I'm unimpressed, or at least confused, by Addthis' analytics. I'm new to Addthis.com and generally, I like the breakdown by service, some of the ability to look at timeframe , and the overall presentation.
But the table about effectiveness should, in this user's humble opinion, provide this:
- why not allow people to pick a specific time period so they can compare March vs February? Or March 2015 vs March 2014?
- overall statistics including: number of page views, number of shares, percentage of people who shared on each page
- the value of these shares which is what they call the viral uplift
I would think that the columns information that I'd like to get are:
- page impressions of the addthis.com gadget
- number of shares - total or by service
- the percent of shares
- number of click throughs from the shares by other users
- the percent
Instead, there's just this viral lift concept which I think is just the last point. I think.
I'll go ask this question on their forum and see what they say....
I've posted it but, I'm not sure that I did the signature right. Probably, I'll be banned now...sigh.
http://www.addthis.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2
Note - I can't find my post and haven't tried logging in again.
Generally, our sites took over direct management of our social media icons ourselves.
We lost the viral uplift calculation but we never figured out how to use it anyway.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Add this.com viral lift
I've started using addthis.com on VSC and I'mconfused by the concept of viral lift. And i quote:
Viral lift is the percentage increase in traffic due to shares and clicks. Essentially, viral lift shows you how viral your content is – if your shares are getting a lot of clicks, your viral lift percentage will be high.
The AddThis Analytic’s viral lift feature is a valuable tool in making editorial decisions and tailoring future content. It allows you, as a publisher, to see what shares are sending the most traffic back to your site. If you head into your analytics dashboard, you will see that we flag a page as viral if it’s generating more clicks than shares. Then head into the Content tab, sort by clicks and you can easily see what content is really resonating.
End quote. I'm confused in that I feel that if content has a high share to visit ratio, it's already worth flagging it as having some viral potential. In fact, if people are sharing it, its a GREAT thing. A second question is whether the shares generate cliks. This could be driven by the quality of your page title, image , and meta description which is what shows up on a Facebook share.
Viral lift is the percentage increase in traffic due to shares and clicks. Essentially, viral lift shows you how viral your content is – if your shares are getting a lot of clicks, your viral lift percentage will be high.
The AddThis Analytic’s viral lift feature is a valuable tool in making editorial decisions and tailoring future content. It allows you, as a publisher, to see what shares are sending the most traffic back to your site. If you head into your analytics dashboard, you will see that we flag a page as viral if it’s generating more clicks than shares. Then head into the Content tab, sort by clicks and you can easily see what content is really resonating.
End quote. I'm confused in that I feel that if content has a high share to visit ratio, it's already worth flagging it as having some viral potential. In fact, if people are sharing it, its a GREAT thing. A second question is whether the shares generate cliks. This could be driven by the quality of your page title, image , and meta description which is what shows up on a Facebook share.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Add this!
When you run a website, there's so much to do. Actually, if you run a website, you can do as little or as much as you want. Let me tell you about my experience running websites. First of all, I don't run them by myself. We are no up to 30 people working on these sites.
There's also so much to do. Our priorities:
1. Customer service. Answer the phones. Well! And find out what issues our users are having and resolve them.
2. Build great new content and services.
3. Maintain our advertising and SEO efforts.
4. Try to be current with all the cool new stuff like social media, social bookmarking etc etc. You'll notice that this blog still pops up some outdated icons at the bottom of each post (I often delete them). I see a blank form, technorati, delicious. We finally, on one of our major sites; VocabularySpellingCity.com, put up an Addthis.com on every page on the site. Addthis give some pretty cool stats and should be easy to update in case Twitter and Facebook don't remain the big dogs. Hard to imagine but then, they just arrived in the last three to four years so we'll see.
So pop over to some of our pages on VocabularySpellingCity and share or tweet the pages, would you? thanks.
Compound Words
Contractions
Dolch - Sight Words
Geography Lists
Homophones, Homonyms, etc.
Literature Based Word Lists
Math Vocabulary - New!
