Blog analytics and metrics

We discussed all sort of blog metrics and analytics, a must listen for anyone serious about blogging and measuring its outcome! Here's the full transcript:

Good evening everybody and we’re back for another Press This. We seem to be getting on quite well making this a weekly show. Right before I introduce my guest I want to point everyone who is using my plug in Sociable to my blog to read the latest news on that as I let go of that plug in and someone else has taken over development on it. We won’t go into that now thought because we have a fabulous guest with us on the line.

He’s a good friend of mine but also the number one Analytics guru in the world at the moment. Avinash thanks for being here.

Avinash Thanks very much Joost it’s a thrill to be here.

For everyone who doesn’t know Avinash Kaushik can you tell us in a couple of sentences what you do. I know you keep about 5 jobs at the moment.

Avinash That’s true. I guess I am the co-founder of Market Motive which is an internet marketing learning company and I write a blog called Hakim’s Razor and I’m also the Analytics evangelist for Google. So it keeps me busy but that in a nutshell is everything, although the blog is the biggest reason for me being here because I also happen to be a huge, huge Joost fan having benefited from many of your plug ins Joost and, of course, all your help with my blogging. So I’m really thrilled to be a small part of your show.

It is very much appreciated and thanks for being here again. First thing, we moved you to West Host yesterday which has seem to have done your blog a little bit of good.

Avinash Oh exactly and I’m ecstatic. I was using a different host and I’m not going to name them but I was having a lot of trouble with the speed and other kinds of things with them. And just moving to West Host has been incredible. Since this morning I kept hitting reload on my own blog because I can’t believe it loads so fast. I was quite pleased with the move.

I tend to use something all bloggers need to worry about, I tend to write long blog posts and I tend to use a lot of pictures, my own photography or images of reports and analysis I do and so every post I write has a lot of images and tends to be heavy and tended to be very slow and that never works on the web.

So I’ve been looking to figure out how do I make my blog faster to people who then want to consume my content through all different platforms are able to access it very quickly. I think I feel that that’s going to be much, much better now. And using some special plug ins that you have Joost and as well as moving to West Host.

The combination of the plug in I have been totally pimping over the past few weeks not which is Total Cache and finally have it running on my own blog as well. I finally got Yoast.com to loan in under 2 seconds and I’m very happy with it. Yeah it’s been great. So thanks to West Host and to Frederick who has been a guest on here on the show before for helping us set that up.

What I wanted to talk to you about today is a post that you’ve now almost 2 years ago, November 19, 2007 about blog metrics. You have since written a second book which is due to come out in October, isn’t it?

Avinash Yes the middle of October.

I thought it was about time we rehashed some of that stuff and see if we could make any improvements or new remarks to what you had written there. Basically you wrote down 6 different kinds of metrics people could use on their blog.

Avinash Exactly and I think that the essence of the post and the essence of trying to measure blogs first came from actually realizing that blogs are not normal websites and these corporate website destinations where you slap Metric Google (inaudible 5:28) on it and you sing happy birthday and you’re on your way to being data driven, that’ really isn’t true.

My own experience in blogging had taught me that blogs are very unique animals and we need to think very differently when it comes to measuring our success on blogs. So I came up with this framework of 6 different things to measure success of a blog and I’ll very quickly walk you through it and of course you know it already Joost but everyone and the first one is to measure author contributions. I think a lot of bloggers say that they’ll blog every few weeks or once in a while and write some random things and they deserve to be God’s children and be successful and that’s not really true.

My first metric is to say hey are you actually contributing content that then makes you deserving of success in the world and so the 2 metrics used there are post (inaudible) content created the number of words in post divided by number of posts. So that’s first starting getting started raw for contributions.

Then the next metric is sort of holistic audience growth and this is where, of course, the first metric Joost comes from the plug in you had the metrics plug in, so that comes from there.

The next metrics to measure are the audience growth and in this case we use Google Analytics or Omniture, Web Trends, Scat Counter, really whatever you prefer for an analytics tool to measure visits and unique visitors that tells you how many people are consuming your blog.

