2010 in review [ROI HUNTERS BLOG]

No sooner did I post a comment about the shortcomings of WordPress.com stats then I found this in my email in-basket from the ‘stats helper monkeys’ of WordPress.com.    You can see by some of this analysis how it might be difficult to perform the following analysis:

• Geo specific information – to help identify where geo targeted PPC advertising might be most effective.
• Path Analysis – I want to understand if they stay for more then one page then where are they going.
• Entry / Exit Stats – which pages are the stickiest, which exit pages do I need to work on.
• Time Spent Stats – I love to understand what’s working and what’s not.  Outliers are the most fun!
• Time of Day Stats – When is  my site being visited the most, this might affect my PPC spending habits.

Stats Monkey Helper Info

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,300 times in 2010. That’s about 8 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 12 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 80 posts. There were 5 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 42kb.

The busiest day of the year was October 15th with 37 views. The most popular post that day was Google Groups: Team Collaboration Tool.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were ifreestores.com, bigextracash.com, en.search.wordpress.com, theappleblog.com, and bigblenderoftech.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for or current resident, current resident, great customer service examples, brand manager, and customer service excellence examples.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Google Groups: Team Collaboration Tool September 2008
3 comments

2

Customer Service Excellence Examples August 2008
10 comments

3

Or Current Resident? May 2008
2 comments

4

Marketing Warfare: The iPad Battle April 2010
19 comments

5

Motrin, Social Media, and the Brand Manager’s Bad Day November 2008

No Top 3 Country Visitor Stats for this Blog

Sorry, with WordPress.com at this time it can’t be done.

WordPress.com Is Great

Firstly let me say that I love WordPress.com.  It is now my platform of choice for introducing web sites with web content capabilities to small companies.  Many of my clients are Mom & Pop shops, small non-profits, or small for-profits with less then 50 employees and no IT staff to speak of.  They might already have a site, but haven’t updated it in years.  They don’t have the discipline in place to update their own sites on a regular basis, let alone a web development package to update their legacy site.

WordPress.com becomes a great inexpensive proof of concept tool.  I can show the staff how a web site should be updated, by the staff, as frequently as needed.  I can remain an admin to their site so I can fix any minor problems that occur or answer any questions on capabilities or limitations.  If the client sees results that prove valuable, I can then walk them through the analysis of moving to a hosted WordPress.org site or a custom built site from scratch.  (You can guess which one usually wins.)

I like WordPress so much I’m in discussions with the college I teach at to use WordPress.com and a WordPress.org installation for a CSS and Advance CSS class I want to teach.

Marketing Shortcoming – Stats

If there is one area that vexes me while I am navigating my clients through the proof of concept is the lack of decent stats.  WordPress.com provides the basics: Page Views, Referrers, Top Posts & Pages, Search Engine Terms, Clicks.

Items I would love to see:

• Geo specific information – to help identify where geo targeted PPC advertising might be most effective.
• Path Analysis – I want to understand if they stay for more then one page then where are they going.
• Entry / Exit Stats – which pages are the stickiest, which exit pages do I need to work on.
• Time Spent Stats – I love to understand what’s working and what’s not.  Outliers are the most fun!
• Time of Day Stats – When is  my site being visited the most, this might affect my PPC spending habits.

Possible Statistic Solutions

I’m sure WordPress staff have heard all this before but I want to add my two cents.  For anyone that uses some of the different log analyzing tools out there this is nothing new.  The following seem reasonable to me:

• Upgrade Existing Default Package – maybe there is a add-on which could be implemented for WordPress.com that would bring it up to modern marketing times
• Google Analytic Tool – possibly some hitch in ‘Tools’ or ‘Settings’ that allow someone to put their unique site id in a field and WordPress would fill in the blanks behind the scenes.
• Log Export Utility – either on demand or on a timed event the site logs would be sent to the admins so they can manually run the logs against their own log analyzer (webalizer, etc.)

Even with the stats shortcoming I still would use WordPress.com as a starter web site for smaller clients.  The ease of use and the fast indexing of content by Google make it a very strong tool to begin the processing of understanding exactly what your company needs.

Good Hunting.

PS.  I’ve gone round and round on changing the title of this post to be more gracious to WordPress.com but I got the idea from the DailyPost.WordPress.com so I wanted to keep the “List three countries you’d like to visit, and why you want to go.” question theme alive in my post by focusing on the 3 top countries that visit my blog.  Since I could not answer that question, this post was created.

Jott Thought: Flickr…

Jott Thought: Flickr – a great social media tool

Powered by Jott

Expanded Thought: I switched to Flickr from Yahoo Photo when Yahoo discontinued Yahoo Photos and have been very happy. Contacts are notified by email when new images are uploaded. There are Flickr groups to connect with like-minded folks. And I love the stats!