Dear Brands:

Your metrics don’t matter.

What I’m trying to say is that all that time (and money) you’re using to research where to spend your resources online likely isn’t doing you as much good as you think it is. Your third-party SEO provider or your internal business analyst, marketing department or SEO managers are spending their time scouring the web, looking for the best place to place your link to help improve your search rankings.

Chances are, they’re using the wrong metrics. Here’s the relatively ineffective online social metrics they’re using:

Google PageRank (PR)

A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away), Google themselves even down-played the importance of PageRank. They actually used to display PR data inside Webmaster Tools, once upon a time. In 2009, they removed it. They’ve slowly been migrating away from this metric – at least in the public eye. Those in the industry that don’t intentionally try to play-up the role of PR often refer to PageRank as “Toolbar PageRank” (TBPR) now. What’s the difference, you ask? TBPR is a snapshot of actual PR at that moment in time. TBPR is only published once every few months where actual PR is constantly changing (in Google’s algorithm). We never know what actual PR is at any given moment; all we know is what it was (TBPR) at the time of publication.

The last publication of TBPR was back in early November, according to SEORoundTable.com.

Alexa Rank

The Alexa ranking of a site is another (more) dubious metric that SEO’s place emphasis on that they really shouldn’t be. The Alexa ranking is far less sophisticated than the Google PR and it’s already been proven that this ranking can be “gamed”. In August of 2012, I wrote a post about the “Darker Side to Blog Traffic Stats“. In it, I exposed some of the “gaming” that goes on amongst some blog owners to intentionally raise their page’s Alexa ranking. This is done by visitors with the Alexa Toolbar visiting the website and spending a certain amount of time on the site and viewing a certain number of pages. The idea is that if a user visits your site with the toolbar, the visit is logged by Alexa and counts toward the reduction of your ranking. Spending more time and viewing more pages is meant to not only simulate “normal” user behavior but also to lower your bounce rate and increase your page views per visit.

Guess what? This works.

Guess what else? Alexa rank doesn’t correlate to traffic – at least not proportionately.

On my personal website Memoirs of a Single Dad, my Alexa ranking has been declining for the past 6 months or so while my traffic has been steady, overall. In January, 2012 it was in the 200k range (world-wide) and I was receiving 300-500 uniques per day. Today, my Alexa ranking is 613k and I am receiving 400-700 uniques per day. I even saw a huge traffic spike late last year where I received 10x the number of visitors I typically experience in a week (due to a post going semi-viral). My Alexa ranking barely moved an inch during that week.

What is the reason for the steady decline? While I don’t have any hard evidence, I stopped commenting on other (mostly mommy) bloggers’ posts as of about June of 2012. Another good explanation of how the ranking works (and can be impacted) can be found here.

Klout & Kred Scores

Klout and Kred are two similar sites that measure an individual’s online credibility by scoring their engagement levels online.

In Kred’s own words:

Kred Story is a visual history of your Social Media Influence. Explore the posts, pictures and links that make you influential. See your full influence story and zoom in on meaningful moments.

It’s a “Pinterest-style” site that attempts to measure influence based on social media sharing statistics. Users are also able to give each other “Kred”, indicating they feel the other user is an authority in a particular topic. This influences the user’s Kred score (presumably) proportionate to the person giving the Kred. Kred’s scoring appears to be on a 0-1000 scoring system where 1000 is the most influential in a given topic area and 0 is no “Kred” at all in that particular topic.

Klout is a similar site which uses similar metrics but appears to be less “fluffy” than Kred. Where Kred displays a pin board style format, Klout has more of a tool feel than social media site. Similar to Kred, Klout users can also “give Klout” to others, indicating they feel the person is an authority in their topic area. Klout has a 0-100 scoring system, where 100 is the “most” influential in a topic.

On the surface, these sites seem great. They use real metrics (social shares) to measure an individual’s online standing. They provide a scale that we can compare scores with other influencers to see where we stack up. In reality, though, they’re flawed systems just like any other created to measure something that’s arguably immeasurable.

Wrapping It All Up

The fact remains that individuals and corporations will continue to use these metrics to measure influence and to continue to base their decisions (and spending) around. Until better systems come along, they’re all we have but they are flawed in their own way. We should keep those flaws in mind when making critical business decisions.

With millions of blogs out there, you can find as many reasons for blogging as there are bloggers. Some of us blog in pursuit of a higher calling to bring awareness to a cause or to have an outlet to vent some of our frustrations and connect with other like-minded individuals. Other bloggers are in it for the money – ha! No, it’s true; apparently there’s money to be had in blogging somewhere down the line, its just a matter of finding it.

I respect both sides of the coin and I find myself a bit on both sides as well. I wish I was in a better place to share more about my personal experiences, but unfortunately I am not – at least not yet. Blogging started out as therapeutic for me but I also have found the benefits of having this site can be many. I’ve formed a few relationships (with people and with brands) that I am very thankful for and I’m convinced never would have happened had I not started writing. I even wrote my own book on dating and relationships because of this blog and can now call myself a published author.