But then the other part of audience growth is actually measuring what I tend to call offline content consumption, which means content about your blog being consumed through RSS and through other places but not on your website thanks to all this proliferation of various kinds of readers. And that’s using RSS and Feed Burner and things like that.

So the combination of visits and visitors as well as feed subscribers helps you to truly understand what the growth rate of success is in terms of attracting new visitors to your blog. In fact, I go as far as saying I don’t actually care about the visit and visitor numbers to my blog. I really don’t. Last month I think I had 65,000 or 70,000 visitors to the blog. I actually don’t care about it. What I care about is every single month what happens to my RSS subscribers.

So this morning in think my RSS subscribers are around 27,000 Feed Burner subscribers for the blog that’s my number one metric I use to measure success of the blog because the RSS people who sign up for my RSS feed are exhibiting a high level of loyalty where you can push content to them. So that is a very important metric to measure.

Then the metric is conversation rate and again another one from your plug in Joost and you know on e-commerce websites you measure conversion, this is conversation which is the number of visitor comments, not yours the number of visitor comments per post. This is a very social medium and unlike many other websites we want people to engage with us, we want them to engage in a conversation with us. So I use your plug in to measure that particular metric.

So for me at the moment I think its 27 comments per post is my conversation rate. So that’s very important to measure and I want that rate to go up all the time.

Then the metric is where I have added one more metric Joost since the last time and that is ripple index and where I measured your Technorati authority to see how many unique blogs link top you. And I’ve added one more to it which is Twitter citations. At the moment I’m using Tweet Me at the end of every blog post. So at the moment my latest blog post I wrote yesterday has 110 I think people who have retweeted it, tweeted about it and things like that.

So both of those Technorati Authority and Twitter Citations tell you if your blog is threading. If people are talking about what you’re talking about because that’s really important in the blogosphere. You don’t just want to be the person who just talks about things and nobody then extends the conversation.

And the last 2 metrics are very simple, what’s the cost of blogging and that can be from server technology to opportunity costs. The last one is ROI from blogging. What is your benefit? And there I think people don’t look at it holistically enough. I actually measure the comparative value of my blog, what is the value of my blogging over time. I measure the direct values and so in my case it could be people who maybe who buy my book let’s say after reading my blog or it can be Adsense ads. I don’t have those but Adsense ads, display ads, so direct revenue from the blog and of course unquantified value. It could be speaking engagements that you get I know all the time from your blog and you become then world famous as a result of writing an authoritative blog.

So that is the framework I use. The important thing to realize is blogs is not simply about measuring using Google Analytics and Omniture and these tools. It’s about thinking more holistically and measuring the complete success and it’s very different from measuring websites.

I totally agree on that. You mentioned Technorati again and Technorati doesn’t seem to be used all that much anymore in the blogosphere lately. That might just be me but I see that Jethro in the chat room asks the same question. How do you look at Technorati at the moment? Do you still use it as much or do you find Twitter more interesting?

Avinash I think it’s an...And situation in the sense that I don’t use Technorati to discover new blogs. I think that was kind of the purpose of Technorati before, you go there and you find and discover new blogs and things. I think Twitter has supplanted Technorati to a great extent. In fact, Twitter has supplanted Delicious, Twitter has supplanted son many other channels in terms of helping us discover new content and new sources of content.

But I think that Technorati’s indexing of blogs is still a fairly good. I would not say it’s awesomely excellent but it is fairly good. And in that sense it is a clean way and perhaps the only way sadly at the moment to know how many unique blogs, I love that about that metric, which is how many unique blogs link back to you? So it’s not just your friends talking about you every day, it’s not that spam websites have linked to you, but unique, important blogs that are linking to you. That metric I believe is still sound from Technorati.

I wish there were other alternatives to get that metric. Unfortunately, that particular metric at the moment I haven’t found a good source for it. For me, it’s less that Technorati is great or bad, I encourage our listeners to focus on the metric and why the metric is important.

