Thanks to John Battelle and Dave Taylor for their mentioning of HitTail at the Blog Business Summit. It seems that if you want some positive online coverage, having a product to aid with blogging presented at a blogging for business conference in front of a room of bloggers helps:
Thanks to conversionrater.com for covering the Blog Business Summit, and the coverage of the audience measurement tools. Apparently, someone had asked about HitTail at the session, and the reviewer is going to check it out. Here's a quote from the site.
Blog Metric Tools - Some of the server log tools are AWStats, Urchin, Analog, and Clicktracks. They also commented on how hits are generally worthless as a statistic, unless you really are interested in how many files are being requested. Someone mentioned HitTail, which I hadn’t heard of yet and now want to review.
Now, I understand how people can feel that hits is a worthless statistic--but that's if you don't filter them down to the interesting stuff beforehand, the way HitTail does. When done properly, you can watch traffic as one-person/one-hit. It's what people REALLY want to do when they hear the notion of loading their log file for the first time. Log files are so filled with garbage as to be useless without analytics software, which I think the comment above was alluding to. I can totally understand why HitTail came up as a topic when people started putting down the usefulness of analytics software. This was reflected in the recent PC World article that referred to HitTail as analytics for the rest of us.
Watching visits as one-person/one hit is the truly interesting way for a casual blogger or marketing person to monitor traffic, because you can intuitively understand what's going on without having to commit your life to becoming a Web metrics guru. Filtered search hits are honest representation of site activity, albeit somewhat disappointing for most. Once you filter out your own search tests, and compulsive competitors, what's left are genuinely interested parties, and often less than what you thing. But that makes the information gleaned from each so much more valuable, and part of the reason HitTail seems so refreshingly new.
Here is an interesting graph that implies Digg and SlashDot not only have similar traffic, as was implied in several articles, but this Alexa data implies that Digg and the NYT are tracking each other uncannily closely, and SlashDot and The Washington Post are doing the same. Strange how closely the lines track each other. I threw in the red Netscape line for good measure, which shows a muted reflection of the same peaks and valleys.
With Google's announcement of its Website Optimizer product, we understand now more than ever that HitTail is in the path of the Tornado. It's fascinating that they named a paid campaign tool for multivariate A/B switch testing as website optimization. Technically, you're optimizing your Google AdWords campaigns and landing pages for better conversion. What you're NOT doing is optimizing your actual website to have more fundamental long-term effectiveness across multiple search engines and across great stretches of time. In other words, you're not fundamentally optimizing your website, but rather simply making your currently active paid campaigns more effective.
None-the-less, this move by Google is going to swing the focus of the mainstream marketing world onto website optimization the same way Google's acquisition of Urchin swung the attention onto analytics. But the big missing hole is turning analytics information into actionable data to improve conversions. Google Website Optimizer is a modest first step in that direction. But there's still a huge disconnect between Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer. A great deal of expertise is required to go from data discovered in the former to A/B switch tests conducted in the later.
HitTail fills this gap by explicitly telling you what to write about in new content to be added to your website. You can use this content on paid campaign landing pages, but if they're technically well search-optimized, you can double the benefit you're getting from your work by creating pages that are also super-charged for free natural search listings. In this way, you can continually expand your website with ever-more-effective pages. Over time, the snowball effect can kick in and your actual reliance on paid clicks diminishes right as the paid campaign becomes more effective, thereby driving down your average cost-per-click.
Yes, it's likely that unless something really shakes up the world of Web search, Google will be the dominant player for a very long time. And optimizing for search means optimizing for Google. But none-the-less, one should always be hedging their bets. And what better way to hedge your bets than to employ a strategy that is equally effective in Google search as it is in other search destination sites, and is free to boot?
HitTail is a genuine website optimization product because no matter the search engine today or in the future, there is always something about your site that is ALMOST working for you--and that's where HitTail shines. It thrives on shifting, changing algorithms, because that stimulates a whole series of new writing suggestions to be issued, allowing you to stay aware of, and keep pace with change.
HitTail is a way to drive more traffic to your website at lower costs. It can also be used to optimize pay-per-click campaigns. In this video, meet both HitTail's invetor and the public relations entrepreneur who brought it to you.