A few months ago I witnessed a few blogging practices that I wasn’t very happy about and it’s taken me some time to come around and write about them. I was in pursuit of traffic – the stats. I love stats and I love more readers visiting my site (but who doesn’t)? I was cranking out heartfelt post after heartfelt post and yet, my traffic was still relatively flat-lined. I saw another blogger talking about what she called a ‘linky’ or something like that and I was intrigued.

What I came to find was a whole other world of blogging I was completely unaware of – the world of stats padding and traffic manipulation.

Stats Padding

Why would anyone want to pad their blog’s stats? It sounds silly but it can be serious business. Consider for a moment the difference between a website that receives 1,000 unique visits per month and one that receives 10,000. That’s a fairly significant difference.

The problem with Internet traffic is that the have’s often remain the have’s and the have-not’s often stay the same as well. The sites that receive all the traffic guard their traffic like an elf guards his gold. How does an up-and-coming blogger crack into the traffic pot of gold? Many would argue that content is the way to go. I agree – write (or produce) something that people want to read and you will see an increase in visitors. But others resort to less scrupulous tactics like padding their stats. These padded stats are presumably to attract the attention of brands and sponsorships or advertisement dollars to increase revenue from their sites. Stats-padding can be done in a number of ways, either through manual manipulation or through automated tools.

Automation Tools

Automation on a computer is nothing new. Heck, I remember writing simple macros back in the day to automate simple tasks that needed to be done but were a constant drain on my free time. Well, it appears some websites have taken to employing automation tools to improve their site’s traffic as well. At the simplest of levels, think of a automation tool as a recording device. You record an action by performing it on your computer. The automation tool records what you do and then allows you to play back what you’ve done. You can control timing, frequency and other factors of the playback. More advanced uses also include automating from different computers, different IP addresses and other tactics to trick traffic sites into believing the automated traffic isn’t just coming from the same computer.

“Click Rings”

Quite possibly the most common and also most shocking method of bloggers improving their traffic stats is by joining and participating in what I call a “click ring”. A click ring is formed by other bloggers that are looking to trade another site for a visit. I agree to visit your site, click around, and spend some time and you agree to do the same. Click ring rules often go so far as to mention a minimum number of pages to open and a minimum duration to keep the pages open. This, of course, is so that your bounce rate doesn’t take a hit from all that fake traffic.

Bloggers, let’s be honest shall we? The old (and quite over-used) saying that “content is king” just doesn’t hold water in today’s blogging world, does it? Generally speaking, good content is more likely to generate a few more readers, a little bit more traffic and maybe a handful of opportunities but not always. Sometimes blogging is just the luck of the draw. Apparently, some of us aren’t willing to accept this notion so they take matters into their own hands. Are the days of viral content just happening gone? Well, no. But the likelihood of the stars are aligning and Oprah visiting your site (since we can’t sit on her couch any more) don’t seem all that likely either.

If you’re a blogger I’d love for you to weigh in with your thoughts in the comments. What do you think about traffic scores, “click rings”, automation tools and other tactics bloggers employ to get an edge? Have you ever partaken in any of these practices? Did it work for you?

I’m a tweaker by nature. I love to tweak and test and re-tweak and re-test settings on just about everything. When it comes to my site I also love to crunch my numbers. How fast does my site load? How is my site impacted if I change this setting? What about that setting? My site is definitely not static by any means. In this post, I’ll attempt to examine a question I get asked a LOT from fellow bloggers:

Why are my Google Analytics stats different than my WordPress | JetPack | Blogger.com stats?

Great question! Let’s get started.

The Stats Just Don’t Add Up

Stats and analytics are only as useful as they are accurate. That goes without saying. You’d think website hits would be pretty straight-forward: if someone visits your site and views a page, that’s a unique view. If they check out another page, that’s another page view. When they leave, that’s a ‘bounce’. Simple, right?

Not exactly.

I run a number of WordPress-based sites and like to use at least two methods for tracking my stats: JetPack (lite) and Google Analytics. When I compare the stats for my sites in both platforms, the stats just don’t add up. If you use two (or more) platforms like this as a way of comparing I’m sure you’ve noticed something similar as well. But how do we found out what the possible cause(s) may be of this discrepancy?

The best way to tackle this discrepancy is to zero in on a very specific example to try and track down the possible causes.

JetPack Dashboard View

I’m going to take an example of a specific post and a specific time frame and zero in on the difference in stats between Google Analytics and JetPack stats. That way we know we’re comparing apples to apples, so to speak. First, let’s start by drilling down on a specific post in JetPack.