And today we’re using Technorati as a good enough mechanism; perhaps in the future we might have other sources.

I know this company that you’re an advisor for that has the data to actually give us something more decent than this, the Google Blog Search guys could probably give you a far better overview of how many unique blogs are linking to you over a certain period of time.

Avinash It is certainly something that I’m sure they are thinking about. I’ve certainly advocated for a unique number but the problem is at the moment what happens is it is not a unique blog number, it’s just the number of mentions and it just tends to get skewed very quickly. So the raw number itself is not a very good way to measure, which is what Google Blog Search will do today. You search Avinash Kaushik or Joost or you search blog metrics plug in and you’ll get a raw number and it’s still I think not quite what the clean metrics should be.

But you’re absolutely right they do have the capability of giving us a unique number.

Yeah that would be really cool. You also still focus a lot on RSS and I think that you take both real RSS subscribers and email subscribers as one there? Because all your email subscribers go through Feed Burner as well right?

Avinash That’s exactly right. So for me I tend to treat the pure RSS as well as email grouping Feed Burner as subscribers if you will. I tend to put them in the same bucket. Although email is probably a bit more pushy then simply the RSS feed because email kind of shows up in your inbox and you’re kind of forced to deal with it. And I actually think that it actually gets people to read it a lot more then perhaps simply just passively showing up in your RSS feed.

So I do tend to treat both of those numbers the same although in my deeper reporting of success for many businesses, I tend to break those 2 number out. Which is what is the growth of RSS subscribers? I might have around 2,000 right now if I remember correctly and so of the 27,000 I think 2,000 are email and 25,000 are pure RSS which is the non-email version. I tend to put them together at the moment.

I am a big fan of measuring RSS Joost because I think RSS requires a higher degree of engagement. It requires you to go and click on a button and sign up and submit and accept and all kinds of things and I think that RSS subscribers tend to be more valuable people that stick around.

It’s like Seth Godin’s mental model of permission marketing Joost that you know very well of course and everybody does, which is by signing up for my RSS feed and/or the email and I know Joost you have a very large email subscriber base as well you’re actually giving me permission to push content to you whenever I have something new. Rather than saying I will visit your website if I remember when you have something new with RSS and with email you’re pushing content and giving me permission that no matter what I write I can push it to you. For me it has a higher business value than just the normal visitors to the blog.

I mean I love the visitors to the blog make no mistake but…

Yeah me too but I can understand. We’ll talk a bit more about this right after the break.

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I know you said in your new blog post about your book and there is a cool chapter in there about useful Twitter Analytics. I was curious if you could shed a tiny bit of light into what that covers?

Avinash Of course. In the first book I don’t think Twitter was around then and sadly the last book I wrote 2 ½ years ago. But with Twitter I think we’ve been very much in a mode of like early web analytics reporting where everybody used to report the hits to my website and hits stands for “how idiots track success.” I think with Twitter is where everybody is reporting something and much of the data out there is actually crap. I mean one of the tools uses, it simply says your tweets are very high signal, good content if they have a hash mark or @ sign in it and I’m not sure how that signifies quality of the post.

I think there is a lot of evolution left and the things I’ve covered in the book are some of the metrics. I say it is important, of course, to track the growth in the number of relevant followers you have. You don’t want random willy nilly people following you on Twitter. The metrics I have and I have a couple of different ones and I think with the names that I think are of value are, for example, one of the most valuable thing to measure about your success on Twitter is message amplification.

Joost it’s simply this idea that if you tweet something that is of value to the world or you tweet something cool then other people will retweet it, right? And so the metric I love measuring is the number of retweets per thousand followers. There is a tool called Retweetist that measures this metric and then it makes it very easy for me to compare myself against Joost or Ashton Kutchner God forbid. But I can compare myself with any of these other people and say when I tweet does it get retweeted more because it is of more value and higher quality then from these other people followed by more or less people who follow me?

So measuring how far you message can spread I think is a very important way of knowing that what you’re doing on Twitter is being perceived to be of value by the ecosystem. So that’s one.

