Google Analytics and HitTail often mentioned together

It's more than a year since we launched the HitTail Beta (August 14th--I should have done a happy-beta-birthday), and some of you have been with us since we soft-launched it in the form of MyLongTail at the beginning of 2006, where I documented the fact that's important to HitTail--you can get into Google search results with a brand-new website in under 2 weeks! The "sandbox" penalty was gone. So, imagine what you could do with a site that was already somewhat built up! Imagine what you could do if you knew the terms that were teetering on the edge of working for you already in natural search, and just required a little push.

Well, you just imagined HitTail, and I'm happy to have brought it to so many people for over a year now.

I'm always still surprised and delighted at the articles that keep appearing about HitTail in blogs and newsletters. Here's one that apparently has been out since May of this year from Yaro Starak, the Blog Traffic King, but I only just discovered. It sums up the whole long tail and HitTail thing very nicely, and for those of you who don't get it yet, it's a recommended read. Thanks, Yaro!

The feedback really just keeps pouring in, and I'm surprised by how across-the-board it's coming from. You can read a great deal of the feedback on our TypePad Quotes and Testimonials site. But there are even not-safe-for-work links that I'm avoiding putting there out of good taste. But never one to avoid controversy, I figured I'd share one not-safe-for-work link (NSFW) regarding funny suggestions from HitTail. There are more. Seems we're just as appealing to the adult entertainment industry as political blogs, eCommerce sites and the like.

I guess this makes us an equal opportunity secret weapon for driving website traffic. I'm even waiting for candidates from the 2008 election to start hopping on the HitTail bandwagon as part of getting their message out online. There was brief interest from Obama Girl, but I guess she's so busy with her newfound fame. I'll give her another try.

One of the amazing trends I've discovered in watching the HitTail discussion on the Internet is how Google Analytics and HitTail so often get invoked in the same breath, such as comments from The-Secret and shopgirl.

While Google analytics is statistics, which gives you the typical top-10 lists, HitTail is on the other hand, based on anecdotal and empirical evidence--working much like a private eye piecing together clues. Recently, I was slammed by a HitTail user accusing us of not really being a longtail tool, because we stop 350 keywords in, and the long tail hardly even starts at that point. I humbly reminded him that the "My HitTail" tab was only one of five--and actually the least-important one at that.

That's right!

We only made that long tail graph to demonstrate to people how things JUST START TO GET INTERESTING in the tail, and how much attention is improperly spent on the head, where you're already performing well! So, I added some text to the bottom of the chart to make sure people get the subtle message of how the data displayed in the chart is actually UNIMPORTANT!

The fact that we're not Web analytics software, applying statistics to the data is what makes people so addicted to HitTail. We're not insulating you from the data or interpreting it for you. We're merely zeroing in on serendipitous events that happen to be handing over competitive intelligence. It's not some derivative of this event that's important. It's the event itself--that someone found your site on such-and-such a term, but they worked really hard to find you--usually deep in the results.

This tells you two things:

1. You CAN be found on that term. Hence, the value of identifying the first time anyone ever found your site on a particular term. It demonstrates POTENTIAL--like surveying for new oil fields.
   
   
2. There's a bunch of crap ahead of you in the search results that likely did not satisfy the searcher, or else they would have stopped sooner.

So, merely by virtue of using HitTail, you're simultaneously surveying for new fields of website traffic "oil", and you're verifying that no one already has a strong claim to that property. There's no waiting for the polar icecaps to melt to claim your Internet gold. You don't have to battle Russia, Canada, the U.S. and Denmark for North Pole natural resource rights. All you have to do is choose an already-search-optimized publishing platform, such as Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad or WordPress, and take HitTail's writing suggestions.

It's that easy.

So, we don't ask you to give up Google Analytics. It does a bunch of things HitTail is unlikely to ever do. But because our philosophy is so radically opposite to statistics (anecdotal evidence), they compliment each other perfectly--and this is perhaps the reason so many people mention GA and HitTail in the same breath.

If you have to choose just one more tracking system to run in addition to Google Analytics, HitTail is it.