Blogging with real-time data

We recently came across a great example of 1) how quickly a new blog post can appear in search results and 2) the value of HitTail's real-time reporting.

Kenton Newby describes his experience with amazing indexing results after publishing a blog post and finding it in search results within 2 hours of posting it and at the top of the 2nd page of results for the query "define Google Analytics bounce rate"

We've discussed these types of cases in the past here. One of the big advantages of PPC is that you see results immediately after you activate an ad campaign. With SEO, it usually takes longer to see the results of your work. However, blogging has shown that this gap is narrowing and that it's possible to see the results of your SEO efforts in natural search results within hours or days of publishing.

Note that HitTail's real-time report alerted Kenton to the fact that his blog post was getting traffic as it occurred. This realization would not have been possible using other analytics tools where there is a delay in viewing referrer data.

How do you take action on this data?

The real-time data is especially useful for bloggers who pay attention to social media and get a lot of their traffic from sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. For example, if you are logged in to your HitTail account and you notice a bunch of new referrers on the Search Hits tab from StumbleUpon or Digg, you can take action immediately by bookmarking the site yourself or notifying your network to increase visibility for that blog post. This practice has the potential to create a quick short-term boost in traffic.

New HitTail Live Widget being Tested

Hey baby, wanna see my HitTail?

Would you share the first page of your HitTail Search Hits data with the world?

Well, it used to be that you had to log into your own site (or as Connors) to see how cool and addicting our real-time Search Hit tab in HitTail is. But we wanted to start giving everyone a feel for the “black river of keywords” that exists in any site without logging in.

So, we’re testing this new “HitTail Live” widget on our own site for now—but based on whether people like this feature, we might make it available to the public. First, I’m interested in what you think. So, comment!

This widget it somewhat in the spirit of the “search voyeur” features that used to be built into sites like Excite and AOL Search in years past, where you can have insight to the “search stream”. Lately, this has been supplanted by Google Zeitgeist. But somehow, we still think that viewing the real-time flow in a voyeuristic fashion is still hugely appealing. It’s the same issue as day-after Google Analytics, vs. the viewing the real-time click-stream that makes folks like this blogger continue to use HitTail over other choices. Both have their uses, but as this writer states, there’s just something about watching those hits come in.

So, if you’re interested in using this widget on your website, let us know with comments. It’s not a sure thing. For example, would you actually be OK with SHOWING OTHERS the flow of traffic leading into your site? Is it giving too much away?

Personally, I feel it will help reveal the trends on the Internet that the online marketing community doesn’t want to acknowledge: natural search is king. Paid search (which is indistinguishable from natural search from a referrer perspective), which you can identify by the “lack” of a natural listing, is just way less common than people think. Sure, it can drive traffic, but can it even begin to compete with natural search niche domination?

By showing you this widget, we’re now also showing you a slice of the traffic coming to the HitTail site itself. It’s also a wonderful example of how awesome our filters are. Doing this should by all reason pollute our data with people surfing or referrer links. But it won’t. Think about that. If you click one of those links in the Widget, and surf BACK INTO the HitTail site using a reproduced Google search, shouldn’t you see that you just did that in our widget? Shouldn’t that sort of self-referential referrer loop ruin the data?

In any other tracking system, it would.

And THAT sort of subtlety is why folks like Tatraplan detect something special about HitTail’s particular brand of showing referrers.

And with this new public-facing widget, we think there’s a much easier way to check out HitTail’s coolness, without “logging in as Connors”.

If you agree, and might like one of these for yourself, let us know.

HitTail is Real-time, Easy and Actionable.

With HitTail premium here, and a unique chance to get grandfathered into our "thank-you" introductory pricing, I pause to think about why our non-analytics package has received such unilateral praise. We don't track conversions. We don't tell you whose online now. We don't do A/B switch multivariate testing. We don't do site visitor geo-dexing. So then why is everyone jumping onto the HitTail bandwagon?

By boss, Connie Connors, would remind me that we're real-time, easy and actionable. But these are buzzwords to my ears, and I think people have to have the "I get it" moment. Before that, there's no amount of explanation that will suffice. Sure, we've tried, with our snazzy flash demo, personal appeal, live login, and collecting the tons of spontaneous endorsements around the Internet. And now we're about to demonstrate that it has legs as a paid service. But what does real-time, easy and actionable really mean?