The other one, another one I like is also conversation rate Joost, it does the same metric that we had created for blogs. In conversation rate, for example, I use a tool like Twitter Friends and what it tells me how many replies are received by me per day versus how many replies are sent by me per day.

The reason this is important is because I tend to work with a lot of big agencies and big companies who are very big and have lots of marketing budget and what not and they tend to use Twitter to simply blast out press releases and other really terrible ways of using Twitter. So with that in mind I created this metric of conversation rate to show people, to force people to think that Twitter is a 2 way medium, it’s a conversation, it’s not a 1 way blasting of TV, magazine and radio ads where you simply it’s a 1 way thing. Twitter is a 2 way thing and I think by having the discipline of measuring how many times you are replying to other people and if it is higher or lower than the benchmark and how many times are you receiving replies and is it higher or lower than the benchmark, helps you understand that your are participating in the medium for the purpose for which it was created.

As an example Joost, in the last 30 days the average number of replies I’ve sent is 6.4 per day and the benchmark is 2.4. So that tells me that’s good, I am replying a lot and by the way Joost I can very easily index myself against you or I can index Intel versus Pepsi or any of these brands and say hey, which of these brand is participating in the conversation and not just putting out press releases and don’t reply to people and are evil basically.

So those are 2 metrics that I wanted to mention here that gives you a clue to the things I’ve covered in the book about how do you measure success of Twitter. My process is very simple, first try and understand at the very heart, core and soul of what the medium represents and then try and create metrics that capture the essence of the medium.

How would you say Twitter has added something onto your blog experience? Basically you’re maintaining 2 blogs now both Twitter and WordPress.

Avinash I completely agree. It is interesting for me they are 2 different channels of engaging with an audience and I found that they tend to be very different animals. The thing that I’m able to do on the blog, my blog is extremely focused. There is no advertising on the blog and I only write about web analytics and I don’t write about anything else that is off topic. I don’t even if I have something interesting. I simply talk about that and it’s very focused and I am able to engage in a conversation.

Because of my new book it was sort of twice a month but it’s going to go back to 4 times a month. So once a week and it’s very thoughtful and long posts. While Twitter for me has ended up being a channel where I am able to share cool links, emerging stories and witty conversations or quotes like you have God’s right to rank number one on your brand if not you’re incompetent and things like that. I’m able to engage an audience more frequently and with these cool links and things that cover a much wider space then simply analytics.

So I’ve deliberately kept the 2 different mediums very different. But the common theme Joost in both of them is that before I press send in every single tweet I write or publish post in WordPress, I pause and think is what I’m saying of value to people at the other end? If it’s not of value to the people at the other end, I don’t tweet it and I don’t write it on my blog. I think that’s a common unifying thing but I’m using both mediums very differently because each channel tends to be very unique.

Yeah it is. I tend to find that I blabber a whole lot more on Twitter then I do on my blog but that’s just me.

Avinash For me my blog is my medium; my personal internal mantra is I want to change how people think. I want to get into your brain and rewire your brain in how it thinks about data. That is my small humble goal. I think I can’t possibly do that with Twitter, it’s just impossible. I think that kind of audacious if you will goal requires a much more thoughtful medium and I think for me blogs tend to be that at least for now and we’ll see how things evolve.

Yeah true. There are a couple of people asking me and this is not really related to blogging so if you don’t want to go into this right now feel free. There are a couple of people asking what you think of the fact that Adobe if buying Omniture.

Avinash Ominiture has had its financial ups and downs over the last 2 years. So they were looking for financial support and Adobe had placed I believe $25 or $50 million in Omniture just about 4 or 5 months ago in order to support the financial side of Omniture. So it’s not completely a surprise that Omniture has decided to partner with Adobe and sell the company.

I believe it is TBD in terms of the impact on Omniture, on Adobe and on what the overlap is. It is not completely clear what the synergy is so the feedback I’ve seen initially has been more around what is the synergy? But Adobe is a very well established, very financially sound company that is going to be around forever and that is great for Omniture to have that type of…in America we say sugar daddy. I don’t know if there is a word for it in Holland.