What happens when a top-tier tech publication sends out an invitation to the world for a NYC meetup, includes you as a sponsor the invite, but doesn't hyperlink your logo? You get a spike in Google search hits! In this post, I provide a rare branding insight possible still because the HItTail.com domain is so new.
For example, I can easily calculate how many Google hits per day occurred by people specifically looking for hittail over the past month. The number is 12. While this doesn't sound like many, remember HitTail removes duplicate searches from the same user, so that's 12 different people specifically looking for hittail every day, because they heard about it. Not bad.
So what about today, with the TechCrunch New York party invitation going out, on which we're a premiere sponsor? How many people have search on HitTail as a result of that? The total Google hits so far today is 24 (at the time of this writing). So, searches on HitTail have doubled today over the 30-day average, which most likely can be attributed to TechCrunch. But we cannot know for sure that this was a result of the TechCrunch invite. Yes, it's highly likely, but it's like we did a direct mail campaign and neglected to add a promotion-code. The real traffic driver was TechCrunch, but its all being credited to Google, already making it difficult to track our ROI.
Lesson learned: when you do an online campaign like a party sponsorship that can be a direct traffic-driver and don't include a web-link back to you, you are giving up your opportunity to directly attribute traffic to the campaign. Worse yet, because the first thing everyone thinks to do is type the "brand" into a Google search, the credit for the visit goes to Google! Well, at least the searches on HitTail have doubled so far today, no matter the cause. If you are searching for us because you're going to be at the TechCrunch party on Thursday evening, November 16, 2006, then we look forward to seeing you there!
A few weeks ago, word-of-mouth, paid and natural search were neck-and-neck as leading referrers to the HitTail site. But then, John Battelle's Search Blog pulled ahead of both our AdSense ads and all Google natural search hits as the top referrer, and the key insight was how much of a direct traffic-mover single hits from high profile sites can be. While the coverage remains on the main homepage, word of mouth (PR) can eclipse the natural search traffic. It establishes sort of a traffic surge that annoyingly trails off as it disappears from the homepage, and the effect diminishes.
The goal is with enough subsequent "big hits", you can get a rising plateau pattern, each time pulling your average traffic level up to new heights. The pattern of traffic peeking, diminishing and new averages shows the relationship between an effective online outreach campaign and overall website traffic.
But over the past month, social networking sites entered the mix in a big way! Stumbled Upon has now displaced John Battelle in the top-3 referring sources. So now, the breakdown goes:
1. Google natural search 2. Google paid search (calibrated to be neck-and-neck with natural) 3. Stumble Upon (about 1/3 the traffic-level of natural) 4. John Battelle's Search Blog (about 1/4 traffic-level of natural)
Another surprising and noteworthy referrer is the Site Build It! forums, a by-invitation-only forum for users of their product. I can't even register there to see the discussion, but it appears that it is a product (and a process) to help people build effective sites and traffic who don't know much about the Web or development. Forums are a sort of old-school social networking. Seems like a perfect match for HitTail. It's coming in with about half the unique's that Battelle is generating these days. In a way, it shows the overlap of what I may call a social networking referrer and a word-of-mouth or PR referrer. In the end, everything that's non-paid falls under the public relations umbrella--whether it's through mainstream media, search results, blogs, forums, social networking, bookmarks or social tagging systems. It's all public relations.
When you take that into account, most of the referring sources actually fall into this category. And that's the long tail of my referring sources.
What's the take-away?
When you look at only the top-referring sources, you have a horse race. Lump all Google natural search hits together: that's one horse. Lump all paid search hits together: that's another horse. And look at your next biggest single-site traffic driver: that's the third horse. It appears to be a neck-and-neck race (you can always calibrate your paid-hits to be close to natural if you're willing to spend enough), and the gap between that and your next largest referrer is your PR outreach deficit.
But add up everything beyond your top referrers (the long tail) and you quickly realize that most everything is of the un-paid public relations category (consisting of everything but paid campaigns). Unless you're made of money, an online public relations campaign may be the most effective way to go.