I go into ‘Site Stats’ on my left navigation menu and click the (very tiny) button  to view the stats for this particular page. I’m going to zero-in on the stats only for the month of March. Here’s what I see:

Notice that JetPack has registered 1,041 clicks of this post for the month of March. The graph shows the distribution of those clicks over the duration of the month. However, when we take a look at the post view in Google Analytics, we see an entirely different story.

Google Analytics View

To get to the same view in Google Analytics I have to drill down a bit. To see the details of a single page or post, you can do the following:

1. Click to expand the ‘Content’ menu.
2. Expand the ‘Site Content’ sub-menu and choose ‘Pages’.
3. Locate the specific page (they’re listed by URL) by either filtering or going through the pages of results. By default, they appear to be sorted by views in descending order.
4. Click the link under the ‘Page’ column to filter on only the stats for that page (or post, in this case).
5. Specify the time frame by choosing the corresponding start and end dates in the top-right.

Google is showing 1,185 page views for the exact same post and the exact same time frame. That’s a pretty significant difference in clicks! But where did all of those clicks go?

Click for a larger view.

Possible Causes to the Difference

There are a number of reasons why the two tracking methods would be showing different results. Below are a few of the possibilities.

Tracking Logged-in Users

JetPack knows the difference between a user that has logged into the site and one that is visiting anonymously. This could be one possible cause for the difference in stats. This will typically cause your JetPack stats to appear inflated as compared to Google.

If you don’t allow user registrations on your site, you likely want to turn off the tracking of logged in users, since you’d only be tracking your own page views on your site. Turning off this function will provide you with the most accurate results possible. Turning off the tracking of loggin-in users in JetPack (and Lite) is done by performing the following steps:

1. Click the Settings main menu.
2. Go to the JetPack menu option.
3. On the WordPress.com Stats section, click the Configure button.
4. Toggle the option to count (or not) registered users – checked means those users that are logged in will have their stats included in the click counts.

Search Engine Hits

Chances are, search engines are crawling and indexing your site just about every day. It is my theory that some analytics platforms may count those “bot” crawls as hits as well. Reason would tell us that Google Analytics would filter out any of Google’s own crawler hits, but it may not be able to do the same for other search engines (Yahoo, Bing, Alexa, etc). This may be a possible cause if your JetPack hits are greater than your Google Analytics stats.

Improperly Configured Sites

Another possible cause to a discrepancy in site stats could be the configuration of the site itself. Google more recently went to a new, asynchronous method of tracking stats in Analytics. If it’s been a while since you’ve configured your site to use Google Analytics, you may want to update it to utilize the new method of tracking. More information on this can be found by clicking here.

The jury is still out as to the exact cause of gaps in statistics between the various platforms. In the mean time, continuing the focus on building quality content and solid relationships will be my focus. I’ll be keeping a watchful eye on my stats as I always do and reporting when something else just doesn’t quite add up.

Chances are, if you’re reading this article you’re a blogger just like me. I’d say there’s also a good chance that you’re looking to increase your site’s traffic, which is a very natural thing to want. Every website wants more traffic - I dare you to show me one that doesn’t – but is all traffic created equally?

Good Traffic vs Not-So-Good Traffic

If you’ve spent any time in applications like Google Analytics then you know you can twist, turn, dig and mine data just about any way you want. Want to know where your visitors came from? Want to know how long they spent on your site? Want to know what page they were on when they left? You can figure out all of these questions and more just by examining the data.

So, when it comes to traffic, what is considered ‘good’ traffic? Here’s a list of things to look for. Generally speaking, the inverse of each would be considered ‘bad’ traffic.

High Pages-per-Visit Statistics

The more pages your visitors view the more engaging your content is. You’d like them to check out more than one page or article, not just ditch after one page view. Sites with low pages-per-visit stats are presumed to be less engaging and less interesting to the visitor.

High Time on Site Statistics

This one may go along with your pages per visit stat. You want visitors to be engaged and to stick around a while. Google tracks how long each visitor spends per page and on your site in general. The longer they stay, the more engaged they are which speaks to your topic’s depth and authority.

Low Bounce Rate

What’s a bounce rate? A bounce rate is a visitor that arrives and quickly leaves without really taking the time to read your content or explore your site. You can read the full, official definition from Google here. Think of a bounce as someone walking up to your shop, poking their head in the door for a look and promptly leaving. These still count as ‘visits’ but I’d argue they’re not quality visits.

High Returning Visitor Rate

What portion of your visitors are coming back for seconds (or thirds or more)? If visitors are returning to your site time and time again that means you’ve got a great thing going! Your level of engagement is high and people find genuine value in your content.

Unfortunately, there’s not enough time to discuss all traffic metrics. I didn’t even get to mention metrics by source. You can see significantly different behaviors depending on the source of your traffic. For example, your bounce rate may vary greatly from visitors arriving from search engines vs. Facebook referrals. More on that in a future article.