Omniture has a sugar daddy now that is great for them. It will be interesting to see how the strategic direction changes. And I think like the rest of the world, I’m very curious to see how it evolves. But at least on the financial side, Omniture has some good support there not.

Yeah which is probably a good thing. But the question is what is Adobe going to do with it? It really feels strange to me and seeing from the reactions on Twitter a lot of people don’t understand it. But thanks for answering that because that’s what a lot of people were asking.

Now we briefly mentioned Feed Burner and even when you wrote the post Feed Burner was owned by Google I think.

Avinash Yeah or before yeah.

It might have been before but I don’t really know.

Avinash Yeah it certainly is now.

When that happened but what I’ve been waiting for and I don’t know whether Google is actually intending on doing this is some integration between Feed Burner and other analytics packages be it Google Analytics or just Feed Burner (30:03 – inaudible) when it got acquired, which seemed to have been leaving us in…

Avinash I think it’s a technical term.

Do you know of any plans on integrating those two that you can talk about?

Avinash I can’t make forward looking statements, it would be not optimal but I do want to state very, very emphatically that I’m a huge believer that data should not exist in a silo. If I expand the conversation slightly, as a blogger myself and as an avid fan of WordPress, as a crazy fan of WordPress I absolutely positively want my Google Analytics data, my Feed Burner data and my webmaster tools data all sitting in one place. It is a crime that I have to go to 3 different places and stitch all this data tougher. I can make better business decisions if these 3 resources of data were sitting together and I could analyze them much more effectively.

I know that when Google had acquired Feed Burner they had said that it is definitely in scope to figure out what is the best way to integrate data and make it available to the users. I am a user of plug ins in WordPress that mix these two data together and put it in one dashboard. I think it is of much value and so it would not be beyond the realm of possibility that these kinds of integrations make a lot of sense to users. It makes a lot of sense for Google as well as many other companies.

But unfortunately I can’t comment on what, when and how and things like that. I just can definitely say that I join you as well as the listeners of the radio show here today in being an advocate for getting all this date in one place. I think that the cool part about Feed Burner is not the subscriber number which everybody is so enamored and in love with. To me, the really cool part of Feed Burner is understanding what stories are being read in our RSS. I want to know individually by story which stories are being read, which stories get higher clicks back to my website, which stories get lower clicks. I want to know how many podcasts that I had embedded were downloaded. That is such profoundly deep data in Feed Burner that nobody uses.

It is wonderful data and I think the data is sitting outside. If this data were integrated not only would I know visit and visitors from Google Analytics or Omniture or whatever tool you use but I would know exactly how many stories were read by how much and I could put that next to the page views that exist in Google Analytics. I would get feed views if you will right? Feed of story views and downloads of podcasts and plays in the podcasts. Those are just small possibilities of data that sits in a silo with Feed Burner that I think would be of incredible value.

So I want you to know as I’m an evangelist of taking this user feedback and sending it back to Google.

That would be appreciated. It is a product we probably all want to see live again instead of die which is sometimes seems to be (33:34 – inaudible). We’re going to go for another quick small break and then we’ll take a couple of questions from the chat room.

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Welcome back and we’re talking to Avinash Kaushik about blog metrics and analytics. Avinash you were already answering a question in the chat room. It was a great question that came in from Jethro is what is the best way to not get absorbed in all these analytics and actually deal with something worthwhile?

Avinash Absolutely and I think that I’ll give the second answer that I shared in the chat room first. If I can only pick 2 metrics to look at the first would be the graph of RSS subscribers because I just value that kind of loyalty tremendously and for me that’s a key measure of success. I’m adding RSS subscribers that are increasingly at a higher rate over time. So that’s a very key metric for me.

