Most importantly though from an advertiser perspective a blog that has an audience that is interested, loyal, vocal and knowledgeable has to be a good thing. These people return day after day to see something other than product details. They are very into their photography hobby or profession, passionate about what might seem trivial to outsiders. Believe me these people spend a fortune and enjoy spending. They have disposable income and they know how to use it. It seems Google Adsense just does not reach them. That isn’t the fault of my content.

The answer isn’t to change my content, it is to change the advertising. Rather than serve Googles needs, I need advertising that serves mine.

Unsurprisingly with the amount of activity around Performancing Towers I have been neglecting my personal blogs recently. As a consequence looking at my Metrics for my favourite blog this morning makes for depressing reading. There are several features of Metrics that can be used as an early warning system though, perhaps my blogs are not doing as badly as I initially think?

When you first go into your blogs Metrics reports you see the Dashboard. This gives you an overview of what is going on with your blog. I can see right away my photography blog is in poor health. Initially all your small graph widgets will be set to 1 week. To get a picture to see if my traffic is in fact declining or improving I need to “zoom out” to two weeks, three weeks or four weeks. On the two weeks I can clearly see my traffic peaked the thursday before last and has been in steady decline ever since. Hmm .. not good. On the three week view it seems last week was slightly ahead of the week before overall, maybe some hope? Oops, no, on the four week view Week 1 was way ahead; my traffic has been declining all month, that one good day must have been a temporary rally. The Visitors graph set to a duration of a month shows an overall decline with a peak on the 9th. 

Before I jump to conclusions I need to see if the rest of my Metrics agrees with these symptoms. Next thing I look to other than raw visits is comments. This months average per day is 3.75 with an average per post of 2.42.  Last month had an average per day of 3.86 and average per post of 2.45. So slightly down on comments. As well as less visitors my blog is less “interesting”. Great.

So it seems I have done some damage to my blog. Thankfully I know why, I haven’t been posting and have left the other members of my blog to keep it going. While one member has posted every day (the picture a day challenge) he is very new to blogging and his grammar is … well sometimes it is very hard to understand what he is saying. Without me editing his posts or posting up good content my membership is starting to slide. Anyone was originally attracted to my blog will be mightily bored by this apparent change of direction. In theory though the remedy is for me to get back writing again.

How could I have prevented this happening?

First off I should keep posting or get the other members of my blog up to speed on what constitutes interesting, quality posts. This is a time management and training issue. Ideally I should have done this before I had decent traffic.

Secondly I should have been monitoring my metrics and making myself aware of what the numbers should look like. It is important to get a feel for the “pulse” of your blog. I do know my best day is Thursday and my worst days are the weekends even when all things are good. If the traffic does not go up from Wednesday to Friday right away I should know something is going wrong. Same with comments, I should see several comments a day and overall that number should be increasing, if comments slow I should pick that up before rot sets in.

Your visitors will tell you what they do and do not like, don’t let them get to the point where they have to vote with their feet like I have!

Yahoo!, when you announced YPN, I, and a million other Adsensers, jumped for joy. With another “real” contextual ad solution, the rewards of publishing on obscure topics (potentially) go way up, while the risk goes way down (two baskets for your eggs).

You started slow, fine, no sweat. We were promised improvements, and we waited patiently.

But somehow, EIGHT months later, YPN is still a huge dissapointment for me. It just amazes me how terrible their offering is.

• Internartional? What’s that thar? Section 11.1
  Abuse of Services. You agree not to:
  display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US;
• The short tail From a WMW thread:
  

  I am seeing vonage ads all the time while my site has nothing to do with vonage.

  So far, the targetting is terrible: lots of generic “Mortgage Loan” and vonage ads. I would say that, if I’m lucky, one out of 4 ads in a skyscraper is at all remotely targeted to the page. Usually, none are.

  i got rid of the vonage adds, but I agree about the florist and ftd ads, they are still there after a couple days and I’ve blocked every url (including ftd.com/folder, ftd.comfolder, ftd.com/folder/ etc. w/ and w/out the www)

Of course, some pub’s are making more with YPN, but that’s not because YPN is a more efficient market (HA yah right)… it’s because YPN is too stupid to use any type of Smart pricing, which is only going to sour advertisers completely on YPN (even more than they are with the Google contextual network).

[Not that I have a problem with pub’s using this inefficiency to its full potential — hey milk it while it lasts!]

Maybe it all started with Overture

I think one of the problems is that Yahoo’s CPC offering (based on the old Overture) is still clunky and annoying. With YPN built on top, it can’t help but inherit the problems of its parent.

Yahoo!, perhaps you could hire a usability consultant (or three) to take a look at your CPC program and interface?

And when you’re done with that, please hire a business consultant to take a look at YPN (someone who knows what the “Long tail” is, and why having it is the critical success factor in contextual ad platforms).

And then switch the “International button” to ON.

…

Sigh. Google “gets it” 90% of the time. Yahoo, please, please get your head out of your arse. Otherwise you may find your contextual product to be #3 behind MSN’s. And that’s just plain humiliating.