SEOmoz introduces public analytics on all posts | Hacker News Reader

SEOmoz introduces public analytics on all posts

seomoz.org

19 pointsRoedou9 comments

Disclaimer: I helped implement this.

I think it's a great idea. Many news sites have been displaying "visits" or "hits" next to their news stories for a while but it's never exactly clear where this comes from and how it's measured.

By pulling this data directly from Google Analytics we are speaking the same language as everyone else and displaying metrics like time on page, bounce rate etc I think reveals a greater level of data than most.

We're following in the (awesome) footsteps of people like Fred Wilson (http://chartbeat.com/demo/) and I hope that by displaying this data it will help our community keep us heading in the right direction and of course it should motivate all of us to keep pushing the numbers in the right direction :)

As someone who blogs on SEOmoz, you can bet this is going to make me up my game with my posts now everyone can see how widely-read my posts were vs. my colleagues'.

"Post Analytics" seems like a terrible label for that button. What does that even mean? Especially for the web dev folks that are probably reading that blog... am I POSTing analytics to the site? Sending my analytics to SEOmoz?

Why not "Show Analytics"? Why not show that info by default, without a button click?

Er, after reading it a second time it's probably intended to be more "This Blog Post's Analytics". The noun/verb issue is easily misread, especially since every other call to action button on that page uses a verb. "Add Comment" "Hide Comments" "Get RSS" "Friend Us" "Follow Us" etc...

I think you're right though that "show analytics" would be better. Also the reason they don't show it up front might be twofold (or not) - one that it increases engagement by making the blog part more interactive, a small but significant thing IMO, the other is that it reduces database load as not everyone will look at the analytics (if you're not bothered to read them then they just clutter up the page).

It looks like all the comments here are from SEOmoz employees.

ATM: 8 comments, including your, 5 from non-SEOmoz employees.

Actually Will I think is only a guest blogger there. Not quite sure what the relationship between SEOmoz and Distilled is but it seems pretty tight.

I love the concept, but a piece missing here is how many "goals" / "conversions" each post generates.

From my own adventures in blogging I found that # of visitors isn't the right metric to measure success / fail.

EG - this somewhat technical post is low visits (~1500) but consistently generates leads at a high conversion rate:

http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/05/how-to-track-co...

Vs this link-baity post which generated lots of visitors (15,000+) but generates substantially fewer leads than the technical post:

http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/12/%E2%80%9Cmerry-...

That's not to say that there isn't inherent SEO / brand value in high-traffic posts but again, in my own experience, I'd rather have a handful of posts that perform like example #1 vs. a dozen of example #2

This is definitely on the roadmap, this initial implementation is just the bare bones.

One unusual thing with SEOmoz is that they get a huge volume of traffic through their blog where the conversion rate (to money) is low. What I'd love to see more is softer conversions such as social interactions, registered users etc.

Thanks for your feedback!

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