The second metric I would recommend is conversation rate. This was using your plug in Joost the Blog Metrics plug in and we should probably add the link somewhere in the liner notes but I love that measure. Simply because I believe this is a social medium where there has to be a conversation and the conversation rate engaging people to share comments with you is really hard work and it takes a lot to get people to talk to you, share feedback and criticize you and praise you. It really changes and takes a change to your writing style to engage your audience in a way that they will then have a conversation with you.

So if I could only pick 2 for Jethro and forget everything else I would use those 2 metrics, RSS subscribers and Blog Metrics. If you are just starting out new in blogging or you just have been doing blogging another report I would highly advocate is to look at the Keywords Report for all search engines. Look at the keywords that are starting to refer traffic to your blog.

Then for me it’s really interesting to see what are the kinds of stories I’m writing and what are the keywords people are using to find my blog? Why are they ending up on my website? It could very well be I’m writing about ABCDE and then there are these people who consistently keep coming on only B & C and nobody cares about A & D for example. To me looking at the report for keywords helps me understand what people are looking for more on my website, which then helps me optimize the kinds of stories, of blog posts I might write.

And in the same way I have a plug in and you can use Google Analytics for this, of course, if you want but I do have a plug in, in WordPress that I use called Search Summary. I forget what the plug in is called, oh Search Meter sorry, Search Meter Plug In for WordPress and if you add that plug in it tells me the keywords that were searched on my blog yesterday and in the last 7 days and the last 30 days. These are people who come to my blog and type things in the search box. That is another fantastic way to look at data, the keywords, because it tells me all of the places that things people are typing where they are getting zero results, and it helps me figure out wow everybody wants to learn a lot more about lifetime value and I’ve not written about it at all. So let me write more things about it.

So keywords are the ones if you want to get deeper into the data but if you want to stay at a high level use RSS Subscribers and Blog Metrics.

Yeah cool. So once people start doing all that, you mentioned like you’re adapting the posts you’re writing based on the keywords people use while searching on your blog and to get to your blog. Don’t you ever feel that that limits you to a subject too much?

Avinash For me because my blog is very focused so I think that most of the time what a lot of bloggers do is, the mistake a lot of bloggers end up making is saying I know exactly what people want and I’m going to write about it and end of story. Right? We have a very particular view because blogs are such a personal medium of expression that we end up simply writing what we feel like writing about. And I think that’s okay, that’s okay.

For me using, especially the internal site search data using the Site Meter Plug In in WordPress but it helps me and gives me clues to what other things people might be interested in. So I will certainly never, never limit myself only to writing about things that are from the keyword reports. I would never do it. But I find they tend to be very good clues to what else people might be interested in that I could expand upon, that I could write about.

Often Joost for me it’s great to look at the data on weeks when I don’t know what the hell to write about. I have writer’s block in my mind and often the data that inspires me is like wow I never thought about that. Yes I’m going to write about that. It’s like wow people have trouble with this and maybe I’ll write about that. So I think looking at the keywords is a way of me understanding what customers might be looking for and it’s a happy medium of taking that data into account and taking into account what I want to write about and then sort of executing my strategy. In this case you win and your customers win.

Yeah okay thanks. Another thing you measure your blog quite intensely I would imagine. What kind of traffic do you see as most valuable in getting to your blog? For instance, do Twitter users getting to your blog behave differently from other people? Do you see any things there that we could use in our blogging?

Avinash Absolutely. I think so. For example, I’ll give 3 sorts of examples and I’m actually looking at my report right now if you want any actual numbers I’m happy to share them.

Actually Twitter has formed; it has actually evolved to become a very big part of my overall traffic stream, even though I’ve only been on twice in the last month because I was busy with the new book. Twitter has sent and I’m looking at it right now about 4,000 visitors and that’s actually a lot of visitors to send given I only had about 60 or so thousand visitors in a month. So Twitter and people retweeting and forwarding and things like that is actually becoming a big source of traffic to me.

And I found that Twitter traffic can still have a very low bounce rate for me, they tend to engage with the website and they also tend to be people who know me to some extent. A large percent of the Twitter traffic tends to be people who know me and that’s different from traffic I end up getting from Digg and Stumble Upon.