Deep down in every marketer's heart is the desire to watch a website's raw log files and understand what they're seeing. At some point in their marketing career, someone loads it into Notepad.exe to demonstrate to them the futility, and they are crestfallen, spending the rest of their marketing careers looking for second-best. What they discover is highly evolved and complex software that goes way beyond log files in the ability to ferret out every little fact about the site. But with this capability, comes complexity, and to really pursue this path, you have to become a career analytics person--or worse yet, rely on someone who is. It's still not as good as just watching your log files.

HitTail's "real-time" capability is about satisfying that basic marketing need--finally. Massively powerful databases, stunningly fast parallel processing, new programming techniques (AJAX), and a new way of thinking about the problem were required to make this happen. But when marketers finally see it, they get that at long last, they're getting a real-time view of their log files. Better yet, it's distilling the list to just what they want to see--sources of initial referrers. Because, in the end, when you're just sitting there watching traffic, who cares about page-to-page internal page-loads. What's most interesting is how people are getting to your site, and why. And that's exactly what HitTail shows you in real-time. No more. No less. And as the icing on top, it's also extracting the keywords and evaluating writing suggestions right there as you watch. There's no one-day wait. A one-day wait for site activity data is so 1990's.

So, how about when we say "easy"? Well, that's always a loaded term. One person's easy is another person's puzzle. HitTail's "easy" means that there are just 4 tabs to our user interface and the activities under each tab are fundamentally the same. We don't make you play "drill-down-surprise" and we don't make you play "expand and explain". Instead, we make you play "pair down the list". Every list is addictively interesting, and this addictive nature of HitTail enhances the "easy". Everything remains in fixed positions on the screen, and we correspondingly let you "get into the zone". When you're HitTailing best, you're thinking least. Things just sort of run on automatic, until it comes time to write. THEN you think.

Contrast that with the labor-intensive keyword research processes of the alternatives. Worse yet, contrast that to the complexity of trying to do complex things, like user path analysis.

The sad truth is that when you try to do complex things, you have to do complex things.

"Duhhh", you say? Well, not really, when you think about the state of analytics today. Sometimes just getting to your list of initial referrers is a complex thing. Forget about serious keyword analysis. Analytics software loses most people at "Hello". In contrast, HitTail inspires a surprisingly enthusiastic following. Never before on the Internet has the formula for systematically drawing in more and more potential customers... been... so... EASY!

And finally, how about the term "actionable"? What exactly does that mean, anyway? Isn't analytics software actionable? When I pull up those charts and graphs, can't I turn around to my website and know exactly what to do?

Well, no.

First, you need to know what questions to ask, so your analytics software is telling you the right things. Once you have that, you need to interpret the raw data. Are you dealing with usability adjustments? Are you dealing with a deficit of referring sources? Are you dealing with flawed sales-flow and conversion? And once you have your answers, who do you turn to, to do the work? Your webmaster? Your marketing team? Your programmers? Or how about you yourself? Are you personally a candidate to carry out the work that your interpreter of analytics data says needs to be done?

With HitTail, you are.

With HitTail, you receive explicit instructions, you need to write about this, or you need to write about that. And we strongly encourage you to use best-of-breed blogging software, so all publishing friction is eliminated. You don't need to go to webmaster, marketing team, or even programmers. You just go to Blogger, TypePad or WordPress (not the hosted version), and type in a few words to the title field, and write as well as you can about that topic. Press "publish", and within a few day or weeks, you will be attracting more visitors to your site on that term. So, with "actionable", we mean that we tell you precisely what to do with the data that we provide.

It is a demonstrate-able and reliably reproducible effect, making HitTailing a delightfully scientific natural search marketing technique. And it is indeed a technique, rather than a mere tool, exactly because it is actionable.

So, there you have it. HitTail is different from competitive marketing tools, because it is real-time, fulfilling the hidden desires of marketers worldwide. HitTail is easy, in that you can figure out everything you need to know within a few minutes. And HitTail is actionable, in that you are explicitly instructed to take specific actions on your website... repeatedly.

And when you do it, you'll see results.

And that's HitTail.

• Real-time
• Easy
• Actionable