September 21, 2008 – 12:52 am
The primary difference between statzen.com and the other tools bloggers use for analytics is that we have a “content focus”. As I was looking over the attention my personal blog has been getting I thought it might be a good example of what a “content focus” means for the blogger.
Here is a screenshot of a table showing my most popular posts on September 19th, 2008:
This is a fairly typical day for my blog. If you have never seen the statzen interface then you will want to know that the orange represents the feed attention and the blue represents the web attention. There are some hidden columns to make for a smaller screenshot, but what this table basically shows is that the newer stuff is read mostly in feed readers while the older stuff is read on the web. There is usually a little more crossover in the top ten posts for my blog, but every blog is a little different.
One thing we really like about this view is that the important information is clear with only a quick glance. The bar chart along the right side shows the popularity of the posts in relation to each other (the long tail of your blog if you will). The mix of blue and orange makes it easy to see how people are reading the posts.
Now, check out this screenshot from September 20th, 2008 (one day later):
This is an exceptional day for my blog. It is telling a much different picture from what I normally see, and that is clear with a very clear glance. My newest post is getting the lion’s share of the attention. Not only did my post about the current gasoline shortage in Nashville get linked to from several of the area’s more notable political bloggers, but it also shot straight to the top of the results for people searching for “gas shortage in Nashville” on Google. Once you take a closer look at the actual numbers you will see that my top post is also getting double the feed traffic of any post from yesterday. By drilling down I was able to see that much of the feed traffic is coming from people sharing the post in their RSS readers.
The top posts from the day before are still in the top ten, and they are even still getting a similar amount of attention as the day before. However, because of the two-color bar chart on the right hand side it is easy to see with the quickest glance that these two days are very different.
By focusing on posts instead of URLs we are able to really answer the question “what are my readers interested in”. This example is just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t even talk about the “Inferred” column which give an indication of how many times a particular post was read on the front page (or other pages with multiple posts). Because of our content focus we are also able to do analytics based on the metadata associated with posts. The first example of this is the topical analytics which I will highlight in a later post.
If this looks like the kind of information that you want to know about your blog, please sign up to be one of our alpha testers. We are sending out invitations daily.
Posted in features, general |
We have started rolling out a new design for the public pages of statzen.com. This is in preparation of our public launch.