Digg traffic I have come to under appreciates over time. When I started my blog 2 ½ years ago it got on the home page of Digg a few times and then I would get this massive spike of traffic and it would crawl and slow down, etc. But I found that as I analyzed the data looking back…a few months later I looked back and segmented out that Digg traffic and segmentation is a great strategy by the way if you want to do Analytics. I found that very few of them ever came back, like an insignificant percent came back.

So I always said Digg traffic is all those people who want to have a one night stand with you. They’re not interested in a long term relationship. Of course, since then it’s harder and harder to get on Digg and so I expend 0.00% of my efforts related to Digg. For me at least I’ve come to understand that Digg is not the traffic and they don’t even subscribe to the RSS feed, so what’s the point of it?

Stumble Upon tends to be different. I find that Stumble Upon is usually in the top 10 of my blog buffering traffic. And Stumble Upon sends me a sustained amount of traffic every month, which is incredible I think. Every month I get “x” number of visitors 1,000 to 2,000 from Stumble Upon and when I segment back traffic, when I segment out the traffic from Stumble Upon I find that they tend to visit more times again and again. A bunch of them actually sign up for my RSS feed.

So while Stumble Upon sends less traffic now then Twitter for me at least and definitely less traffic then if I were on Digg, it tends to be traffic where a good percent of them engage with my website in terms of making repeat visits and also signing up for my RSS feed. Over time I’ve come to appreciate the Stumble Upon traffic a lot more.

For me those are the big learning’s. In Facebook I’m still sort of forming an opinion about the value of Facebook. I think the people who tend to be on Facebook tend to like to live in a closed medium. And if things show up in Facebook, like if I did a full feed from my blog into Facebook which I don’t, then I suspect I might have more readers. But I don’t find that Facebook readers, the wonderful people on Facebook tend to come out and read the blog and things like that. But if I can send something into Facebook I think they tend to react more. So I’m still forming an opinion of who these people are who live in this closed world of Facebook and how do I engage with them best.

But those are sort of my big learning’s in terms of the social platforms in terms of traffic.

It’s funny because probably just like mine in a lot of sense for me Twitter traffic has been exceeding Google traffic over the last couple of months, which I find to be insane being my job has always been to have an SEO and now I seem to be optimizing Twitter and optimizing Google.

Avinash I’m looking at it right here and for the last month it’s Google, then Twitter, then Images Google, then Bing and then Yahoo and then Facebook. I’m literally looking at the report and the other thing Joost is you know that in tools like Google Analytics you can track conversions. So I have conversions in terms of people going to my speaking engagements page, people who sign up for my RSS feed and I track 4 different conversions. Actually conversions from Twitter is actually very healthy. My conversions from Google Organic I’m looking at right now is about 22% and Twitter is 14% and Bing is like 4.6% and Yahoo is 9%.

So not only is Twitter sending me traffic, it is actually converting at a much healthier rate then the other search engines. And Facebook is around 7%.

So Facebook beats Bing.

Avinash I think Microsoft owns a big piece of Facebook.

Oh a big piece, a couple of percent isn’t it? But those goals you set would you recommend bloggers always set those goals or and I think you said in the article you should be setting some goals but what kind of goals should you be setting.

Avinash I humbly and firmly believe that if you’re a blogger who wants to use analytics of any company from any tool and you don’t have a goal created, one goal you’re committing a crime against humanity. It is a crime not to have one goal in your analytics tool. Because then you’re simply measuring input metrics and you’re not measuring outcome metrics, which really is very important.

So I’ll give you some ideas of what the goal pages are. So for me one very important goal I’ve been just selling like crazy through the podcast today is the RSS Subscriber. So I actually capture the number of clicks on the links that are going from my blog to Feed Burner by day. So I can track how many people click on that. Now remember that’s not the completed sign up that happens at Feed Burner and that’s okay, I’m tracking that with RSS Subscriber and I’m not going to worry about it here. But I track the clicks that go out there.