I was recently asked the definition of LongTailing, and had to clarify the difference between it and HitTailing. In a recent blog post, Chris Anderson is calling George Lucas a longtailer, because of this Lucas quote:
Spending $100 million on production costs and another $100 million on P&A makes no sense, he said. "For that same $200 million, I can make 50-60 two-hour movies. That's 120 hours as opposed to two hours. In the future market, that's where it's going to land, because it's going to be all pay-per-view and downloadable."
Longtailing appears to describe is the whole sweeping movement of targeting more specialized niche audiences, while spending less to produce and distribute product. The result is collecting enough customers to support a business, where it would have been impossible before. This is the point Chris hammers in his book about Amazon.com and Rhapsody--a new shape of business. And those who chase that tail are longtailers.
HitTailing on the other hand, while most easily understood in the context of the long tail is merely a way to save marketers lots of time in their keyword selection. Online search marketing is so often about selecting the right keywords to target, which brings in the right audience, which leads to the best return on your marketing dollar. When you delve into longtail marketing, the problem is that the pesky keyword list gets so dauntingly long that you don't know where to begin. But there's hits in 'dat 'dere tail. And all the online marketer needs is a convenient way to zero in on those tail hits, saving massive amounts of time in both their pay-per-click (PPC) and natural search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Well, that's long way of saying that LongTailing applies broadly to business thinking, while HitTailing is only about efficient keyword selection in search marketing.
Even so, we find HitTailing to be a refreshing beacon of simplicity in the world of search marketing, where constantly cleverer traffic analysis results in constantly crowded quagmires of indecision. You can follow click-paths, see drop-off pages, see click hot-spots, pie-charts galore, and even record and play back individual visitor sessions like a VCR. But this wash of data rarely tells you in clear terms what to do next.
HitTail tells you in such explicit terms what to do next, that industry thought leaders such as Markus Merz of performancing.com describe it this way:
HitTail is the hammer-like tool for the hard hearted and disciplined people who urgently want to get their work done. Thirsty for work might be the right manner to approach HitTail. This tool literally throws work at you like that mafia meat ball yelling "I never want to see that guy again! Do something! Now!"
This marks a significant change in the direction of development of analytics software, from a glut of paralyzing information, to a shaping a prescribed formula for success. On the outs are the endless charts and graphs that only an accountant could love, and on the way in are the intuitive and explicit instructions of what to do next. Think of the big change in online maps when they changed from merely showing you a map to giving you turn-by-turn driving instructions. Think of tax software from when it changed from filling in forms to being an automated interview. This is the fundamental change in search marketing that HitTail is ushering in. And it's exactly what's necessary to get the world of mainstream marketing to embrace the elusive but key chore of organic search engine marketing.
Why HitTail May Be the Next Big Thing in Marketing
So the question keeps coming up: why is HitTail something new and important? Why is it accumulating such following? On the surface, it looks like many other products, including Google Analytics, and even the new breed of analysis software that zeros in on natural search. But HitTail strikes a chord with many online marketers, bloggers and even small businesses that hasn't been struck before. More and more, marketing-savvy bloggers are mentioning HitTail and Google Analytics in the same breath—usually as the bare minimum recommendation to know what's going on on your site. Why?
We got the combination of features and process precisely right to take the pain out of long tail marketing online. Huh?
Yep, that's right. Long tail marketing is painful. When you finally manage to pull the long list of keywords that are leading to your site, those words are suddenly out of the context required to give you some reasonable idea of where to focus your effort. And because these long tail keyword lists are so staggeringly long (in many cases), you're bound to waste a whole lot of valuable time.
HitTail is like analytics for busy people. It zeros right in on the sweet spot in that long tail keyword list, and issues them as suggestions, simply stating: "Write about these, and more web traffic will follow." This works so consistently well, because HitTail looks at these search hits in the context of the rest of your site and knows which terms are right on the edge of performing better for you, if only you used them in the headline of a new blog post or webpage.
