Anything we do to keep people on the site longer is a good thing:
A widget that tries to improve the site bounce rate by producing links to posts and pages matching search engine terms used to find the page. For instance if the page displayed is where the user landed after clicking a Google search result link the widget tries to inform about more reading on the site that might interest the user.
We ran across this tool for real time analytics about a week ago called “chartbeat” – which is just plain cool. I learned of it while enjoying the podcast “This Week in Startups” by Jason Calacanis and crew. #twist
This offers a real time (within seconds) look at the visitors to our site. Some of the metrics are total people on the site; if people are reading, writing or idle; average USER page load times (more how this works later); and a very niffty twitter monitor.
Oh yea – and it keeps a historical record. (At least 30 days worth.)
So How Does it work?
I have had a lot of people ask “How does it work?” and “Doesn’t it cause the server to slow down?” – which is actually the brilliant part about the whole deal. It works with AJAX and analysis on the chartbeat side.
Here’s picture:
chartbeat visual
User goes to your site (which already has the chartbeat embeded in the page.)
Server sends the code back to user’s computer. At this time, a javascript timer is executed within the users browser – to give us an idea of the page load speed.
After the page loads – the browser communicates in very, very small files to the chartbeat server, telling it the information about the page and what they have done. It does this with AJAX and after the page loads – as to not interfere with the transfer of information. (AJAX is asynchronous communication with the server, or stated differently, a message sent to/from the server which doesn’t interfere with the user’s browsing.)
chartbeat takes that data and crunches the numbers, and builds the very cool charts, graphs and dials. Which gives us a look at our site’s performance.
It’s a great idea and one that has saved us a lot of time wondering if the site is slow because of a programming issue – or if we have a sudden influx of users. We can see in real time the story. The cost is $10/month for 5 sites, and is well worth it. (They do not sponsor this blog – I just really, really like the product.)
Take a test drive here. It is a demo chart they have running. Let me know if you like it – or have used it.
Posted in analytics, cloud computing, innovation, marketing 
Tags: analytics, chartbeat, google analytics, metrics, SEO, traffic 
No Comments »I’m not sure I should share this link…but I guess since they already shared it at ProBlogger, I can too.
While SEO is something that is well worth while focusing upon right from the start of your blog – I’ve found that it becomes particularly important once your blog is at least a few months old. In my experience it is not until a blog is 6 to 12 months old that it really begins to grow in its authority in Google.
This article goes hand in hand with my post earlier dealing with SEO.
Image via Wikipedia
There has been a thread rolling around the company I work for yesterday about how we need to roll some custom 404’s (404 is the page which is displayed when a web server cannot find the page you requested) for an upcoming website launch. It makes me laugh – because I know that’s a great idea, but many times we simply forget about it…or just keep bumping off the todo list.
As I went through my link farm (corner of my desktop when I drag all the links I don’t take the time to read when I find them) this morning I found one for a post called “Find And Fix Your Inbound 404s”
Our SEO/marketing guru (Sarah) was making this point that the post suggests too:
Inbound links drive traffic and rankings. Inbound links are precious. Allowing inbound links to fail on nonexistent pages is a marketing crime.
Which is very important – but the post goes on to say:
Once you’ve found your inbound broken links, you can contact the site linking to you to fix them. Smarter: handle it on your side, routing the traffic where you want to send it by (re)creating the appropriate page. Smarter still: issue a 301 permanently moved redirect and flip the traffic to where it should go.
Which I had never thought of…and it very brilliant. I think we never are as aggressive as we should be when it comes to proactivitely addressing these concerns. As the web gets older – more and more of those old links will be irrelevant. The same, or better, content might exist – but we’re too dumb and/or lazy to get people to it.
OK – enough bitching, got to go fix some links! If you have other helpful articles or post…put them in the comments.