Another important goal for me is the number of clicks for people who are clicking through to my book purchase links on Amazon as well as actually Amazon and so I track that as a conversion goal.

Another conversion goal I track is the number of the people who come to my website, what percentage go and look at my About page. One of the big goals of my blog is that maybe one day I might become world famous. Right? So for that to happen people have to come read my blog and maybe read about me and then maybe they’ll tweet about me some day. But I do track the percentage of people who see my About page. It is a very important goal. It sort of extends my brand; it gets other people to know what I am and what I do, so I track that as a goal.

Finally, another goal I track is I’ve started tracking a couple of other goals. One is the loyalists which is the number of people who read more the 2 posts that I have wrote in a given time period. I call them loyalists. Then another one I’m tracking, finally last one, is the number of people who go and see my speaking engagements page. Again, it’s because I speak at a lot of conferences around the world and they invite me and they pay and all that, which means I have a page on my blog where I link to them. If you come to that page, click through on those links and sign up for the conference you’re adding value to that particular conference. So I track that as a measure of success.

This should give you some clues about how I have figured out why I blog, right, for my brand value, for extending loyalists, for creating subscribers, for getting more speaking engagements and I figured that out and it is a matter of literally 5 minutes to go out and create these goals in any analytics took including Google Analytics.

The other thing Joost is I can quantify the value of some of these goals. For example, I know exactly how many people I have sent to a conference and I know how much the conference is paying me. I can actually compute what was the cost per click. I can easily do that. If I have to buy a mailing list of email providers today, a mailing list of people in the analytics industry that would cost me around $3 per good email address, per qualified email address. Well I have 27,000 feed subscribers so I know what the values of those people.

So don’t simply stop at identifying simply the raw number, figure out what your conversion goals are. Which allows many of us easily to computer per visit goal value. So for the last month Joost for my blog the per visit goal value, the amount of revenue I have made from people who came to my blog is $1.67. That is the per visit goal value. Even though I have no ads, I’m not selling anything; I’m not selling IPods right.

No, no but it’s if I could make that for real I would be very happy.

Avinash Your website Joost we can easily track the number of clicks on the ads you have, the relevant ads…I mean your website is a gold mine to track all this stuff easily.

True it is very easy and it has become easier over time. Then when you mentioned the loyalists I think it is actually new. How are you tracking that?

Avinash Yeah so I use a number of tools and one of the tools I’m using actually allows me to create an outcomes goals based on both the number of people who have seen “x” number of pages per visit or people who have visited “x” number of times. So in this case what I have done Joost is I have gone into the advanced segmentation for Google Analytics and I have created a custom advanced segment and the custom advanced segment is I simply drag the metric page views per visit, I drag it over and I say more then 3 and another metric for the loyalist that is a visitor loyalty report in Google Analytics and I have created an advanced segment in Google Analytics saying I want all the numbers of visitors with a loyalty greater than 3 visits or 2 visits whatever the number you prefer and I save those segments and bam in 5 seconds on my dashboard I am able to report both of those metrics very easily.

Cool. So it’s time we stop this call because we’ve gone on for almost an hour now.

Avinash Oh wow!

Let me thank you for being here. It’s been a blast to have you on and I would like to invite you to come back in a couple of months if you have the time, so we can discuss this even more. I see we’re getting a lot of questions which we’re not going to be able to answer now.

Avinash I would love to. I am your biggest fan and anytime you want to have me here I will be more then happy to come.

Thank you and much appreciated. So thanks for being here and let’s talk soon. To all my listeners Brasco kindly asked me to remind you that this show if you’re listening to the tape of it is recorded each Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. Pacific and 5:00 p.m. Eastern, 10:00 p.m. GMT and we’re actually live at that time and we take questions in the chat room at WebmasterRadio.FM. If you want to participate live that would be really cool.

Now for next week we’ve got another show lined up with my good friend, well we’ve been talking a lot Aaron Brazell who is working on the WordPress Bible. Actually he has finished it I think. We’ll talk about that soon. See you next week and thanks for listening.