6 – ComMetrics Blog Impact
Stats are important – but on their own, they don’t tell us much.
- Nevertheless, decision-makers, press, media and users are hungry for numbers, so we have aggregated the numbers we use.
The composite index BlogImpact is based on several mezo indices such as:
- Footprint and how big an impression your blog posts leave in cyberspace.
- Health Check usability, trust and credibility of blog content.
- Resonance such as, consistency, conversation and so forth.
Each of the above indices is again made up of several other measures as outlined in the hyperlinked pages listed above.
1st step – sign-up and get the free access to be able to benchmark your blog and micro-blogging performance.
How we interpret statistics
Here are a few popular blog-ranking services on the web. Unfortunately, many rely on only one piece of data for their rankings. This could be link popularity, RSS feeds or some sort of traffic ranking service.
Unfortunatley, without insight and interpretation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage or performance from many of the agencies, bloggers and corporations themselves. The key is to
- look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time.
Hence, put more weight on active unique users that commented in the last 30 days vs overall registered users that receive content via e-mail.
Do not be fooled by puffed numbers. No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage and performance from multiple dimensions. In turn, it is smart to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.
In order to respond to the above concerns and for getting a more comprehensive and accurate picture, some people have tried to combine data from multiple sources. An example might be taking Inbound Links from Yahoo! Site Explore (i.e. takes entire site not including internal pages), Alexa Rank, and possibly Quantcast. For an example see 30 Most Popular Blogs.
Quantcast works only, if the website or blog owner has decided to use and insert a piece of javascript into his or her blog so that they can collect and report a rank based on actual traffic. As well, if the user does not allow Javascript to be executed, Quantcast cannot collect data.
For Alexa, no corporate notebook or PC workstation is likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed. In turn, traffic to your website originating from a user at work is unlikely to count with Alexa (for more details see here: Alexa.com continues to fail businesses with inaccurate usage numbers
We tried to address the above and other issues by using several measures to calculate several indicators. Each indicator measures different aspects of blog’s impact in the social media space. In turn, this helps in avoiding the most obvious pitfalls when choosing the measures we included in our algorithm.
Check out what indicators we use and how we collect these data by clicking on the hyperlinks below:
- Footprint or how big is your shoe size when looking into cyberspace?
- Usability and how customised content can be delivered to subscribers.
- Return on connecting – ROC such as, consistency, conversation and so forth.
- Return on microblogging – ROM or is your Twitterfeed creating some kind of resonance?
Comparing indices helps in determining where improvements will help achieve the best results.