Is it a low hanging fruit strategy? I used to think so, until I saw a Discovery Channel documentary about how ripe fruit is picked these days. They use tree shakers! Picking low hanging fruit is a laborious and tedious process, requiring lots of manpower and with very little opportunity for automation. But along come tree-shakers, where you put a funnel-tarmac under the tree, grab it with the marvelous tree-shaking truck and shake-away. All the ripe fruit comes tumbling down, gently falling onto the tarmac an into the collection-bin (in this case, the suggestion tab).
So, HitTail is a ripe fruit harvesting strategy, using some specialized heavy machinery. Let your competition waste their time picking low-hanging fruit, while you harvest ALL the ripe fruit.
But just as with fruits and nuts, just harvesting the ripe fruit isn't enough. Inspecting machines need to sort the good ones from the bad. There is some room for automation here, and machines tend to do this better than humans. But the end product is always the same thing: identical and ideal product.
In the case of HitTail, what we're collecting are more like uncut diamonds. For fear of mixing metaphors here, what needs to be done after auto-sorting and quality control is human inspection for cutting, and the hand of a master gem cutter. Without it, the average public wouldn't be able to tell the diamond from a pebble. There is no shine or twinkle. This is the role of the craft of writing well. HitTail is not 100% automated. It's a partnership with skilled writers with unique voices and budding reputations.
Well, that's where the manual side of the HitTailing process kicks in, and another reason why it is so dramatically different from analytics, which tend to reach a dead-end at reporting. By letting you inspect the uncut diamonds coming into the sorting bin (the suggestions tab), we're encouraging you to look closely. Visualize the finished twinkling cut stone you could create from this rough stone. Like the master cutter, you simply know that if you cut and polished this stone, it will yield a tidy return. The cutter knows this because that is simply the nature of diamonds. We know this, because that is simply the nature of the keyword suggestions that we issue. Natural search listing are the cut diamonds of the new online economy. Google knows this, and with AdWords is in the cubic zirconia market with AdWords. The untrained eye can't tell the difference.
But natural search hits are becoming ever-more-valuable, because as the public at large becomes media-savvy, they are increasingly able to discriminate ads from genuine listings in the same fashion as they are commercials (and infomercials) from TV programs, and advertisements (and advertorials) from articles in print media.
Consequently, the rock-solid relationship between the public relations industry and HitTail, which is essentially a search engine optimization product for mainstream marketing, becomes clear. Public relations is an art-form based on creativity and unorthodox marketing, where you garner publicity without directly paying for it—idea being that you can capture a lot more attention (and ultimately get and keep more customers) while paying less than the competition must pay for more traditional advertising.
And what is natural or organic search? Much the same thing. It's the editorial component of the new media, known as search. Search is a new media as surely as magazines or TV programs. Google, Yahoo and ASK are like the big TV networks of yesteryear. And unlike mega-sites like YouTube and MySpace, EVERYONE partakes in search. So, getting free publicity in the new media of search is precisely the same thing as free publicity in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, USA Today, Oprah, the evening news, the late shows or the morning shows.
It's the subject of other posts, but actually free exposure in search is better than the above-listed venues, because search works 24/7 and reaches out to uniquely pre-qualified prospects—those who are looking for YOU (even if on generic terms). Of course, we don't forsake the big media hits mentioned above, as that is Connors Communications forte. It's a rare thing to find a single company that can work equally well in both the mega-influential world mainstream media, and the turbulent grass-roots opinion-setting world of online media, capable of developing products such as HitTail.
Those who deal with branding love HitTail, because you can keep corralling your target audience back in, and have the repeated exposures necessary to build up top-of-mind awareness. Solution sales organizations selling into difficult markets (long sales cycles) love HitTail, because it often provides T1 (first touch), and numerous subsequent touches as the prospect continues their research, often looking for your competitors. Corralling them back in on a variety of used (but often unexpected) terms is critical. Online publishers love HitTail, because that business model often doesn't work if you're not getting your traffic for free through natural search, because if you have to pay for your traffic, then it's a wash when you sell advertising. Small to medium sized businesses love HitTail because it fits in nicely with integrated marketing strategies that emphasize low-cost marketing alternatives, like public relations, to offer that special competitive edge and secret weapon.
We think you will love HitTail too. Simply click the register link, put a snippet of code on your site, and watch the writing suggestions start to come in.
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