Monthly Holiday Lists
Phonics & Sight Word Curriculum
Possessive Nouns Sound Alike Words
del.icio.us
There's also so much to do. Our priorities:
1. Customer service. Answer the phones. Well! And find out what issues our users are having and resolve them.
2. Build great new content and services.
3. Maintain our advertising and SEO efforts.
4. Try to be current with all the cool new stuff like social media, social bookmarking etc etc. You'll notice that this blog still pops up some outdated icons at the bottom of each post (I often delete them). I see a blank form, technorati, delicious. We finally, on one of our major sites; VocabularySpellingCity.com, put up an Addthis.com on every page on the site. Addthis give some pretty cool stats and should be easy to update in case Twitter and Facebook don't remain the big dogs. Hard to imagine but then, they just arrived in the last three to four years so we'll see.
So pop over to some of our pages on VocabularySpellingCity and share or tweet the pages, would you? thanks.
Word Lists
Capitonyms - New!Compound Words
Contractions
Dolch - Sight Words
Geography Lists
Homophones, Homonyms, etc.
Literature Based Word Lists
Math Vocabulary - New!
Monthly Holiday Lists
Phonics & Sight Word Curriculum
Possessive Nouns Sound Alike Words
del.icio.us
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Facebook like this page, FB like your FB page, Facebook Share
The F icon there is a "share this page" icon. It will place on the user's Facebook home page some info about this page from our website. Specifically, it'll put up a user comment, the page meta title, the page metadescription, and an image from the page. This is different than the following two cases:
Facebook Like this page. Many websites have FB likes that have the user "liking" that specific page of the website. If you click on them, you've liked the specific page (or post in this case since we're in a forum).
Facebook Like set up to Like their Facebook Page. This is how the likes are set up on the home page of the Time4Learning website. A person who likes any of the Facebook Like icons on these page becomes a friend of ours on Facebook. It's very different than liking the page. For instance, they get updates on their Facebook page from our Facebook page. Visually, I don't think there's a way to know the different between the two.
Facebook Sharing - What content gets chosen?
I've just been running some tests about how the Facebook share icon works in terms of what image, title, and message it picks up. I'm pretty sure that when you put a share icon on a webpage, as we've done on so many of the T4L webpages, here's one for example:
http://www.time4learning.com/secular/index.shtml
the share icon picks up the page title, the meta description and the first image on the page. Here's a test:
However, I've been trying to figure out how Facebook picks the image. In this case, it gives the user a choice of 12, all of which can be found on the page. The first one is an odd choice, it's not the first image on the page. It might be the largest. It's not the one that's closest to the top in the center either.
http://www.time4learning.com/secular/index.shtml
the share icon picks up the page title, the meta description and the first image on the page. Here's a test:
However, I've been trying to figure out how Facebook picks the image. In this case, it gives the user a choice of 12, all of which can be found on the page. The first one is an odd choice, it's not the first image on the page. It might be the largest. It's not the one that's closest to the top in the center either.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Sign of the Times - Another first
I needed to sign a document emailed to me and return it. I printed it but I couldn't seem to get my durn HP gadget to scan it into my computer. I finally got frustrated, pulled out my phone, turned on the flash, took a picture of it and emailed it to myself.
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Big Google Update
It's early 2011 and the NYT and other major press have all been abuzz about a major Google search engine algorithm release. "The biggest update in five years!" I've heard.
So with bated breath we keep checking our SERP. So far, nada. No big increase in position (which we had hoped for), no loss of position (which we feared).
I had hoped in the removal of the algorithmic sites which are made for Adsense generating menus and topics by formula and ordering articles for $11, my sites would rise. Sadly, no visible progress and no loss of ground either. It's exciting to have SEO on the front pages but ultimately, a little anticlimatic for me.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Adsense - Trying to Help with Context
I'm involved in a very large website which runs Google Adsense. I've noticed that on same pages, we don't succeed at getting contextual ads. I'm trying to figure out what to do about this since I think the non-contextual ones earn less (less dollar per click, lower click through rate). OFten, I don't even get an ad served up on these pages.
There are three reasons that I can think of that this"list" page is not getting enough context. Some are easily solved, some are not.
1. The URL is not SEO-friendly. (see A) All the other pages on the site have SEO friendly URLS but on this huge site, 50 million monthly page views and over a million pages or word lists, we designed to manage our resources and did not implement a look up table for SEO friendly URLs. This is unlikely to get solved.
2. The text on the page, especially near the top, does not give much context. In fact, looking at the code, I see:
We're using some sort of standard text for the meta keyword and description. It's probably the same across all one million list pages. It's really long too. The title tag seems to be picking up proper context by providing the grade level, school name, teacher name, city, and state.
I guess that this could be fixed by putting the words: "vocabulary list", "teacher", and "school" into the title tag. And the keyword and description should also be customized for these pages with this data. On the other hand, the page does have the school name and teacher name on it. This is not really less contextual custom text than are found on the other school pages, it's just that the balance is different since these pages have these long word lists which to a search engine, are so much gibberish.
3. The page is marked "do follow, don't index." I wonder if that affects contextual ads?
In contrast, the teacher and school pages do have more relevant custom text on the page, they have SEO-friendly titles, and they are "do follow, do index". For example, here are examples of teacher and school pages both of which have very nice and appropriate ads.
Another mid-term potential project is to allow teachers, parents, and students to put up more comments on their pages which would ultimately provide more original text (user generated) which would endear us to the search engines.
Or, if I let kids put up too much graffiti, I might get in heap of trouble.
 |
| List page not getting contextual ads! |
1. The URL is not SEO-friendly. (see A) All the other pages on the site have SEO friendly URLS but on this huge site, 50 million monthly page views and over a million pages or word lists, we designed to manage our resources and did not implement a look up table for SEO friendly URLs. This is unlikely to get solved.
2. The text on the page, especially near the top, does not give much context. In fact, looking at the code, I see:
We're using some sort of standard text for the meta keyword and description. It's probably the same across all one million list pages. It's really long too. The title tag seems to be picking up proper context by providing the grade level, school name, teacher name, city, and state.
I guess that this could be fixed by putting the words: "vocabulary list", "teacher", and "school" into the title tag. And the keyword and description should also be customized for these pages with this data. On the other hand, the page does have the school name and teacher name on it. This is not really less contextual custom text than are found on the other school pages, it's just that the balance is different since these pages have these long word lists which to a search engine, are so much gibberish.
3. The page is marked "do follow, don't index." I wonder if that affects contextual ads?
 |
| School Page: Good success with Contextual Ads |
Another mid-term potential project is to allow teachers, parents, and students to put up more comments on their pages which would ultimately provide more original text (user generated) which would endear us to the search engines.
Or, if I let kids put up too much graffiti, I might get in heap of trouble.
 |
| Teacher Page, Getting Contexual Ads! |
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Am I loser if I'm following more than followed?
I run a small online education company and so far, I have had one of our teachers (ie a freelancer) manage our Twitter account. I looked at the account this week for the first time in awhile and saw that we had about 650 followers and were following around 900 people.
I feel like we're a loser. We are following more people than are following us. What do you think? Other than the fact that this is a pretty small number by our standards, shouldn't we have attracted more followers than we're following?
I feel like we're a loser. We are following more people than are following us. What do you think? Other than the fact that this is a pretty small number by our standards, shouldn't we have attracted more followers than we're following?
Friday, January 21, 2011
getting the hang of social media
I talked to some people including hearing a talk this week about the tricks of building a community around social media. So I tried a give-away. Cool, in less than 24 hours, 200 comments on Facebook. I think I'm getting the hang of this facebook thing.
 |
| SpellingCity comment got 200 comments! |
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Google Adsense, Burst Ads, Move to DoubleClick
Does anyone know about any good articles on this topic? About half of my Google Adsense ads in 300 x 250 box on my site are showing survey ads.
Google Adsense has it's own stream of Burst survey ads with no filtering whatsoever. So these are ads that Burst sold advertisers and which Google places. We have no way of knowing what the ad rates were as Google hides all that from us on a per impression or even a per network source basis.
These network flows and the filtering capability are something new that we have been working with over the past 3 weeks. One of the difficulties is that the previews in Adsense do not accurately reflect the set of running ads. The Burst ad stream was new on January 1 as were a number of other Adsense ad streams. It takes a while to sort these things out, especially with this being a brand new set of functionality and ad flow in Adsense.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Forums online
Forums continue to boom! These online discussion forums seem to be alive and well for indepth discussion, it's the quick chatter that seems to have moved to big time social media.
Despite Facebook & Twitter, the useful online forums continue to buzz and be useful for sharing info on a variety of topics. When I have a question, be it on parents discussing online homeschool education on non-religious homeschooling, the forums are the places that I'll go to to get thoughtful in depth expert discussions.
Facebook has groups and specialized areas but the in depth discussions seem to be on the discussion forums and boards. Twitter too has a lot of volume on many topics but not much depth.
The technology or forum software for the forums seems to be moving towards Vbulletin 4 and Ning groups. Php forum and Yahoo groups seems to be in rapid decline as forum hosting technologies.
BTW, I'm involved in managing forums using an array of technologies for the forum discussions, some a lot more successful than others. I have two discussion forums using Vbulletin 4.0, one on Joomla, one using BuddyPress on a WordPress site, and then four different Facebook pages.
There's also a high school homeschool student discussion forum but it's only available to Time4Learning members (BTW, this comment is new added in 2016). It looks, btw, much like Facebook but uses some proprietary software.
The key to many of these forums is skilled attentive moderation to stimulation that discussion, encourage the newbies, manage the personalities and inevitable rifts, and keep the forum discussions jolly and moving.
Another key to forums is technology and keeping them updated with single sign on using the social media logins and adding features like maps to locate other members and easy posting of pictures and videos.
Despite Facebook & Twitter, the useful online forums continue to buzz and be useful for sharing info on a variety of topics. When I have a question, be it on parents discussing online homeschool education on non-religious homeschooling, the forums are the places that I'll go to to get thoughtful in depth expert discussions.
Facebook has groups and specialized areas but the in depth discussions seem to be on the discussion forums and boards. Twitter too has a lot of volume on many topics but not much depth.
The technology or forum software for the forums seems to be moving towards Vbulletin 4 and Ning groups. Php forum and Yahoo groups seems to be in rapid decline as forum hosting technologies.
BTW, I'm involved in managing forums using an array of technologies for the forum discussions, some a lot more successful than others. I have two discussion forums using Vbulletin 4.0, one on Joomla, one using BuddyPress on a WordPress site, and then four different Facebook pages.
There's also a high school homeschool student discussion forum but it's only available to Time4Learning members (BTW, this comment is new added in 2016). It looks, btw, much like Facebook but uses some proprietary software.
The key to many of these forums is skilled attentive moderation to stimulation that discussion, encourage the newbies, manage the personalities and inevitable rifts, and keep the forum discussions jolly and moving.
Another key to forums is technology and keeping them updated with single sign on using the social media logins and adding features like maps to locate other members and easy posting of pictures and videos.
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Blog Disclosures
I've been using blogs and bloggers for promotional purposes for half a decade. About four years ago, I adopted a disclosure policy and a year after that, I started urging our collaborators to disclose any relationships. I think its a good healthy trend. I'd like the government to mostly stay out of it and I'd like an educated readership to expect and insist on it from writers they follow.
In case you don't know, I run and founded Time4Learning.
I just read a great review, with a clear disclosure on it which made me smile. Its a Time4Learning review. And I quote:
As I've said before, homeschooling has not come to me as naturally as I'd anticipated.
I had visions of very structured mornings - first we'd do our daily devotions, followed by quiet playing for Brooklyn and Simeon while Lincoln read and practiced his handwriting and I taught Judah how to read. Then we would seamlessly transition into handwriting practice for Judah while I went over math lessons with Lincoln. In the meantime the younger kids would be done playing with blocks and would quietly begin putting together Lego castles....(continued)
I won't spoil the surprise but as you can imagine, homeschool days don't really run like that...Surprise!!!
In case you don't know, I run and founded Time4Learning.
I just read a great review, with a clear disclosure on it which made me smile. Its a Time4Learning review. And I quote:
As I've said before, homeschooling has not come to me as naturally as I'd anticipated.
I had visions of very structured mornings - first we'd do our daily devotions, followed by quiet playing for Brooklyn and Simeon while Lincoln read and practiced his handwriting and I taught Judah how to read. Then we would seamlessly transition into handwriting practice for Judah while I went over math lessons with Lincoln. In the meantime the younger kids would be done playing with blocks and would quietly begin putting together Lego castles....(continued)
I won't spoil the surprise but as you can imagine, homeschool days don't really run like that...Surprise!!!
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Link Building - Hit on your vendors!
One simple way that I can think of to build links is to hit on all my vendors.
If you've done some graphics work for me, before I've even paid your bill, I have sent you an email with a quote endorsing your work and suggested that you post it on your website. And, I've included the link back to me that I want.
My graphics people feel that I'm being helpful to them by providing them credibility to help with their marketing. And I'm getting links.
If you've done some graphics work for me, before I've even paid your bill, I have sent you an email with a quote endorsing your work and suggested that you post it on your website. And, I've included the link back to me that I want.
My graphics people feel that I'm being helpful to them by providing them credibility to help with their marketing. And I'm getting links.
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